When The Groove Is Dead And Gone

BY Ben Gook

Velvet Underground. Big Star. Bad Brains. Fugazi. Kraftwerk. Leonard Cohen. There are those cult musicians who, according to the belligerently orthodox mythology of the music world, inspire a hundred people in their audience each night to start bands. Their sound inevitably reflects these origins. Some favourite names start this way – Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook met at a Sex Pistols gig in 1977 and formed the Stiff Kittens, later renamed Warsaw, then named Joy Division and then renamed New Order. Tens of thousands more merely burn as stage-lit ideas in the back of scruffy heads.

Other bands, really existing ones, are less edifying in their trajectory. They take another band’s template and piddle all over it. Reduce it to a caricature. Dumb it down. Make it big and bombastic and stupid. Then we predictably start to think ill of the original act – to resent their siring such maddening progeny.

Would the world actually have been a better place if, say, The Beatles hadn’t existed – simply because their 4000 lesser versions wouldn’t have existed either? It’s a question for the ages. But the following bands definitely require at least a stern talking-to…

Radiohead Has there been a band in the last 15 years as widely misappropriated as these downy English chaps? Sure, Radiohead were themselves initially drawing from U2, but the ’Head were so widely aped they had to go and buy synthesisers and listen to skittering, glitchy German techno just to get away from their followers. The early-to-mid-period marriage of Radiohead’s plangent guitars to the literate melancholy and soaring voice of Thom Yorke was undoubtedly a potent combination. An apparently simple combination at that… or so it was easy to think until you’d seen 14 support bands at local pubs completely miss the mark. And easy to think until you’d heard Coldplay turn the thing into a meaningless, ‘emotional’ version of a wet willy. And The Editors. And Muse. And Kent. And Athlete. And Travis. And Elbow. And…

Bob Dylan As if it wasn’t apparent enough, Bob Dylan’s book Chronicles proved that he was a singular wordsmith. Beyond the familiar whine of his voice and his early blatant politics, there’s a vision of the world that links all his output. The same can’t be said for the middling troubadours who thought they, too, had something vital to impart – in someone else’s style. Sure, Dylan called on others, but he stood alone in bringing together what he did – something made apparent when he went electric and did the pop-rock thing better than most in the 60s. Words and music – tell me the twittering, half-baked poet you met at a sharehouse party could combine Dylan’s mastery of both these realms?

Pearl Jam For bringing to the world the entire canon of Creed, Nickelback, Three Doors Down and other scholars of Triple M ute-rock. ’Nuff said.

Faith No More, Tool, Red Hot Chili Peppers The unnamed heroes of a hundred battle of the bands contests over the past 12 years. These guys put the funk and slap into high school rock and metal. Not only that, they also inspired Incubus and, most unforgivably, Crazy Town. While you may justifiably question the worth of these bands as original artists, it’s unquestionable that one should consider their legacy one of the most heinous afflictions known to suburban youth centres. Special mention: the 6000 other ‘musical’ projects of Mike Patton, the busiest and most tedious man in the side-project industry.

Joy Division/New Order Recent inclusions for the post-2004 explosion in dour dancefloor antics. Interpol took the template and rent it sideways, while, in the spirit of the times, also making it seem like a fashion-label tie-in. But it’s fair to say Melbourne’s and Sydney’s current indie clubs have their livelihood staked on the heritage offered by a suicidal chap and his fellow Manchester residents. The stark and icy moods of their music, at once bleakly sexual and self-lacerating, are easily enough invoked in the retro-futuristic irony of emotionally non-committal post-punk; Ian Curtis always sounded like a weirdly vibratoing robot anyway, so why not marry this with arms-length lyrics, as well-trousered men have recently done? At least Ian meant it.