Pretentious? Moi?

Artrockers,

There’s a thin line between artistically valid experimentation and pretentiousness, a line so thin that some overstep it. Few things have disappointed me more in my life than the transformation of Alternative Television to The Good Missionaries, from Love Lies Limp to Vibing Up The Senile Man. Of course Mark Perry did it for all the right reasons, as a reaction to the Punk monster he’d helped create, but the results were, let’s be honest here, pretentious* almost to the point of unlistenability . There was a lot of pretentiousness about at the time, I’d cite PiL’s Metal Box as a good example, from its over the top packaging (Even ELP never went that far) to its jammed grooves that tried so hard to be Faust or Can but ended up sounding like...Jammed grooves. On the right drugs it was ‘interesting’, but in the cold light of day it was simply clunky. Lydon did it for the right reasons too, the same reasons as Perry, but the result was a bunch of people pretending to be something they weren’t. Metal Box is an album praised more in retrospect than it was at the time, I bought it, but only because the metal box looked groovy amongst my albums, like a reel of film, and because nobody I knew could stand to listen to the whole thing, which made me look like some kind of underground hero because I could. Actually I couldn’t, I never put the album on for my own pleasure, I only played it when people I wanted to impress were about, and pretty soon Metal Box would make way for Elvis Costello and the party would start.

And there’s a whole bunch of pretentiousness about right now, Arcade Fire and Factory Floor spring to mind. I guess it’s for the same reasons that punk gave way to This Heat; you can only do so much with three chords. But it doesn’t mean you have to turn into Bjork, simply add a fourth chord.

What defines pretentiousness for you? Send me your overblown, your downright silly. Always remember, and I’m talking to you PJ Harvey, it’s only rock’n’roll.

Tom Artrocker

*
Definition: 1. acting as though more important, valuable, or special than is warranted; 2. appearing to have an unrealistically high self-image
Synonyms: pompous, ostentatious, showy, inflated, bombastic, affected, self-important
Antonyms: unpretentious, humble



>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

You Say The Nicest Things – Your Responses

Last week Tom asked whether the riff should be copyrighted...

Hi Tom,

Regarding your stolen riffs request, I wasn't going to bother emailing since its almost part-and-parcel for any successful rock band, even the Velvet Underground's There She Goes Again is pretty much lifted wholesale from Hitch Hike - which I think Marvin Gaye wrote (OK, some clever-clogs will probably tell me Lou Reed knocked it out as a jobbing staff writer). Anyway I wasn't going to email but then I remembered about Nirvana's monster album, Nevermind, which you could say really is a monster - a Frankenstein's monster of British bands. There was a time when I could pick out much of the stolen bits but I'm just too rusty these days, however I stuck the LP on, for amusement, and here's my findings (maybe you can fill in the gaps):
Smells Like Teen Spirit = Troggs - Wild Thing (opening riff, loud-quiet-loud structure to some extent, Pixies)
In Bloom = Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (maybe, riff slowed down)
Come As You Are = Killing Joke - Eighties (slowed down)
Breed = Link Wray - Run Chicken Run (the riff part)
Lithium = (? picked guitar is familiar, but can’t pinpoint it)
Polly = Kinks - All Day And All Of The Night (almost)
Territorial Pissings = sounding too Killing Joke-like, the middle break is an exact rip from Wardance.
Drain You = (bog standard grunge stuff, but middle bit ventures into early Pink Floyd territory)
Lounge Act = Bowie (can't quite get it, Queen Bitch maybe, particularly as song progresses)
Stay Away = sounding too Rezillos-like, My Baby Does Good Sculptures re-jigged
On A Plain = (OK, just Nirvana grunge to my ears, though he does sing "Somewhere I have heard this before, in a dream or memories stored", appropriately, in fact most of the lyrics are appropriate, "know it’s wrong so what should I do", "one more special message to go then I'm done and I can go home")
Something in the Way = (?)
[Hidden Track] = more Killing Joke guitars, Firedances-period.

Maybe I'm just imagining it, but to me it’s just an LP of familiar 'good' bits that everyone bought, you could say in that respect that it’s just like the Grease soundtrack (which is a general rip-off of 60's and 50's song snippets) though not musically of course, maybe Nevermind is the 'Grease'-soundtrack of indie.

By the way I always thought that the first Strokes LP sounded a bit like obscure West Country band Chorchazade, but figured that any rip-off would be just too improbable. I do reckon, however, that everything The XX has done can be traced to The Past Seven Days, whose sole 7" single RainDance, great though it is, is essentially a dead end, one-off experiment.

Alb

PS Obvious one, The Jam - Start = The Beatles - Taxman