#120 - Words + Guitar
"Words and guitar / I got it / words and guitar / I like it / it's the thing you'll never know / it's the thing you'll never own" - Sleater-Kinney, "Words + Guitar"
Dave Thomas on his band, Pere Ubu, and the history of rock:
"In the early 70s, the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound and this whole world of synthesized sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn't one thing. It was studio techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was supposed to be, to make use of this powerful, relatively new narrative voice."
"That's why I've always said that we are in the mainstream. It's people like Eminem and Britney Spears who are the weird experimentalists. They are avant garde. They are dealing with weird alternative worlds. If you put our view of the human condition alongside Britney Spears's, one of them is extremely experimental and weird, and it's Ms. Spears."
"By the time of Pet Sounds, rock had moved into a mature emotional phase, and by the early 70s when the third generation was getting involved it had reached the point of unabashed, unashamed literacy. . .Where else do you think Television and Talking Heads and Pere Ubu came from? It was that third generation."
"I think the division [between Ubu-style-rock and radio rock of the 1970s] was intensified by the punk movement. And that's why I hold such a grudge against punk music. Because punk was designed in a basement at Sony Corporation to turn back that third generation, to wipe it out. It was designed to sell clothes, for goodness sakes. Nobody would ever buy Tom Verlaine's jacket or socks, so they had to have something that would sell. And of course it would be that retrograde, reactionary music."
- from The Wire, Issue 272, October 2006
9 November 2006