Going To Hell

I went to go see The Brian Jonestown Massacre Sunday when they played in New York, and really enjoyed it; they played a bunch of good songs and Anton, the bandleader, went off on some really funny rants. Modern indie rock can be such a dicey topic, that I feel a little explanation should be provided to why I not only like the BJM but why they are one of my favorite bands. Since The Brian Jonestown Massacre is described as indie rock I must also include my own views on indie rock as a whole and my own reductionist comprehension of indie’s history and development.
Indie rock is a genre where it is very difficult to have good taste. This difficulty is due to indie rock’s very poor quality control and in this respect indie is not far removed from mainstream rock: consider the cases of Black Sabbath and Guns N Roses only one of said bands is good yet both are spoken of in reverent tones by the mainstream rock press, one could even argue that Guns N Roses is the preferred band. The reasons for such low quality control come from two sources, the love of a gimmick and big money. The ahistoricism, love of the new, and insatiable appetite for irony that largely guides indie rock circles means a low quality band with a cheap gimmick can easily become highly regarded by the indie press, see Blood Brothers. The other reason is due to the big business indie rock has become, it means major and major affiliated labels and rock press largely control the public perception of what indie rock is and what indie bands are important.
Indie rock has a longer and more varied history than what I’m about to present but I’m most concerned with how indie rock is largely defined in America and how the elements of that definition were shaped by the time The BJM started. The elements which came to dominate the definition of indie rock in America (Pixies, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, bands which I feel either indifferent towards or hate) created a very skewed perspective as to what said sound constituted and the influences new bands would incorporate in the US: consider how many American bands, until very recently, credit My Bloody Valentine, the Jesus & Mary Chain, and Spacemen 3 as influences, compared to Fugazi, Sebadoh, and The Pixies. The popularity of indie among the 15 year-old to 20-something masses starting in the late 80’s/ early 90’s also meant major label interests, causing the focus of what constituted indie to shift from something fairly broad and obscure to bands that were either on major American labels or affiliated with the popular “Sound of Seattle.” The loosely defined nature of indie rock also made it even easier for major magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin to swoop in and posit their own definitions of indie rock as correct and viable. Unlike punk or hardcore, indie never had a clearly defined ethos of sound or business ethics, nor did it have a major voice or guide such as punk does with Maximum Rock and Roll. This takeover became easy to enforce since even magazines like NME and radio like John Peel did not exist in the US, and the influence of the major music press outlets such as MTV and Rolling Stone could quash/ drown out any objections to their viewpoints.
Coupled with the tendency of American musical culture to forget about large chunks of music’s past, it is particularly amazing a band like The Brian Jonestown Massacre could of come into existence in America during the early 90’s. That an American band could come along in the early 90’s, aggressively promoting a concept of 60’s style that relied heavily on the period of 65-67 in America and particularly in Britain and Europe for inspiration, is striking. In America still, the concept of the sixties is narrowly defined; the range of musical styles (mod, psyche, folk) and culture is overshadowed by Woodstock, by the culture of 1969-era Haight Street, by dirty hippies. The BJM appeared promoting Brian Jones at a period when most pre-80’s and 70’s Rolling Stones music had been forgotten or ignored in America. The BJM musical style was informed by the music featured on the Nuggets and Pebbles comps before those comps became wildly popular. While now it is not so odd to see people dressing in a mod/ freak beat revivalist manner, the BJM were doing it at a time when bands like Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth were immensely popular, so they must have looked completely alien to most people. While the bands that have their roots in such bands/artists as Love, Donovan, Bert Jansch The Byrds, mid-period Kinks, early Echo and the Bunnymen, The Creation, Spacemen 3, are fairly de rigueur now, for a band to be playing in such a style back then sounds completely unheard of, pre-Hives, pre-White Stripes, and pre- that goober Devandra Banhardt. While their had been garage rock revival bands such as the Fuzztones, the musical style of the BJM is a lot broader than just 60’s garage. Musically the BJM offer up a style that is not just revivalism but is also informed by bands which were greatly inspired by the psyche bands of the 60’s, it’s a hypothesis of what would have happened had the Psychedelic and Folk styles of the 60’s developed further and in a different direction than of the prog-, hard-, and country-rock styles of the 70’s. Indeed the BJM took the underlying psychedelic influences of the shoe gazing and early indie-rock bands like My Bloody Valentine and exposed them outright, and directly played them up so that they look like true revolutionaries in sound and don’t look dated to the 90’s style, compare that with the videos of My Bloody Valentine which look like Sonic Youth. Brian Jonestown is able to cover a range of musical styles without sounding scattered, it all fits within their particularly weltanschauung, whether it be county-blues, Thank God for Mental Illness, mod rock, Take It From the Man, or early 80’s indie, Bravery, Repetition, and Noise, the music doesn’t feel like a deviation from their core style or ideology.
I really admire honesty in people and people with a strong sense of self/ philosophy, who adhere more or less to that philosophy for their life, where any change in this philosophy is only further development or modification of previously held beliefs, not their complete abandonment. The antithesis to this model would be someone like Madonna. This is not to be confused with a pre-set belief system or a prefabricated image, but a personal philosophy that is a natural extension of the self. The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Anton Newcombe, the band’s leader and main songwriter, greatly embody my ideal because they are not only embracing something I think is cool: 60’s music in many of its forms, mod/mod-hippie style, but they’ve also largely stuck to their aesthetic choices, they still wear Indian shirts and their music has not taken any drastic turns. Compare this devotion to aesthetic and honesty with one of BJM’s cotemporaries The Dandy Warhols, who incidentally ripped off the BJM numerous times.
First off not only is a name like The Dandy Warhols irritating and unimaginative but it is completely unrelated to the band’s sound and aesthetic. Even within the confines of the movie Dig one sees that the Dandies do not try to sound like the Velvet Underground or bands that would have played at the Factory, and if they do it is only for a passing song. Musically they laughably trend hop, trying to sound like a shoe gazer band on one song, The Pixies on another, a hard rock psyche band on one album, and an electro-clash band on the next. They do not dress like they came from the Factory, rather they just look like generic indie rockers of the period, and in Dig we witness their dated choice of multiple body piercing and Courtney Taylor’s embarrassing mohawk. There is no comprehension of Warhol’s aesthetic evident in The Dandy Warhols either, the only attempt they make is on the album art to Welcome to the Monkey House of a peeled banana with a zipper on it: did they not realize that Warhol’s banana artwork was already phallic? This reference to Andy Warhol comes off more as a Carlos Mencia joke than anything remotely intelligent. Any reference to anything dandy or Warhol this band does make is purely superficial. Whereas the name The Brian Jonestown Massacre presents a clear statement of sound and aesthetic, which is duly carried out by the band, the name Dandy Warhols signifies nothing. The band’s only real outlook is an embarrassing irony and attempt to look cool that is profoundly irritating in its lack of both self-effacement and any grasp of aesthetic sense (The Odditorium? Give me a break). I read an interview* with Anton Newcombe and in it the interviewer remarked how honest Anton was being about his band and beliefs, whereas when the interviewer talked with The Dandy Warhols they just gave ironic answers and tried to look cool. This quote encapsulates why I prefer one band to the other.
So my reasons for liking The Brian Jonestown Massacre are simple, the music is good and well informed, they have good and developed aesthetic choice (except for some occasionally bad cover-art) they are honest, they are consistent, they are innovators in a sense, and they are varied in sound. I respect this band so much, that I consider calling them indie rock derogatory.

So sorry Indie friends, but The Brian Jonestown Massacre is far superior to Xiu Xiu and Blood Brothers.



*http://bjmarchives.com/Interviews/619980antonvendetta.htm

Additional Notes:
-Indie Rock Sucks
-Miranda Lee Richards is hotter than Zia McCabe
-Thanks to Mike Dowd for letting me stay at his place over the weekend and for first showing me the documentary Dig
-Favorite song titles: Whatever Hippie Bitch, If Love is a Drug I Want to OD, (David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Six, Time Is Honey (So Cut the Shit), God Is My Girlfriend.