Posts by philipmatthews
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Mind you, I can't imagine this kind of attention over commercial radio jocks shuffling their slots.
There was a fair bit of this kind of angst when Newstalk ZB (unwisely) axed its Chch morning shows for syndicated Leighton Smith and Mike Hosking. I say unwisely cause it took quite a big ratings hit as a result.
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I struggled for a simile but I will wait for Graham's review.
Sounds like he had a marginally better experience. "Occasionally terrific ... enjoyable rather than exciting". Link here.
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I remember those Joy Division at #1 moments. That Atmosphere video, as ad hoc as it was, was probably still better than the pretentious official one Anton Corbijn did years later. But for real out-there-ness I don't anything matched seeing the clip for Laurie Anderson's O Superman on -- I think but I might be wrong -- RTR.
Also, was completely remiss of me to talk about American punk rock before and not mention these guys. Definitely another one of the roads that lead to Nirvana.
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Oh and I meant to add Meat Puppets and Bad Brains to the above list of American bands.
The real point is that Kurt Cobain saw Nirvana as just one more band in that tradition, only they had the good/bad luck to become that much bigger. Hence the title The Year the Punk Broke -- after more than a decade of American hardcore and post-punk being a DIY independent label thing limited to small clubs and college towns, suddenly there was massive attention. But he was aware of all the history behind him and the work that people like Ian MacKaye, Jello Biafra and Greg Ginn had done.
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I would imagine if there were bands, they had to have an audience and possibly because of the ethics and aesthetics of punk in appealing to the southern cracka ass skinhead bootboys, they would have been suppressed/oppressed by the mainstream media so a lot of 'honest' american punk bands wouldn't have made news here.
I was thinking about this. Back in the 80s, a lot of American punk did have a pretty big following here. There was student radio play, you could get the records easily on import. Groups like Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Minutemen, Naked Raygun, Butthole Surfers. American punk, and labels like SST, Homestead and Alternative Tentacles, was a lot more exciting and innovative than British punk through that era, which was mainly right-wing Oi stuff, unlistenable but well-intentioned anarcho punk like Crass and the cartoonish mohawk bands like Exploited and Anti Nowhere League.
Anyway, a lot of the American stuff I mentioned was completely against the mentality of southern cracka skinheads you mention, and probably more politically left than most British punk bands. It doesn't mean they didn't draw that skinhead crowd who were looking for some of that aggression, but the bands weren't courting it. New Zealand punk and post-punk in the 80s had the same kind of skinhead problem.
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Drive has been an excellent development space in the past few years, and they're throwing that away. One Drive show with Mikey (which is what I had hitherto taken to be the plan) would have been cool. Taking out all the other Drive shows is not cool.
Just tell me he doesn't do the Freedom Call anymore ...
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Greil Marcus on McLaren, from a 1997 interview:
I don't know if punk started out as a rejection of pop music or life in the UK at that time. Certainly, as soon as it started, as soon as the Sex Pistols began to perform as a public outrage and even before they released their first record, a whole conflict of symbolism immediately gathered and was drawn to what they were doing. None of this was accidental because Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, who were the real college-educated Col. Parkers of this movement, had a Situationist background and were schooled in a haphazard way in nihilist European art politics going all the way back to the 19th century. They knew that architecture could be as repressive as a law (that would) put people in jail for criticizing the government. They believed that the music that people heard every day had as much of an effect on how people thought of themselves as anything people learned in school. They saw records as a way to disrupt the assumptions that people didn't question, that people used to hold themselves together. This is to say that these were the assumptions that held society together. I don't think they saw records, performances and songs as a way to change the world as such. It was more of a theft- 'let's set off a bomb and see what happens.'
Within that perspective, everything was a target. Pink Floyd are no more or no less the enemy than the government.
And on New York punk:
I don't think there's any question that for over twenty years the Ramones have inspired countless people to do all kinds of things. They inspired the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I didn't like them. I always thought they were a bunch of twits. As one of the guys in Gang of Four put it 'these guys must be really thick.' Gang of Four LOVED the Ramones. They just actually believed that you get past the parody/stupidity and find the real stupidity. Television was an arty version of the Grateful Dead. To me, it was just a new form of rock and roll. It was all just a downtown New York bohemian scene. It was a local story. I still believe that. This was local music as far as I was concerned. I don't believe that the reason that punk came to life again and again all over the world is due to anything that happened in New York. It was because of the glimpse of possibility that people got out of the Sex Pistols or the Adverts or X-Ray Spex. These were bands where the most unlikely people suddenly appeared in public and said 'I can say anything I want,' which is the most liberating thing in the world to do. I don't think you ever saw that in New York. What New York said was 'you can become a heroin addict and become cooler than anybody else and you can play guitar and be a real poet, and we obviously know that being a poet is the best thing in the world to be.'
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No reason not to call this Punk, really
Watch out -- you'll upset Karl du Fresne:
[Chris] Knox, who is considered a founding father of the punk movement in New Zealand, chose as his first song the Beatles’ Baby You’re A Rich Man, and made the comment that the Beatles were a punk band themselves in their Hamburg days.
With all due respect to Knox, this sort of revisionist bullshit can’t be allowed to go unchallenged. Attempts to confer musical legitimacy on punk by claiming that the greatest pop band in history were precursors of punk won’t wash.
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When did people forget how to say the plural of "woman"?
It's a particularly NZ accent problem, I think. Hence the preference for sheilas or ladies -- obvious plurals.
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Besides all that, you're right; expansive thinking requires the time to tease it out, and if M7 was an hour long you'd really be getting somewhere.
Agreed. If I was boss of TVNZ7, I'd make Media 7 run the full 50 minutes and let the Ad Show people do perhaps ten minutes of ad coverage a week within it. Not the painful panel discussions either but something with more critical nous.