Come visit the big bigot

April 17, 2010 8:23 PM

The 90’s were a pretty foul decade for anyone that didn’t want to groom some stubble and rock out. Our Trent had no hesitation, good for him. Depeche Mode managed to get a bit of beard on as well. The rest of us had to find jobs in advertising. Music took a swerve backwards as a flood of ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ guitar bands jangled their way through territory that had been explored long ago, settled and populated with malls. I know, I used to work on album covers for major label compilations of “20 BANDS THAT SOUND LIKE NIRVANA”.

Tom Ellard (of the now defunct Severed Heads) has a blog. Topics include Kurt Cobain, academic conferences, piracy, privacy and contemporary experimental music.

New to Severed Heads? SevCom (online since 1994!) documents the history of the band in text and images. Quite apart from producing some of the finest industrial pop ever made, the Sevs were into experimenting with computer graphics and video synthesisers: Ellard's YouTube channel offers a selection of visuals old and new.

posted by Syme (58 comments total)

Music took a swerve backwards as a flood of ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ guitar bands jangled their way through territory that had been explored long ago began playing good old rock again instead of crappy hair metal and new wave.
posted by usonian at 8:38 PM on April 17, 2010

Man, this site just does not want to load.
posted by kafziel at 8:43 PM on April 17, 2010

I have no idea who this guy is, maybe he's great or truly worth reading, but he writes like a douche.
posted by oddman at 8:45 PM on April 17, 2010 [4 favorites]

I've been waiting for people to start talking about the 90s as "the decade that taste / fashion / music / style forgot" - because the 80s lost that mantle a while ago, and we need a replacement decade to denigrate until it becomes cool again in about ten years time.

Thank you, Tom Ellard. You're fulfilling an essential need.
posted by UbuRoivas at 8:50 PM on April 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Tom Ellard (of the now defunct Severed Heads) has a blog.

This is when I reach for my revolver.
posted by nola at 8:52 PM on April 17, 2010 [7 favorites]

I have no idea who this guy is

Severed Heads were an aussie electronic / industrial / techno / dance act, who managed to fly a Psychic TV kind of flag until techno really took off with rave culture; they managed to maintain an almost mainstream-with-indie-cred profile in the music media down under.
posted by UbuRoivas at 8:54 PM on April 17, 2010

Wait, the '90s were the great wasteland of a culture? Jesus Christ, the worst decade in human history is like four months in the rearview, is this man insane?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:55 PM on April 17, 2010 [13 favorites]

Recently someone tagged a stencil (on a natural rock wall, no less) in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle that reads: "What if Kurt gave up?"

I'm not sure if they're trolling or what because I really want to reply "He did." but they've been saved from my snarky reply because I can't bring myself to stencil-tag natural rock.
posted by loquacious at 9:02 PM on April 17, 2010 [5 favorites]

Well, on like the twentieth try, I got the "piracy" link to load.

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by kafziel at 9:07 PM on April 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

What. I liked his account of rescuing tracks from a 16-track Fostex. I learned stuff.

Whiners.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:25 PM on April 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

The college I went to was given promotional materials by the band including cassettes and, tickets to go see the show. I had only vaguely heard of them, but snapped up the tickets. MC 900 Ft Jesus opened for them.

Streaming Rotund for Success right now ... some albums just don`t have lasting power.

UbuRoivas, I`d say they`re far more electronic than industrial.
posted by squeak at 9:33 PM on April 17, 2010

I don't know about the guy's writing but I love Severed Heads.
posted by shelleycat at 9:33 PM on April 17, 2010

The 90’s were a pretty foul decade for anyone that didn’t want to groom some stubble and rock out.

In your tiny corner of the world.
posted by elmono at 9:57 PM on April 17, 2010 [4 favorites]

I have no idea who this guy is, maybe he's great or truly worth reading, but he writes like a douche.

I know who he is and never found him or his music very impressive. He definitely does write like a douche, that's very true.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 10:08 PM on April 17, 2010

I just got one of the new Severed Heads reissues (Adenoids) and really enjoyed it... but your mileage may vary!
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:21 PM on April 17, 2010

"it’s not merely pretentious, it’s vainglorious circle jerking fiddlefaddle of the 7th ascendant level."

That actually sounds like something I'd be rather proud to achieve.
posted by FatherDagon at 10:57 PM on April 17, 2010 [3 favorites]

So what’s driving me nuts is how the New Academy – the ‘little plonking noises out of four speakers’, the ‘MAXmsp makes another bottom burp’, the Japanese ‘throw my fork at a guitar across the room’ brigade – come on, you know the sort – have taken to writing press releases (sending out spam) that attempt to own every virtue of music since Gronk banged two rocks together – it’s not merely pretentious, it’s vainglorious circle jerking fiddlefaddle of the 7th ascendant level.

OK, that's kind of amusing, but... christ, what an asshole.
Equal parts "just figured out what this blogging thing is" and /getoffmylawn
posted by Theta States at 11:01 PM on April 17, 2010

"vainglorious circle jerking fiddlefaddle of the 7th ascendant level."

For 9th level material, try Francisco López ...

There's a lot of noise I like. Whether it's music is moot. But when it comes to soul-killing metallic shrieks with spectra to infinity, a garbage disposal and a handful of silverware from the thrift store is greener than sitting under a plastic tent (ear-protection!) with a laptop.


posted by Twang at 11:19 PM on April 17, 2010

Dear the 80s music, your revival has been fun, I caught some cool stuff I missed the first time, but let's face it mostly you sucked, so how bout you fuck off again and don't come back for 50 years or so. Cheers!
posted by Artw at 11:34 PM on April 17, 2010

Sorry, gotta say that the 'aughts, though a wash in politics and finance, was overall a far better decade for music than the 90's. Don't get me wrong, some great stuff came out of the 90s. But for the most part, the decade was the the epilogue to the total corporate takeover of the American musical consciousness in the 80's, when play-for-pay radio was all that mattered to anyone. This meant that it was impossible for anyone to be heard who was unwilling to suck it up for BMI. I'm convinced that as a result, there were simply fewer people trying to make good music. Nirvana showed it was at least possible for _something else_ to get through, leading to a mass pile of imitators fixated on the Prize of a corporate contract.

Then in the 2000's, everyone realized there was hardly any money to be made, but it became really much easier to Get Heard. This led to all sorts of people with interesting ideas putting them down on mp3, and a corresponding explosion in the variety of (American rock) music being produced and listened to.

tl;dr: If Ys had been released in 1995 as the followup to the Milk-eyed Mender, I can't imagine anyone would have noticed it.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:37 PM on April 17, 2010 [2 favorites]

Before I read this: will any of it explain why the incoming NYU freshmen are making the East Village look like a goddamn Saved by the Bell extras reunion?
posted by griphus at 12:01 AM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

I was tickled when I ordered a couple of Severed Heads / CoKlaComa CDs through SevCom.com and received home-burned CD-Rs in a box with Tom's signature on the shipping label. Considering he is almost completely opposite me globally, it was a nice connection to know that my discs had come from the artist's computer and had been hand-addressed to me. I was aware that he had split from the label that carried him (Network) before it was fashionable or profitable to do so, and I respected that decision.
posted by Graygorey at 12:05 AM on April 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

I like Severed Heads and I like Nirvana. They're both difficult to defend.
posted by kink at 12:57 AM on April 18, 2010 [3 favorites]

The guy has an axe to grind with pretty much all experimental music being made today. Odd, considering Throbbing Gristle is one of his primary influences. I'm sorry that you're dismissive of noise, laptop music and anything that deviates from pop structures. Maybe that's what happens when you're nearly 50 and no longer have access to good drugs. In any case, Tom, your ranting against music which has a hard time getting exposure in even the Pitchforks of the world is not particularly interesting or fun...
posted by naju at 1:00 AM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's funny all the hatred here. Tom Ellard is a legend, who has never had trouble deviating from pop structures. Shit, I used to have a ton of his old tape-loop stuff, which never had a chance at hitting a 'pop structure'. Then, of course, he put out Dead Eyes Opened, which wasn't 'pop structured' until the rest of the world caught up with him about 10 years later.

So, anyway, thanks OP, I didn't know this blog existed.

(and RoseyD it's called FIAMO)
posted by pompomtom at 1:26 AM on April 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

Hip hop grew up in the 90s while rock died.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 2:06 AM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I couldn't stand the 90s at the time, can't stand most of it now.

I am still at a loss over the whole grunge thing. I mean, if you put aside the media narrative applied to Nirvana ("killing hair metal," as if it hadn't died on its own, or when NWA made a bunch of white dudes in spandex and Aqua Net just not that scary anymore), what do you have left? "All Apologies" is a pretty good track, "Unplugged" is a decent album of covers...

But no, we have this narrative where Cobain and co. did something revolutionary by sounding like Black Sabbath, except 30 years late and not good.
posted by drjimmy11 at 2:13 AM on April 18, 2010 [3 favorites]

Jesus, man. I... you know, for the sake of my blood pressure, I'm just going to shake my head and sigh quietly when discussions like this happen. I guess I've learned that to many people, music is just background noise, and if it wasn't played endlessly on FM rock radio then it didn't exist. So you have people saying "(decade) was universally awful for music", and then for examples you get whatever was being played 10 times an hour on the rock radio station at the time. I've seen one person mention hip hop (NWA, who did most of their best work in the 80s), for example, in this discussion of how awful music was in the 90s. No mention of the growth and explosion of the various forms of electronic music, no mention of the punk rock and ska scenes that were going on all over the country: nope, if it wasn't on Z107.1 THE EAGLE (YOUR CITY'S) RAAAAAWK!!! then it didn't exist. God, it's like watching elementary school kids debate philosophy.
posted by DecemberBoy at 2:33 AM on April 18, 2010 [6 favorites]

Yeah, their arguments would be nothing but strawmen.
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:53 AM on April 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's true that there was some excellent growth in electronic music in the 90's. As for the 90's punk and ska scenes... well... They struck me at the time as more scene than music. My point, though, is that music outlets were so restricted by the 90's that it really prevented people from hearing things outside the mainstream. Maybe it's just where I lived at the time (St. Louis), but it seemed that Z107.1 THE EAGLE was the only thing playing new music, and that the music they were playing was shit. If the dialogue sucks, it's precisely because of how dominant and purely monetized music broadcasting had become. In the time since, things that would not get played on THE EAGLE have become far more available to mass audiences, with the effect that people can far more easily find cool shit that they like that isn't on a top 40 list somewhere.

In highschool in St. Louis in the 90's, I spent hundreds of hours making long-form, noisy electronic music on a computer in a basement, recording it on cassette tapes and distributing it to anyone willing to take it. If I had done the same today, I could throw the mp3s on,say, Metafilter Music, and not have to spend 20 minutes with my shitty tape duplicator for every pair of ears that wanted to try listening to the stuff I created. (Yes, the music would still suck, but I'm talking about distribution and availability here, dammit.) One of the most frustrating parts of making music from 1995-2000 in St. Louis was being totally unable to find musicians to work with who could think outside of the corporate radio structure.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:04 AM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

kaibutsu, as a lingering holdover from really enjoying 90's punk and ska, them's nearly fighting words. One thing, though, is that I find myself able to locate a lot of music from those days that I couldn't otherwise. Some of my favorite bands from the last four years are ska bands that split up in the late 90's.

When back in the States recently, driving a rental, my mind was boggled. Out of habit, I found the 'alternative' station, which of course bellows out that it's the... Ahhhlllternative blahblahblah every twenty minutes, all the while playing Taylor Swift. That would be the point where I give up and search for the oldies station, because at least they might be playing Buddy Holly, or the Animals, or something decent.

(Stay away from classic rock stations. Nothing is more soul crushing than hearing music from high school on a classic rock station. At some point, Evenflow made it onto classic rock stations...)
posted by Ghidorah at 3:13 AM on April 18, 2010

How Tom Ellard earned his crabbing license... ran a bbs before the web; put his entire body of work online for free; remembered experimental electronic music is a goal / process, not a style; recorded plenty of fine music; reissued rare Australian / NZ experimental music; used hand made video effects procesors now in the Australian televison museum; recorded in his bedroom, then had a dance hit on multiple continents, then pushed overboard that which got in the way of continuing to learn. Oh my but he can carp. Well earned, Cap'n Ellard. Fire when ready.
posted by eccnineten at 3:17 AM on April 18, 2010 [6 favorites]

The best '80s music didn't make it to the "revival," just some terrible Urban dance music mocked for being terrible urban dance music. No serious stab at resurrecting New Wave or Europop, no socially conscious, hyperintelligent rock like Joshua Tree-era U2 or REM, no hard-edged punk like the Circle Jerks, no hard-edged art-rock like the Violent Femmes, the Pixies, Jane's Addiction. The '80s had a lot going on musically, actually.

What the '90s did was let everyone hear some of it... the suits lost absolute control of the playlists for seven or eight years. Nirvana was walking down a path blazed by Jane's Addiction and U2. The '90s were also a fantastic time for subgenres - savage rockabilly, industrial, darkwave, swing, neo-lounge, prog metal, alt.country. The '90s also saw electronica become the monster global genre. Outside North America, rock is dead. Disco won in the end, and that makes me happy.

The '90s were also a high watershed moment in industrial and interior design. It's really hard to hate on wood and brushed aluminum after a decade of chromed plastic and neon. So, it's hard to hate on the '90s. I think the '80s will be our punching bag until someone figures out the Aughts were suck on a scale not seen since the late '40s.
posted by Slap*Happy at 3:56 AM on April 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

i read the piece on experimental music and didn't get much out of it other than tom thinks that a lot of it is bollocks (pr at least sanything made using PD, Max/MSP or by anyone Japanese is). if he'd said why, i might have read more...
posted by peterkins at 3:56 AM on April 18, 2010

But for the most part if you listened only to mainstream radio and bought all of your music at Wal-Mart, the decade was the the epilogue to the total corporate takeover of the American musical consciousness in the 80's, when play-for-pay radio was all that mattered to anyone. This meant that it was impossible for anyone to be heard who was unwilling to suck it up for BMI.
posted by applemeat at 4:09 AM on April 18, 2010 [3 favorites]

I've never been in on what's really happening musically, but from my admittedly mainstream perspective, the 80's were an absolute abomination and the 90's were an attempt to make up for that. Not that the 90's actually succeeded. 80's nostalgia will far outlive 90's nostalgia if only because 80's pop culture explicitly invites nostalgia and is, indeed, predicated upon it (e.g., the 80's as a nostalgic re-imagining of the 50's).

As for the aughts? Good lord, I have no idea. By the time the aughts came around I was fortunate enough to have had the "get off my lawn" gene kick in, and I've been much happier ever since.
posted by treepour at 4:22 AM on April 18, 2010

kaibutsu, I have quite fond memories of growing up in suburban St. Louis and listening to the Point (105.7) and briefly 104.1 "Extreme Radio" (It was the 90's). Yes, they mostly played mainstream, but the Point especially had a really good habit of supporting local music. I still have a Point Essentials album, a double disc set of entirely local music.

We also had the benefit of having the one of the best music stores in the country. I went in a couple of times and asked "I like x and y, what else would I like?"

And Ghidorah, I got your back. I have a pretty strong love of ska, even a lot of the bands that came out of the much maligned 3rd wave. I've been using the last few years to check out the first and second waves, too, and the bands that escaped out of the 3rd wave. I'd love to hear your favorites if you want to MeFi me sometime.
posted by gc at 4:37 AM on April 18, 2010

Tom is a great character. I think you are all missing the humor of his essays.

I come from the same Sydney post-punk scene and had the same shocked reaction to Nirvana. A completely retro rock band being hailed as something new. Anyway I was laughing all the way through "Kurt Cobain VS Dorks". His put-down of the Max/MSP crowd was brutal and hilarious. (I've actually been writing an iPhone controller for Max)
posted by bhnyc at 4:49 AM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Nothing is more soul crushing than hearing music from high school on a classic rock station.

Worse than hearing music described as classic that you've never heard of before because it was released after you gave up trying to keep up with music?
posted by octothorpe at 6:17 AM on April 18, 2010

There was a ton of great music in the 80s. nola eludes to one of them (Mission of Burma) upthread. Stating it "mostly sucked" says more about the writer than it does about the decade.
posted by belvidere at 6:39 AM on April 18, 2010

eludes alludes
posted by belvidere at 6:42 AM on April 18, 2010

Severed heads- Since The Accident (1983)- Houses Still Standing/Gashing The Old Mae West

Just, you know, for reference.
posted by mediareport at 8:08 AM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Every year of music has been better for me than the previous year.

Generally, how "good" a year is for music is directly related to how closely you pay attention to the music scene and how much time you spend exploring with abandon and wonder.
For most people, this peaks in high school or college.
posted by Theta States at 8:13 AM on April 18, 2010 [4 favorites]

Hey, wow, someone doesn't like noise or free improv!

That is a unique and unusual perspective, for which he provides an enlightening and reasoned case!

It never would have occurred to me that there might be someone who hates the kind of music I make, or that people may get angry about the fact that music they hate exists. I am indebted for his articulation of his specific and clear criticisms of my genre, and have had an epiphany - I actually hate the music I make too and would rather be making dance music with samples from movie soundtracks, seemingly chosen at random and fed into a loop machine with the same loop duration as the timing setting on a drum machine. Because through the magic of plugging in a drum machine and leaving it running while doing other shit, my pretentious crap music could become pop music that people love.

Oh, wait, never mind, I am just being a sarcastic asshole.

But I guess that shows I learned something from this dickwad after all!
posted by idiopath at 8:50 AM on April 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

* DJ Skewl will patch the iPad to send a control over OSC to MaxMSP controlling Reaktor modulated by a Wiimote under the robotic control of a homebrew Arduino driven LEGO vacuuming robot.

* Kurt M will demonstrate touching a Lemur to generate a sound tone converted to a control voltage that modulates a light source picked up by a photocell wired to inputs in Processing that operate a PD patch over MIDI to pan a 440Hz test tone through a 6 speaker array.

* I’ll be there controlling an iPad with another iPad.

* David Pseudonym will be sending wireless signals to an Netbook running Javascript that shows pictures of mice to a homebrew cat that will then drag an iPad off a table onto a Whoopee Cushion.

* Nancy Spudgen will present her now legendary demo of beaming microwave signals under the control of an iPad at high intensity to pop a whole bunch of toads in a bucket in time with a Foreigner track.

* MC Lollipop will use a prototype iPad GSM as a support mechanism to snort some fine ass cocaine.

* Micheal Dorkmeister will show his 1024 button monome and world’s largest ball of MIDI cables.

* VJ Hu Pop will be sharing a way to embed Quartz Composer patches inside Jitter inside Quartz Composer inside Jitter to make a 3D rotating doughnut.

If you know anything about the scene he's talking about, that is fucking hysterical. To the targets he's skewing, music is an almost undesirable side effect of playing with gadgets. What do you do with it? Burn a CDR? Toss it up on Soundcloud? No one will listen anyway, least of all the people who made it.
posted by fleetmouse at 9:16 AM on April 18, 2010 [4 favorites]

God, it's like watching elementary school kids debate philosophy.

How many five year olds could you take on in a philosophy debate? Assume that each of them gets as much speaking time as you do.
posted by zippy at 9:37 AM on April 18, 2010

UbuRoivas, I`d say they`re far more electronic than industrial.

Much of the early material sounds like by-the-numbers industrial to me. What is missing, maybe, is all the extra-musical stuff typically associated with that genre: political posturing, fetishised violence, fascist imagery, Crowleyan sex mâghickck and so on. Severed Heads were a bit more... relaxed?

Ellard (or at least his blog persona) is basically a sarcastic, opinionated geek, so it baffles me that so many people here dislike him.
posted by Syme at 10:49 AM on April 18, 2010

Syme: "Ellard (or at least his blog persona) is basically a sarcastic, opinionated geek, so it baffles me that so many people here dislike him."

If you appreciate someone for being sarcastic and opinionated, saying "he's cool" is hardly the most interesting way to express that appreciation. It is much more fun to reply with the same behaviors (come on, which do you think would be more likely to lead to this guy becoming an active and sure-to-be-entertaining mefite - voicing appreciation, or dishing out some of the same shit in his direction)?
posted by idiopath at 11:27 AM on April 18, 2010

Oh, and setting up Severed Heads side by side with the likes of Throbbing Gristle or Non or whoever else you were referencing with that crap about Magick and fascism really only makes Severed Heads look worse (because their music is worse, besides the fact they did not have an entertaining schtick).
posted by idiopath at 11:29 AM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

But for the most part, the decade was the the epilogue to the total corporate takeover of the American musical consciousness in the 80's, when play-for-pay radio was all that mattered to anyone.

MTV did go a long way toward making top 40 music a marketing exercise, yes, but at the same time the whole indie label explosion that kicked off around the time of Rough Trade and the first Buzzcocks single fully came of age during the 80s, so I get sick of people talking about the decade as if all that came out of it was Falco and hair metal.

If anything, the stamp of 80s music is all over the minimalist dance-rock and dour Ian Curtis posturing of a lot of today's music... you could make the case that in the same way that grunge was an attempt to pretend the 80s never happened and get back to the sheer rocking out of the 70s, music in the 2000s has largely been about pretending the 90s never happened and reclaiming those old new wave and post-punk roots.

Bottom line being I think it's a little disingenuous to walk around acting like "thank God we're over that whole NEW WAVE revival" (new wave here being an ignorant catch all title for anything white people did with keyboards, and not an actual musical genre in its own right) and it's easy to be dismissive of an era if you narrow it down to its crassest cash grabs. The 80s may have redefined overproduction and media hype but it also birthed some of the most far-reaching strands of invention and diversity in the history of rock & roll.
posted by squeakyfromme at 1:04 PM on April 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

if you put aside the media narrative applied to Nirvana ("killing hair metal," as if it hadn't died on its own

Good point. I'm probably not doing myself any favors by owning up to it but as a teenager in the late 80s I grew up listening to metal - both the heavier and the "pop" varieties - and really hair metal peaked around 88-89 (and that after a good 5-6 years simmering visibly beneath the surface) and by late 1991 it was pretty clearly on its last legs.

So if grunge hadn't come along and displaced it, something else probably would have. Most likely gangster rap, which is exactly what had displaced metal in my own listening habits for the most part.

PS. I think one of the things that makes the whole "grunge killed hair metal" story so juicy is the fact that pre-"Nevermind" grunge like Soundgarden and Alice in Chain's "Facelift" were largely marketed toward the metal crowd, at least on the mainstream end of things. Of course, Nirvana were arguably less metallic than ANY of their Seattle counterparts.
posted by squeakyfromme at 1:16 PM on April 18, 2010

*grooms stubble. rocks out*
posted by jonmc at 3:56 PM on April 18, 2010

you could make the case that in the same way that grunge was an attempt to pretend the 80s never happened and get back to the sheer rocking out of the 70s

Pasting a previous comment of mine:

Hey, there was plenty of good music in the 80s - Sonic Youth, the Birthday Party, Pere Ubu, Joy Division, Bauhaus, the Fall, REM, the Jam, Magazine, Wall of Voodoo, X, Oingo Boingo, Laurie Anderson, Dead Kennedys, the Cramps, Dinosaur Jr, Ministry, Killing Joke, Violent Femmes, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Gang of Four, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, They Might be Giants, the Church, the Pixies, Jane's Addiction, Suicidal Tendencies, Butthole Surfers, Kate Bush, the Gun Club, Cocteau Twins, the Pogues, Billy Bragg, Echo & the Bunnymen... hell, even the Stone Roses & Faith No More were OK.

With the exception of Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, the Cocteau Twins, and maybe the Violent Femmes & Billy Bragg, those bands generally fall more on the rocking out end of the spectrum than elsewhere.
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:25 PM on April 18, 2010

I have quite fond memories of growing up in suburban St. Louis and listening to the Point (105.7) and briefly 104.1 "Extreme Radio" (It was the 90's).

What, no love for Midnight-Virus-era KYMC?
posted by Afroblanco at 6:25 PM on April 18, 2010

With the exception of Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, the Cocteau Twins, and maybe the Violent Femmes & Billy Bragg, those bands generally fall more on the rocking out end of the spectrum than elsewhere.

I'd argue that the Violent Femmes Rocked Out more than most of them, in fact, for certain values of Rocking Out.
posted by Jimbob at 11:29 PM on April 18, 2010

I have to admit not quite getting the legend of Severed Heads, though. I guess you had to be there. Some time ago, I was reading a lot of stuff about how great Severed Heads were, trailblazing, the group that launched a thousand bedroom twiddlers. So I picked up a couple of albums when I saw them in the 2nd hand bin down at the record store. Maybe I got the wrong albums, but the contents seemed like pretty average, bland techno. It probably would have been incredible in 1985, but it hasn't aged very well.

Anyone who cares to disagree, feel free to point me towards the Severed Heads I need to hear.
posted by Jimbob at 11:32 PM on April 18, 2010

I'd argue that the Violent Femmes Rocked Out more than most of them, in fact, for certain values of Rocking Out.

Yes, for values that include "gospel", which was apparently their genre from what I read, not that I understand this claim.

I also forgot to mention the Smiths (Johnny Marr stated that they specifically went for a traditional rock lineup in contrast with all the hair & synthesiser bands in the pop charts) and the Jesus & Mary Chain (who caused more permanent damage to my eardrums than any other band, way back in 1987, and who are suddenly in high favour again with the kids).

More locally, Midnight Oil deserve a mention, as do most of the Flying Nun bands from NZ.
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:08 AM on April 19, 2010

I guess you had to be there.

I was there. I like Severed Heads.

I don't know if it's causation or correlation, but in the 80s some of that shit blew my little teenaged mind.
posted by patrick rhett at 6:49 AM on April 19, 2010