(TV) The Nation: Punk Repunked (part 2)

[Scott M Neukam <scottneukam@yahoo.com>]

What's fascinating about Television, made more than a
decade after the group first drifted apart, is how it picks
up pretty much where they left off. It's almost as if the
suspension of time that lurks between rock beats the way
they play them magically reflects how history itself eddies
around the band. On the one hand, aside from expanded
guitar sounds there's little evidence from the disc that
anything that's happened musically over the past dozen
years has had any effect on what they do. On the other, why
should it? They foreshadowed much of what did happen, and
the sound they evolved for themselves was so strong and
defined, why shouldn't they just be themselves? 

It's a conundrum rockers face more directly than other
musicians or artists, because of the high premium rock has
always seemed to place on change. Naturally, there's been a
struggle between the push for innovation and the desire to
hear what's already been said in slightly different form:
That's part of the essence of any populist format. And here
in what appears to be the music's Gotterdammerung, change
is even more often only a facade. One of Television's early
CBGB cohabitants, the Talking Heads, made a career out of
transformations, but they could get away with it partly
because their appeal hung from David Byrne's nerdy and
neurotic persona, which was a constant, and partly because
their oddball videos helped fuel early MTV. It's not that
rock history has ended completely, as Fukiyama would have
it. Almost any disc by Prince or harbingers like James
McMurtry's engagingly recombinant Candyland (Columbia) or
P.J. Harvey's fabulously raw Dry (Island) makes mincemeat
out of that generalization. But as the pileup of reunions,
reissues and regurgitations (like Seattle-based
psychedelia) demonstrates, the emphasis in rock culture has
inevitably swung to a kind of cultural conservatism that
embraces even those fiercest of in-the-moment crusaders,
the punks. It especially applies to punk's godfathers, the
Ramones. 

There are two central ironies to the Ramones. The first is
that their main cultural importance comes from how British
would-be punks misunderstood them when the band toured
Britain in 1976. Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols rather
creatively expanded their
bad-boys-in-the-high-school-playground routine into larger
social contexts, for instance. The second is that they've
effectively become the Grateful Dead of their rock-and-roll
generation. They've only written about three songs, and
they play them with the same repetitive determination that
the aging tie-dye set brings to acid jams. 

Of course, the best thing about the Ramones was and is
their goofball humor. Who else would have taken a doofy
rock "classic" like "Do You Wanna Dance" and sped it up to
undanceable speeds? Or created a teen anthem so true to the
Reagan era that its title, "I Wanna Be Sedated," could
encapsulate it? Now, on Mondo Bizarro (Radioactive), their
song titles tell it: "Censorshit," "Cabbies on Crack," "The
Job That Ate My Brain." "Anxiety keeps me happy," they sing
in their pathetically thin, nasal voices; "It's a crazy
world and I'm crazy." Pummeling their trademark power
chords and slam-dunk beats, clarifying (or reducing) rock
and roll to its bare bones, they make you believe their
cartoon, just as before, even if they've got seemingly
unlikely sidekicks like ex-Turtles Flo and Eddie
(hyperconscious cartoons themselves) on board. Still, the
art of appearing artless lies close to the populist heart
of rock and roll. So the Ramones have earned their spot in
the music's history sheerly by managing to avoid seeming as
self-conscious as they inevitably are after almost two
decades. After all, in case you've been so sedated you've
forgotten about "Do You Wanna Dance," Mondo Bizarro
includes a campy, revved-up remake of "Take It as It Comes"
by the Doors, who've been the big 1960s nostalgia icons for
years. 

The English protopunkers who caught the Ramones' first
British tour came from all across the rock spectrum, as The
Stiff Records Box Set (Rhino) illustrates. This four-CD
collection, "electronically recorded" in "mono enhanced
stereo," recaps (complete with tongue-in-cheek booklet
essay) the history of that seminal, delightfully silly
label of the mid-to-late 1970s. In the process it
underscores just how diverse the roots and faces of punk
actually were. The collection includes the obvious and
necessary (Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Elvis Costello, Richard
Hell and the Voidoids, Joe "King" Carrasco, Graham Parker,
Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury and the Blockheads), along with
lots of lesser and forgotten lights, some of whom barely
flickered even then. In that way it reminds me of the
larger (nine CDs), more expensive, wonderful, but
revealingly uneven The Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1958-1969
(Atlantic). If you can afford these boxes or can cop a
listen to a rich friend's copies, they make for a congenial
walk down memory lane that's inadvertently useful at the
same time, because it works out any nostalgic twinges you
might be getting about the good old days. Most rock and
roll, like most of any species of cultural artifact, is
junk, but junk functions as cultural lubricant. Both the
Stiff and the Stax-Volt sets are full of junk. Some of it
is swell. 

~~~~~~~~ 

By GENE SANTORO 




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