Custom - Fast

This is the first of a three part mega entry. Y'see I bought this album without cover art. For some reason I confused Custom with Cooter and bought a new copy for the cover art...but then it was Cooter instead of Custom. Except that the band Whose album I bought was involved in a long legal dispute with another band named Cooter, a suit that they lost. So now they are called "Autopilot Off." Got it? Well I'm going to review an album by each band, but it stated here and I really cant get to the other two without getting a long list of thoughts about this band off my chest. 

Genre: Kind of a borderline late 90s singer songwriter/Numetal/Alternative. It is a single man outfit, namely one Duane Lavold, a Canadian who started out with a bio pic of the lead singer of INXS which was shelved upon the latter's suicide. He fled to New York and set himself up as a member of an artist collective in the mid 90s, pursuing a career in music. He seems to have imbibed every pop influence of the time, and the decade previous. Again, this seems to be a gift of the Canadians. He has the perceptive lyrics and melodic sensitivity of singer songwriter alternative, which will break down, at least once per song, into heavy anthemic Numetal sludge. The occasional rap or DJ scratching is thrown in just to remind you that, though the album was released in 2002, for some people the late 90s will never die. What a horrible thought. 

Much like the rest of his music, the lyrics are an odd blend of Alt and Numetal. At times very clever and insightful in its perception of human nature, it is often simultaneously terrifying in its lack of self awareness and broishness. A great example is "Morning Spank," a song full of funny moments and clever songwriting but ultimately a rather sexist "bros before hos" song.  

The oddest thing about this duality is that he affects a very skaterpunk attitude, which really is not existent at all in the music beyond his oddly California vocal delivery and attitude. The goes so far as to result in a regular name dropping of LA, even though he lived in Manhattan. 

Where would I have heard of it: Custom was the center of a controversy when the self directed video for the break-through single "Hey Mister" was banned by MTV's standards and practices. This was a sad moment, both for Custom and for MTV. This song was big and growing, and would have made the top ten. Without that last push from the then-still-relevant TRL crowd the single, and his career, stalled. 

MTV, on the other hand, showed the world what it had become: no longer the subversive force of youth rebellion, willing to sponsor a drawn out fight on the floor of congress with Tipper Gore, MTV had become a peddler of safe, intellectually bankrupt pedantry. That is, it was that way on  the one show that they still ran that had anything to do with music. Custom was hardly an intellectual powerhouse, and the video was intentionally offensive, but it is for a song about a dude sleeping with your daughter. And it is a good song, the type of thing that would have brought some energy and controversy back to the network. If the song had come out five years before MTV would have played it, and the controversy would have fueled their relevance. They did not, and despite increasingly shrill protests that youth is no longer interested in music culture, it becomes more obvious every year that the youth are also no longer interested in MTV. 

Anything of note: I think it is worth noting that this album was recorded in a studio this guy built with his dad. in Manhattan. I think that really fits a final piece into this puzzle. Duane Lavold is an intelligent and talented guy who is taken with American pop culture and desperate to get his bite of fame. His parents fund his dream, through multiple failures, and he is good enough to almost make it. Very nearly. 

Is it any good: The album is a mix of things he is honestly enthusiastic about, while also being a designed product, intended to sell well. Any specificity is replaced by a generalized, generic anger. This is the Numetal part, the part that is intentionally shocking just to show them, just to get their attention. Despite this a valuable energy and personality come through. There is humor and really some clever songwriting. This is what pop music is supposed to be: a commercial product that its makers actually believe in. Sure it has problems and rough edges, and god it is pretty sexist. But it is really good, somehow. Which is a real shame. 

Bikini Kill - The CD Version of the First Two Albums

Genre: Punk. I think we can all agree on that part. Also Riot Grrl, in the sense that Jesus was Christian. According to the media this is the music that started the genre, even though Bratmobile coined the term. They were very influential, both musically and as ladies who started a zine that acted as one of the organizing cores of the movement.

Where would I have heard of it: They had a ton of mostly clueless media attention in the early 90s. Almost no radio play, of course. I'm sure "Rebel Girl" has been in a few soundtracks or whatever.

Anything of note: Oh god where to start. I am listening to this album as a 30 year old dude in the post-oughts, not as a young 20s girl in the early 90s. I couldn't be less the audience for this if you listen to the band. And yet, I grew up as an aspiring punk in that era and, ok lets start from a different point here.

According to the band, the point was to create a female dialogue in punk rock, a safe place for women within a punk context. The point was by women, for women. But of course this was not within a vacuum. The dudes could hear what was going on. Or, more importantly, the rest of society could. And because they were musicians recording music I can hear part of  the dialogue now, 20 years later. But so much of this is context specific. Much of the meat of Riot Grrl was in those fan zines, and it was reacting to a very specific set of social, sub-cultural, national and even local political contexts. The term Riot Grrl was itself a response to the Mount Pleasant Race Riots, much as early punk music was a reaction to late 70s London and the Notting Hill Carnival Riot of 1978.

Unlike punk, whose largest influences were political and economic, the biggest influence on Riot Grrl (other than punk subculture I suppose) was third wave feminism. To sum up a very complex concept, Third Wave feminism started when second wave feminism realized it had ignored everyone who wasn't a white middle class woman, and integrating those concerns would require theorists to interact and discuss with those of different backgrounds. In this context Riot Grrl ended up being a valuable part of the Third wave discussion, as it brought women who were not part of the ivory tower of feminism into the discussion, while lending it a lot of street toughness and energy. It did not bring that many black people in, and it may have scared off a lot of moderate women.

With or without Riot Grrl the result was chaos. Feminism splintered into a thousand sub-strains. With the benefit of hindsight I think it is fairly obvious that fitting the needs and desires of every woman into one blanket term was a somewhat doomed endeavor if you are hoping to come up with a coherent policy conception, and indeed the current policy net being pushed by traditional feminist groups includes things like opposing prostitution and also decriminalizing prostitution. Understanding how groups that seem to be on the same side can be violently advocating opposed policies requires research most people, men and women, are not willing to invest, leading most to just walk away from the topic all together, or cling to third hand concepts that let them believe whatever they want to believe. This gets back to what I was saying about the rest of society being able to hear what was going on. If feminism is an ism, and exists to push women's issues for a result, the other is going to have to be dealt with as something other than the oppressor.

Anyway, rock had long since begun its slide into becoming a boys club. I mean Elvis was not fronting a mixed gender band but he was popular with the ladies. By the 90s there were a lot of musical alternatives, and rock was already becoming somewhat parochial. Punk was stridently parochial, eschewing both Avant Guard affectation as well as anything that might attract a mainstream audience. Within its sub-cultural arena there were obviously women, and there had always been women, but as punk fractured into competing, sometimes violent strains the purists walked a tightrope between traditional leftist but also populist politics. Part of the appeal of the non-specific anarchism of punk is that it has no single doctrine, beyond a generalized DIY energy and a Take What You Want ethos. This let in a lot of pigs. It also let a lot of genuinely nice people who were stepping up because no one else was. And with the benefit of Third Wave Feminism we know that often in these situations, where the person who steps forward to take the mic gets the mic, men tend to get it because women have been conditioned not to. Once that is the context all you need are the pigs in the back to shout down any women to do step up.

So Riot Grrl needed to happen. And it was good for punk, because it provided a whole lot of energy and excitement and brought forward some names that went on to really help carry punk forward through the 90s. Hell they helped start Grunge for crissakes. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was named by a member of Bikini Kill. Look it up bro.

But you will note that none of this has anything to do with musical acumen or desires. Punk stuff so rarely does. It is worth asking at a certain point if there is any reason to listen to this stuff outside of that context. Is Riot Grrl the zeitgeist equivalent of a journal entry? Is listening to it now just like visiting a museum of artifacts, divorced from their use and context other than a few notes on a card? Did it have any sonic additions of its own?

Is it any good: Yes it is good. It is good like all the other good punk bands of the era, in just the same ways. Which is frustrating. I mean it is good. Is it better than Minor Threat or Black Flag? I dunno. Probably not. They have a lot of good tunes though, good energy which is punk's big thing. Without making a musical point beyond what was already there, by just being another hardcore punk band except with chicks, isn't that kind of like Riot Grrl just being the token chick on the cartoon show? The Princess Peach of punk rock?

I think there are two parts to this. First, there are some annoying things, but the music holds up and I wouldn't even be able to make these complaints coherently if they hadn't pushed the political intelligence of punk forward by a decade.

Second, this came out 20 years ago and in a time of rapid change it may as well have been a century. I think that, as a society, many of us have reached a point summarized by Lewis Black in this clip. We just want breakfast. I am not saying Feminism is over or has no more work to do. We just have lives to live and can't keep abreast of every issue ever. I am not saying we shouldn't think for ourselves but we have a division of labor in our society. Activists should get their shit together and come back to us with what they want. Otherwise we are going to do the political equivalent of what America has done with its nutritional advice: throw its hands up in the air and go to McDonalds.

Divorced of the political context? They are a great punk band, if very of their time. The recording is extremely lo-fi, from a time where that meant you couldn't understand the lyrics. The music is rhythmically interesting and very energetic. Not a ton of hooks but enough to keep it interesting. On the other hand, since the point of the music is in the lyrics it kind of undermines the whole thing if you don't have the lyric sheets immediately on hand. Overall they have the sarcastic, angry punk vocals down, and the lyrics that can be understood are pretty funny, if a sometimes bit preachy in their delivery. Still, this is good punk music.

As for the philosophical stuff, I dunno. Rock is dead lets all go listen to EDM and pretend music has value.