Consider
Last night I saw the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a group who are actually called Penguin Cafe, despite the tickets and various paraphernalia advertising otherwise.
They were pretty fantastic. Seeing so many people on-stage, working off each other was very inspiring. In a way, it was a lot like seeing Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band - musicians who aren’t simply performing their songs but putting on a performance. The movements of their bodies are just as important as the movements of their hands.
I almost wrote a huge, terrible spiel about how boring modern rock music is in comparison to other genres but decided against it. In its place, here is a good paragraph from a review of Cat Power’s [excellent] 2003 release You Are Free:
The Problem With Music doesn’t have as much to do with the influence of corporations or digital piracy as it does the delirious desire to be spat upon or condescended to by seemingly unflappable, fuck-everything rebels, projecting a confidence their sycophantic fans wish they could muster. Kids want to see their dreams onstage— which used to be harmless— but cool, cold fantasies about credibility, cash and chaos have given rise to an increasingly cocksure collection of unserious dopes with store-bought sticky-up hair. It’s a solid indication that pose is still prose to the uneducated, and that nothing has really changed in fifty years.
Make that fifty-eight.
DB x
