I am a music man/
I come from far away/
And I can play./
What can you play?/
I play the Gee-tar.
Last weekend, during songwriting, it became clear that Matt couldn't play a scale from a given note ("I've never needed to, shut up!" etc.).
He kept trying, while everyone around him yelled "TONE TONE SEMITONE TONE TONE TONE SEMITONE" in increasingly incomprehensible tones of exasperation and spit-flecked rage, but he was basically trying to do it chromatically no matter what we screamed and jabbered at his perplexed little eyebrows.
Finally, exhausted from such eye-rolling, slavering apoplexy, the band quietened down enough to offer some resignedly damage-limitating advice: "look Matt, it's really not very often a semitone. If in doubt, assume it's not a semitone."
A pause.
"If in doubt, skip a fret, don't just go up to the next one", comes the hopeful rephrase.
*matt looks frantically at the low E string he's playing the scale on*
"skip a fret?" (he looks up, petrified) "I'm going to run out!"
[Cue aploplectic jabbering part II.]
Gigs
As the academic year moves into it's final stages and the days begin to lengthen into evenings, our schedule is happily beginning to get more busy again. At the moment it's still not much but there are already one or two dates not quite up there yet, including the intriguing notion that we might play at the opening of a 'community garden squat project' organised by some punks in Reading.
Make Punk, not war
This brings me to something bastard have been talking about for a while: I don't care what they say, punks under the age of about 25 are all just hippies with leather jackets and slightly less girly hair.
"Community garden squat project"?! Since when did punks do that? What happened to "shit on the community, it's a cunt"? That's what I'd like to know.
I suppose in honesty it's a good thing that punks havn't given up the aesthetics of their movement (the clothes, the music, the politicism) and have started to care about the environment and are nice to their mummies as well (we're nice to our mummies).
But punks are basically a remnant of a previous generation, and it's heartbreaking but I recon - uhoh, controversial statement - that chavs are the only original 00's subversive youth culture. Wanky, but true, kids. We've got about two years to sort this out before this was the decade of chavs and emo. Time for:
A folk uprising!
Lock up your maidens and get out the battle hoe, this fair country will jig to a new tune...
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2 comments:
Ah, addressing the age old question of what it is to be punk. Whilst many today are joining with their hippy brethren and tending towards a socialist outlook on life, this has not always been the way. Many of the older punks were (and even some bands today are) very right wing, associating themselves with anger and violence aimed at anyone who they happened to have a grudge on that day. Although there were exceptions, it's hard to deny that a lot of this anger was based on superficial factors such as class or race.
I would much rather have hippy punks than facist punks.
Also, you will always get punks who don't care about anything, including the opinion of anyone else ever. Look at Miln.
Haha, you looked at Miln. Bad luck.
- Mike
I think the irony of my 'that's what i'd like to know' wasn't obvious enough: I agree that of course hippies are preferable to nazis - but anyway, rebelling in an original way most likely doesn't involve acting like a punk of any kind; like i said - we need something new, right?
Something appropriate to a generation faced with weedleing cause-sapping inclusive bureaucracy rather than such an alien-to-youth and obviously dogmatic rule-laying authority as has been rebelled against by the alienated youth on and off this last half century or so...?
Yeah i've got no clever answers, tho i did write a song about it, woo! Problem solved! Another victory for the hapless musicians.
Miln...surely he doesn't 'not care' so much as he just 'is pretty pathetic'? zing etc.
-Alex
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