All I see is a lot of groups that are recycling a lot of 60's stuff that has been recycled once too often anyway.
And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good.
And I'm sorry I just really have to question a lot of these New Wave people that say what they're doing is so radically new and so different. Cause I really don't see it.
As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.
Basically no, I mean I think that it's very easy to like I say, smoke a joint or even to wear a Chairman Mao button, or do a lot of these things with out knowing what's behind it, and what it really means.
But as far as this stuff being really new, really different that's something else again. Even the Sex Pistols were playing old Chuck Berry licks.
But, like The New Barbarians charge $12. 50 a ticket for a show that Ron Wood came out and had a music stand in front of him while he was playing. That's how under rehearsed they were.
Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.
Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.
I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.
I have to see it much more as fundamentally capitalism, I certainly don't see any Rock'n'Roll coming out of Vietnam or China or Russia.
I mean Iggy and The Stooges first couple of albums I think sold twenty five thousand between the two of them you know and so to talk in terms of an underground I mean you have to go really to the independent labels and things like that.
I mean it's easier to be in a demonstration if it's a trip that's one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart in 1971, because it wasn't a trip any longer.
I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can't afford the ticket prices.
I'm really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there's something inherently, even violent about it, it's wild and raw and all this.
In fact I think now we've reached a point now, where the powers that be really have sort of vested interest in all of us being stoned out as much as possible all the time so we don't know what's going on, and we don't care.
It's much easier to wear a Chairman Mao button and shake your fists in the air and all that, then to actually read the Communist manifesto and things like that and actually become involved in politics.
It's the major changes in the other industries, it's the change in the economy- it's obviously got to effect our whole culture.
Most of them are pretty down records, pretty unhappy, pretty confused. Which only reflects how people in general were feeling, I mean really the sense that you get is society running down.
No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.
No, I see it as meaning very little at the moment because none of the groups are about anything.
Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.
Or like in the early 70's when we had the reaction against acid rock and all the fuzz tone, and feedback, and the noise. And you had James Taylor and everyone went acoustic and that.
Talking Heads, were a sorta collegian kinda art school, I'm trying not to make them sound so bad cause I really love em.
That's one reason why it's pretty worthless, I can't totally buy it, if you think about it, it's things like the Phil Spector records. On one level they were rebellion, on another level they were keeping the teenager in his place.
The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.
The thing is that, they all had real strong personalities and real distinct identities, and I don't find most of the groups that are coming out now really do.
The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.
Things do go in cycles so I never believe rock was really dead it was really finished or had it, it just comes back in a different form.
Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.
What is so vastly original and new and different about The Pretenders? You know, she sounds like Sandie Shaw circa 1964, the band sounds like a million bands, so what.
What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.
When kids can't afford to see it anymore maybe we'll have a whole resurgence of garage bands all over America and this New Wave thing will start to mean something on a grass roots level.
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