Fusion 45

I sent an email to Scott Becker telling him how much I loved Option, asking if the magazine’s reviews might someday be posted online. He’s moved on — too many things to do, too much music to hear, too much art to create — but said he hopes the magazine will be archived someday by someone.

I’ve since read his review of Fugazi’s “Red Medicine” album (in the July/August 1995 issue) and the reason why Option’s archives should be preserved became clear. In his assessment of the recording, he speaks of punk rock (though not specifically of Fugazi) by saying that “retaining authenticity at the expense of artifice makes most punk recordings a feeble substitute for the real thing — compressed onto tape, the music can feel small and hollow”. He goes on to say he “got rid of all (his) hardcore albums because they sound unlistenably puny”.

I’ll be the first to admit my musical history has a very small chapter dedicated to punk rock. When The Sex Pistols came to small town America in 1979, most of my white, middle American high school friends were just coming off satin jackets and bell bottoms, walking away from Kiss albums, smoking pot, experimenting with dashikis and mushrooms and listening to Folkways and Zawinul. We caught a taste of The Clash here and some watered-down faux punk there (read: The Knack) but that’s as far as it went.

A few years later, under the spell of a fellow disc jockey who looked a cross between Liza Minelli and Joan Jett, I fell a little deeper into the scene (commensurate with how deeply I was falling for her). But, it was a false affection; punk rock just never meant much to me (nor did the lady DJ, for that matter).

Becker’s observation about the smallness of punk recordings serves to clarify my detachment. As much as I liked live and loud, I was (and still am) in my heart, a record guy. And, save for a few songs here and there, punk rock was, indeed, too small on record to match its immense (albeit short-lived) life on stage.

Anyone who’s followed pop music for more than 20 minutes has experienced a band who’s made a great record but couldn’t make a living playing Holiday Inn’s if they were forced to survive on their live performances. It’s a story as old as rock and roll itself and many a band has been derided as such. But, with punk, that was entirely the point, wasn’t it?

I once saw Barry Manilow perform in concert in Las Vegas and it was truly awful. Some might say that with anything involving B.M., awful is a foregone conclusion. I beg to differ. I like to listen to Barry Manilow records. He (and those who wrote for him) crafted some great melodies. The orchestrations on many of his songs were beautiful and, within the context of his style, the production was near perfect. In short, Barry Manilow made great records, worthy of love by a record guy like me but he was pretty bad in concert. Conversely, many punk rockers suffered from stage acts of beauty and records of mud.

So what does this have to do with Scott Becker, Option and its record reviews? It points to the need for preserving quality reviews of recorded music. I’m not talking about the hideous post-event verbiage wherein Ghostbuster from Baton Rouge writes 50 words on why Kids In America is still his favorite CD of all time. I’m talking about the prescient, passionate words of professional music writers who were sharing their experience of music in its present time. At the end of the day, record reviews aren’t just for us to decide whether or not to buy (or in these days, go to the effort to steal) the music. When done well, music reviews give us an opportunity to understand our own musical identity.

So…anybody ready to start uploading some reviews?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Props and Missives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.