This blog has usually looked at underground electronic musics, and usually black-orientated ones (that's my thing) and if memory serves me right I've tapped into a little bit of today's bands. Well today I have another go hacking into bands of today.
The inspiration for this comes from me and a pal starting to jam together, em on bass, him on guitar. I got into bass originally because of post-punk (Joy Division, PiL, Talking Heads etc, look em up), before getting into hip hop, soul, funk and reggae properly (as opposed to being household background music). I eventually moved on from those musics to British urban, for want of a better word, and picked up the decks and getting onto radio for a time, at the time of writing. My pal on the other hand got majorly into hip hop, before slipping out of that and now bases his guitar playing on blues, old style RnB and Hendrix-esque playing styles.
The point of this background? Not to delve into how these might be looking too much in the past (I've moaned about that already, and Simon Reynolds book Retromania has a stab at that notion as well) but to give a flavour of how these styles might gel together. My pal is the one with the ideas bustling inside him, it would be hard to de-rail him. He wants a raw style, that he argues isn't currently in modern bands. I see a lack of vibe in a lot of modern electronic styles too, music I'd rather listen to at home than a club (garage is the biggest criminal of this, clearly not having a catalyst to take it out of the garage frame altogether). I for one have little interest in modern bands, that's probably more down to taste. As far as my bass playing style goes, I want a groove to it, hence the styles I mentioned. Now it's early days, but essentially a melding of complicated grooving basslines with a raw rhythm guitar could the scenes own catalyst, creating a new vibe for the 2010s.
There was a time where bands did this kind of melding and re-interpretation. Bands like the Stones and Beatles had their own take on RnB (my pals current period) and the psot punk bands mixed the energy of punk with abrasive guitars and funky bass (how I picked up the bass). Nobody these days seems willing to do this. The alternative scene is mainly white dominated, fair enough. The problem is now it's pretty incestuous, there's little exploring outside of 'white' playing styles. There's almost no touching of modern technology, the new taboo that would somehow ruin the authenticity of the music. Strictly guitar-bass-drums on both sides of the Atlantic.
There have been some examples of bands going to the unknown, such as the Reverand of the Reverand and the Makers going for his 'dancehall' album. I'm a bit sceptical of this, sounds like he's trying to do a modern version of doing what the Clash and John Lydon did in their time rather than anything groundbreaking. More importantly, this isn't likely to be incorporating dancehall into his own, but his interpretation of it, and it's unlikely to be a similar result a la the Beatles.
My message for bands of the day, of whatever style, but mainly of indie/alternative fame, break out of doing just the one style, It doesn't have to be black music you look at, but understand that part of the reason people will look back at eras with bands with bigger legacies is because they though outside the box
