People who want music to not be about image and personality are retardo. What would be fun about it if it was a bunch of faceless guys with no opinions dressing normal and not running their mouths off in interviews?
Without image and spectacle how would kids form tribes and subcultures around popular culture and make a clear separation between themselves, make friends for life and enjoy being young?
When I was a kid I was into punk because I liked how I looked a little weird but was also part of a larger thing, like I had a few thousand other kids who had my back if things got hairy. The normies at school would always use the fact that punks all looked the same as a case against our individuality, but that totally wasn’t the point; I didn’t want to look individual, I liked how I looked like a bunch of other obnoxious kids. Being in a gang is cool when you’re a kid.
But if punk had been about dressing neat and obeying your parents (remember Christian punk? The Warped Tour became a traveling ministry for a few years at the end of the nineties, even the European dates where everyone hates god) and Destiny’s Child was about smashing the lights out of rec centres in the mosh, then I probs would have been into Destiny’s Child.
Any music that isn’t classical is at least 25% image/personality and 75% music, and can probably go as far as 75% image/personality and 25% music and still be an exciting spectacle. If the Sex Pistols had a band name that didn’t have sex in it and wore flares they’d have just been lumped in with Black Sabbath as noisey rock n roll and probably forgotten about. If Biggie Smalls had done what his mother had wanted and admitted he was privately educated and just talked about handing in essays on time and hanging out in dormitories, no one would have gone for it.
This also goes for bands like Fugazi who try not to have an image/personality, I wouldn’t go in for their radical shouting and frugal serious vibes if they all looked like perfectly coiffuered garage rockers the things they were saying would be rendered obsolete. It’s the reason why International Noise Conspiracy never floated my boat, they couldn’t reconcile their political lyrics with spending so much time on their hair and eBaying vintage Levis.
So yeah, I think we can all agree that appearance and vibes are important in music, so when you’re really gross but you make it a little bit you really stand out. Here are some unattractive people and their unattractive musical projects.
Necro
Necro is the grossest guy in rap music ever, including the one eyed midget from the Geto Boys and Bizarre from D12 with his massive titties. He’s a big fat jewish metalhead from New York and he’s really into rapping about torturing prostitutes and grindcore bands. He saw a gap in the market for something that one day might have fans that call themselves ‘grind thugs’ and for that I applaud him, being an entrepreneur is what the free market is all about. Some people call him horrorcore but that was more of an older, southern, black thing wasn’t it? Necro is more of a guy who liked metal then got into rap rather than a born and raised MC who just so happens to be into gore flicks, just like how Matisyahu wasn’t born as Hasid but decided to be one so everyone could go “woah! A Hasidic guy who likes dancehall! Who’da thunk it!”.
But enough quibbles about the root of his ‘sound’, what could possibly grosser than a fat 34 year old into porn, rap and metal? He’s basically a grown up version of the Marilyn Manson kids in trenchcoats at school who got into Eminem and started writing graffiti. I like the one he does with Danny Diablo and Rancid’s roadie where they pun the names of old hardcore bands for a whole song though.
UK Subs
The UK Subs singles collection made me was one of my favourite cds when I was little. But of all the gross crusty punk bands that ever existed, the UK Subs are the grossest and most unattractive. There’s two reasons for this; firstly, Charlie Harper, their singer, was already 32 when he formed the UK Subs in 1976, making him older than my dad and 66 years old today, which is a little gross, imagine some 66 year old guy with his top off in the dressing room. Imagine the fat at the small of his back. Imagine if you saw him bend over putting his Y fronts on and saw his taint and sagging brown balls? Imagine if you saw he had piles or something?
You could level this kind of critisism to people like the Rolling Stones, who are old too, but those guys were good looking to start with, and they’re rich, and they had the hottest, most sexy music ever, which brings this to the other most unattractive thing about the UK Subs: they do that song ‘I Live In A Car’. No one’s going to want to plough you when you live in a car, it means you haven’t washed your genitals recently and you’re very poor.
Hot Chip
Remember the The Proclaimers? They were two of the most ugly people anyone ever let on television, but their deal was that they were remarkably ugly and remarkably ginger and had remarkably strong accents (this is their best song). They were so remarkable a spectacle (they even wore spectacles) that it was kind of hot and I bet they got a lot of girls on tour.
Have you seen Hot Chip though? They’re nerds but they’re not even hot nerds. You know how when bands look like different things (skinhead bands look a bit like workmen, Suicidal Tendencies look like gang members, the Smiths look like librarians and so on)? Hot Chip look like senior buyers for a chain of sneaker stores. Workmen are cool because they’re hard, gang members lare cool because they are in a gang and librarians are cool because they’re quiet, brooding and fiercely intelligent. The senior buyers for chains of sneaker stores are men in their mid thirties who have worked in retail since they were 18, dress like people 15 years younger than them, have enormous coke bloats and buy Silas toys - none of those things are cool. (actually, recently they’ve been wearing suits, but they still look like senior buyers looking for coke at their younger sister’s wedding).
The BNP’s pop star
In Britain we’ve got a little thing called ‘race hate dressed up as acceptable politics’ and as a consequence we’ve got these skinheads growing their hair out, squeezing into suits, and learning how to talk to black people on television without spitting etc (the Nazis in America are more straightforward about their intentions, it’s way more honest and they look cooler).
Because they’re so into acting like real politicians, they try and do things that real politicians do, like find pop stars to support them, unfortunately for them however, no one is willing to put their name to these guys’ cause, so they have to make their own pop stars. The British National Party has found this guy who used to be a pub singer called Joey Smith. And well, whatever, I suppose, but you should see him (you just did), doesn’t he look like one of those anemic twinks that are on the covers of European gay porn DVDs? It’s really hard to pin down exactly what is so unhealthy looking about those guys, it’s probably the bad lighting in the photos and their wizened cheekbones from all the drugs. I don’t think Joey Smith is down with those guys but he does look a lot like them. He has a great line in satirical songs though. You really nailed her with this one Joey! It sounds like you put a bunch of internet comments into a single sentence.
Lady Gaga
Why does no one want to do it with Lady Gaga? She dresses super slutty and she has that song about doing it with girls, but no one ever talks about how hot she looks. One possiblility is that everyone is so grossed out by Madonna and they sort of see her as the same kind of thing and imagine her getting older, stupider and muscular and it shrinks their boners.
Same kind of goes for Lily Allen, she’s cute and she wore that Agent Provocateur sailor outfit that completely killed me, but still, no one’s on that shit like they are on Cheryl Cole or Beyonce where there’s erotic literature written about them on the internet (although I haven’t actually done a search- I might now, that shit gets me off).
SIMULTANEOUSLY POSTED ON STREET CARNAGE.
