Reject Rock
I’m about fed up with the eternal praising of misfit music, or, as I have taken to calling it, Reject Rock. What is it? Open your free urban weekly and read who is being praised as being “brave,” “original,” “disturbing” or “bleak”.
This music is made by and for misfits. Those that society has said thanks but no thanks, due to any number of peculiarities in personality, upbringing or personal grooming habits. Lileks once referred to them as those that had been “rejected by the cul-de-sac style council”.
They are the deep thinkers among us. Those that feel things just a little more strongly. Who are keen to what’s really happening, man.
Usually, one can ignore the juvenile rantings of the press regarding these bands by simply not picking up the hipster doofus papers and stopping anyone mid sentence who brings up “The Stooges”. However, upon perusal of yesterday’s WSJ, I found that a misfit has made his way in and he’s reviewing another misfit, one Mark Oliver Everett of the band Eels.
The misfit writer, Jim Fusilli, starts his piece by telling us that E, as he’s known, is “baring his soul again” with his “customary awkward eloquence” in a recording that may even top his seminal “Beautiful Freak” album of a few years ago.
The writer assumes that you, the reader, have been properly schooled in the ways of punk and post punk, where baring one’s soul is seen as the Ultimate Musical Statement. Screw melody, song structure, beauty or technical competence, some hipster is showing us his soul!
Which then makes me ask, who the hell wants to see your or anyone else’s soul for the love of God? Perhaps if we could get a view into the soul of an unusually good person, like the Pope, it may be of interest. But the soul of a malnourished, weight-of-the-world 40-year-old with poor mental health? I’ll pass.
And awkward eloquence? Why would anyone with an ounce of discernment want to hear someone with awkward eloquence when there is plenty of music with confident eloquence? I guess you have to be a misfit to understand.
The piece goes on and on saying how Everett’s “Thin reedy voice” is joined by what sounds like a “toy piano”. Yeah, isn’t it just shocking how more people don’t like this?
As good as this is, the writer admits that it may not be as good as his 1998 release Electro-Shock Blues, “written after his sister committed suicide and his mother succumbed to cancer.” It is a “stark, compelling examination of their deaths (including the track Elizabeth On the Bathroom Floor).”
Now perhaps it’s me, but does that sound like something you want rattling around in your melon when you are trying to relax with a cocktail? How many have succumbed to their own depression and ended it all after listening to this dark dreck?
Releasing an album like this may make Mark Oliver Everett feel better--like Lennon’s Primal Scream nonsense of the 70’s--but to paraphrase Steve Martin from Planes Trains and Automobiles, when you put out an album how about including something for the LISTENER?
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