Rules of the Game #2: Metal Clusters

[koganbot]

Rules of the Game #2: Metal Clusters

OK, second full column is up, brings up some things we talked about in the previous thread, about how there can be a chance element in which music you identify with socially.

(EDIT: Strangely, the link for the piece changed from the one I'd originally posted, so I've fixed it. I wonder how often this will happen. If you're looking for my pieces and the links aren't working, go to the Las Vegas Weekly main page and you'll probably see near the top something that says "Music: Rules Of The Game" followed by a subtitle, and that will be my latest column. Then, if you follow the link to the column, at the end of the column there's a link for "more articles from this author," which will take you to my previous columns.)

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[koganbot]

But of course I'd already switched to the cool and cruel and bully kids' music back in 1966, i.e., that of the Stones and the punks and creeps trying to sound like them (Question Mark, Seeds, Electric Prunes).

Which is interesting and maybe even paradoxical (identifying with the oppressor, perhaps?), especially given that I remember first questioning in 1966 my own support of the Vietnam War when hearing a radio report on an antiwar demonstration where the peaceful demonstrators were attacked by a stone-throwing mob. My feeling was that I didn't want to be on the side of the stone-throwers. They were doing what bad guys did: racists in Mississippi attacked peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, guns, and firehoses. This incident actually created a rip in my understanding of the world, since I thought we were the good guys in Vietnam (defending the South Vietnamese against communist aggression), and it didn't compute that the bad guys at home seemed to be on the good side and the demonstrators seemed to be on the bad. So I had to realign my thinking, and eventually turned against the war, though obviously not for this reason alone. And of course over the years antiwar people themselves heaved plenty of rocks, literal and verbal, and so did I, so things never quite righted themselves into good guys versus bad guys. But the weird thing is that my music tastes didn't follow this pattern. I've liked plenty of stones throsers, from the Stones through the Stooges and Sex Pistols and Contortions. And 1966 was when I turned towards hard rock, towards the cool, cruel guys' music. (Not so simple, of course. "Pushin' Too Hard" represented a pop/rock world that was pushin' on me, but also was about being pushed on, so I could identify, and was about pushing back. As I say in "Death Rock 2000," I was totally unclear where I stood - or wanted to stand - amidst the pushed and the pushers.)