It's not easy keeping Rock n' Roll alive. The music is infinitely repeatable because it jolts right to the reptilian brain. But it's not infinitely replaceable; Chuck Berry Fan #9584675937 making a record that moves no different from "Maybelline" will not be considered as good as "Maybelline," it will be considered trash and made fun of. So there's a handful of tricks that the industry has been bombarding us with more or less since "Maybelline" was released.
The easiest is to re-package: squeeze the same sound out of a crew with different clothes and a different image and give the style a different name. This works best if your group slags whatever happens to be popular at the moment. Instant controversey equals instant attention, and if the record doesn't suck, it'll sell. For bonus points, wait for somebody else's repackaged movement to run into its third or fourth generation of bands, at which point mockery at the lowest common denominators of the movement will weigh it down like a lead weight. You can then sing the praises of your new repackaging of something you used to like, complete with boisterous homages to the Great Bands of Yore.
For those slightly more daring, There's making an actual effort to write songs that sound new, with structures that don't settle into predictable routines, with lyrics that aren't about sex, lack of sex, or how angry you are at stuff.
Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out was an album-length attempt to do just that. The gang were all veterans of the Riot Grrl movement of the late-80's-to-early-90's, and while the sturm-and-drang of that is still very much present, the true revolution is not something promised, but something delivered, in the songwriting, the lyrics, and the deliciously explosive, unstable wanderings of the two guitarists. "Words and Guitar" is the perfect example.
We start with a simple walking (or perhaps, running) treble riff, that starts bell-clear but sinks into distortion just as the fuzz of the other guitar (SK is bass-less, way before the White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs made it cool) reaches up out of the muck, and the drums roll in a staccato punch that seems to be trying to silence the shrieks, only to stop every measure, frustrated. Things settle down in choruses that seem smoother, but only because the playing is gentler, not less complicated; the beats and notes still tumble as though pouring out of the very hearts and minds of the bandmates.
The singing gives off this impression as well. As with the guitars there are two vocal themes: one yowlingly dominant and over the top, one low and sardonic, making up in speed and tone what it lacks in volume. When they crash together, they overwhelm, laying too related but divergent trains of thought into your head, an experience with which the honest among us will relate.
And what has them so excited? Loss? Death? Damning someone from an Olympian height?
Nope:
Words and guitar
I got it
Words and guitar
I like it
way way too loud
I got it
words and guitar
Meanwhile, the low voice punctures the later lines with:
(can't take this away from me
music is the air I breathe)
Yeah, they're singing about Rock, about how they love it, about how it feeds them, about how the fact that they can play it "till there's nothing left" is freedom. All this fury is neither a lament nor a phillipic but a celebration and a clamoring for more.
'Cause in the end, the simplest way to save Rock n' Roll is to rock you till your good and dead.
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