CD Consumer's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review
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CD Consumer
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
by Geoffrey Woolf
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Slabtown.net note: This album also was ranked the 3rd best album of 2000 by CD Consumer
America liked Oasis—for a little bit. But it soon became apparent that this was not a nice, sweet bunch of English guys like the real Beatles. The Gallaghers were rude, coarse, and arrogant. So it was pretty much over for them in the US.
That’s our country right now. We feel threatened by anything not “middle of the road,” nice, friendly. Take a look at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this month. All of these privileged politicians spent four days each trying to prove, on one hand, that they were different from each other, but, on the other hand, that they are exactly like you. We get what we deserve.
The same goes for pop music. We pretend we want rock and roll to have attitude, but we’re so vendor-conscious that we want to believe that we're spending our hard earned fourteen dollars on people we would like if we met them in person. We pretend we want rock stars to be cool, but we don’t want them to make us feel less so. The problem is that it’s difficult to have a “rock and roll” attitude and be nice at the same time. Still, the major labels know this and try hard to play to the dichotomy. More important than the choons, to the record companies, have become questions of Q-factor and “will they be nice to Regis?” And, to be a little fair for a change, who can blame them? These are the things that make a band mass-marketable. They didn’t make up these rules. Americans proved it in the marketplace. We get what we deserve.
We get Matchbox 20s, Third-Eye Blinds, Sugar Rays, Wallflowers, Counting Crows in mass-quantity because they don’t spout off too much, because they’re not too scary, because they remind us of guys we went to high-school with. Even big-unit-moving punk-pop crews like Green Day and Blink 182 have more in common with The Muppets than they do with the Ramones or the Pistols. Carlos Santana couldn’t break through to the mass-market until such time as he became too old to seem threatening, and Beck didn’t break until he turned the irony machine up to eleven (and even then most people who bought his albums didn’t realize he was being ironic). We get what we deserve.
So even by their third album, it’s hard to tell what America will make of the Dandy Warhols (we know that they have carved a niche in the UK as a “love to hate” band, but in the US it’s love OR hate), all heroin-chic, big-mouthed, Everclear/Primal Scream baiters whose very existence is predicated on their hipper-than-thou attitude. From Courtney Taylor’s scarily aggressive cheekbones to his quote-a-matic mouth to his uber-hip t-shirt collection, he’s a formula designed to bring out the worst in an inferiority complexed US-indie scene that sees no humor in slagging other bands or, god-forbid, the audience. “Just let your music do your talking,” they pusillanimously snivel. Is rock and roll really about just the music? Why should it be?
The New York Dolls only made two albums. We get what we deserve.
13 Tales shows a band in a stage of incredible versatility. Sure, the first 3 tracks return the band to familiar drone-space-pop, not very arcane musings on the metaphysical. The lyrics to “Nietsche,” simply, I want a god who stays dead not plays dead/ Even I can play dead perfectly displays the band’s (ostensible) anti-intellectual irono-reductionist philosophy. The rest of the album is deliciously dedicated to some of the most brilliantly placed and executed fuck-offhandedness and piss-taking ever put to shiny plastic.
“Parody” in rock is generally a bad word, bringing to mind Al Yankovics and Alan Shermans churning out disposable novelty music. But when the Dandys go after Beck in “Horse Pills,” it is at once a hilarious send-up and a brilliant example of how hip-hop probably should have integrated itself into indie. And it’s hard to come up with any reason why the Dandys should have something against Ric Ocasek, so the skronky new-wave “Shakin’” has to qualify as one of the best Cars tributes ever.
The balance of the album traces back to the second LP’s grand (ostensible) statement of philosophy, there’s nothing in my heart/ I’d rather be cool than be smart. Taylor slips back into his Lou Weed persona to deliver jaw-droppingly funny commentary on cool: I feel cool as shit ‘cause I got no thoughts keeping me down/ I’m thinking blah-di-blah blah blah to your trip (“Solid”). “Bohemian Like You” documents a chance meeting of empty scenesters blasting, via Stonesy riffage and whoo-hoo’s, “the scene” to rubble:
I really love your hairdo
I’m glad you like mine too
See we’re looking pretty cool
So what do you do?
Oh yeah I wait tables too
No I haven’t heard your band
‘cause you guys are pretty new.
A by-product of all the shit that Courtney Taylor brings down on himself is that it rarely gets mentioned that he is a fantastic vocal performer. His deadpan is part of the reason that his piss-takes get taken way too seriously. It’s also the reason why his sincerity on songs like the gut-wrenching “Big Indian” and the truly-as-good-as-Morrissey “The Gospel” (which is probably still a jab at the Brits’, particularly Blur’s, current fascination with gospel) don’t get taken seriously enough.
“We are rock stars,” say the Dandy Warhols, “and you are not,” to their native land populated by people ill-equipped to suffer such a fate. And this is why the album has been out for ages in the UK. This is why they play sold out shows there. This is why we suffer the Goo-Goo Dolls, and they do not.
We don’t deserve the Dandy Warhols.
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