Michael Clark said that Rock has been his rock. Last week, I interviewed my childhood hero, Michael
Gira, who has released the most comprehensive, expansive and precise album of his career. Ben Frost is about to perform his album
By The Throat at Glasgow's Fruitmarket.
These three events only emphasise how rock music is nothing more than a corpse, a decaying memory of a time when youth was more than a currency for marketing. Once a vibrant cultural movement, allied with fashion and often emerging from the art schools of London and Glasgow, rock music either trades on past glories - thank you, Public Image Limited for your recent tour that reminded us how good you were in the 1980s - dilutes its energy in pastiche of past styles - Amanda Palmer has abandoned the punk cabaret for a bloated, dated sound - or is energised by new alliances - Clark's use of
Scritti Politti is far more interesting than their music, and Ben Frost wanders into neo-classical and electronica, despite his use of rock's iconic "loud guitar."
Gira's Swans, meanwhile, have very little connection to anything else within rock. Their ambition only highlights how mediocre most bands have become.
But how can rock revive itself? Luckily, Scotland has some shows that might give a clue to the future. Why attend a traditional gig - standing about in over-crowded rooms, battling the drunks to buy an over-priced orange juice and missing the last train home - when it's possible to get a musical fix and be entertained and educated at the same time?
Spreading my attention north,
David Hughes Dance is taking
The Chinaski Sessions to the Lemon Tree in
Aberdeen. Starring Belgian post-rock duo I Love Sarah and five male dancers with a little too much energy, choreographer Kylie Walters has fun cracking open the macho myth and peeking at the way that rock'n'roll is tied up with the sort of hard-drinking, boorish heroism that Charles Bukowski celebrated in his poetry and prose.
Unlike many attempts to respond to Bukowski, and most rock bands' attitudes towards women, world and work, Walters approach is neither uncritical nor savage: her approach involved finding an innate masculine energy and letting it dance.
I'm unlikely to shut up about The
Sonica Festival for the next two months - it sits on the edge of at least three art forms, so will end up appearing in any top five I care to make - but that a musical festival contains so little rock is telling. One contribution from the world of pop culture is
#Unravel, the installation-collaboration between Found and Aidan Moffat. I sometimes wonder whether Found, a band who do proper gigs and everything, are more concerned with distancing themselves from rock and associating with a visual art community:
#Unravel was a cheeky highlight of the Glasgow International Art Fest, and allows the audience to follow through Aidan Moffat's selection of short stories, set to Found's music. Plus this one is free.
I suppose that these events either contradict my assumption that rock is dead by demonstrating that it is re-inventing itself through careful collaboration, or prove it through the rock's need to collaborate with other, more inspired arts. I think I was pushing my luck in the first place: an album as forceful, brutal and occasionally poetic as Swans is unlikely to have become popular without an audience already familiar with punishing noise, extended jams and a taste for the psychedelic, and Michael Clark was pointing out how rock has continued to inspire him. Hell, I'd change the title if I didn't like it so much.
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