I’m sure you could have guessed as much, but it’s worth stating plainly: the insidious canonisation of ‘golden-era’ indie-rock that has taken place over the past few years sticks in my craw something rotten. The whole “classic band play their classic album” mentality that has congealed across festival line-ups and concert schedules around the world pretty much marks the point at which any contemporary relevance this music may once have had is permanently severed, the body left writhing around as the stump is burned clean.

And yet this reverence continues unabated, feeding into this absurd, depressing notion that seems to have developed that ‘indie’ as a style/genre is something to actually be celebrated and aspired to. Thus it finds itself slavishly reproduced by those (young & old) who have assumed its perceived stylings as a conscious decision, tragically failing to appreciate its true historical status as a wholly accidental, inherently self-deprecatory category into which people like me (and, I assume, you, dear reader) are thrust more by some horrible accident of birth than anything else – a perpetual ‘none of the above’ box tick within which pale white misfits of one variety or another conduct their business outside of the stylistic rigours demanded by other, more clearly defined varieties of ‘rock’ and ‘pop’.

Once ‘indie’ attains said rigours, becoming a self-conscious category with its own pantheon of classic recordings and off-the-peg dress code, the whole thing becomes such a gigantic joke that it’s fucking sickening. You there, young man hanging about outside Rough Trade East, why in GOD’S NAME would you wish to become something as inherently lame as INDIE? The world is your oyster, the opportunities to look like a tool are limitless, and yet you choose THIS? I did not choose it, I just ended up being it, and yet here you are, listening to Sonic Youth in 2012 as if that somehow *matters*, failing to appreciate that that puts you about on the same missed-the-boat level as some flea-bitten flower-child listening to The Grateful Dead in 1985, convinced that they’re still the bee’s knees, as hardcore and hip-hop and thrash metal explode all around.

Not that there’s anything wrong with listening to The Grateful Dead in 1985. I sure wish I was listening to The Grateful Dead in 1985 instead of sitting here in work writing this bollocks as global destruction looms. But my point is that in 1985, the omniscient arbiters of cultural taste would not have countenanced that decision for any remotely engaged young person. And yet Sonic Youth 2012? Sure, come right in, says the dude in the shop, we’ve got all their ‘classic albums’ lined up right there and we still play ‘em all the time. What the hell is going on? That Reynolds guy whose book I can’t be bothered to read must be right! Time has stopped! And… well you get the idea.

Hopefully ill-conceived, unwanted diatribes like the one above will go some way toward demonstrating the way my heart has hardened to such things to the extent that when legendary and prodigiously talented men and women whose work I’ve spent a good chunk of my life obsessively listening to pitch up in my town to perform their lauded classic works with their reformed classic line-ups, I can barely summon up the energy to acknowledge their existence or snort in derision, let alone actually consider the relative merits of dragging my carcass to some corporate shithole excuse for a medium sized concert venue.

Guided By Voices is different though. If the reactivated classic line-up GeeBeeVee deigned to play in this country (a promise that was issued then cruelly withdrawn last year), I would tear up what I’ve just written, abandon what remains of my self-respect and proceed to lose my shit. I would be up in the front row with all the other crumbling, beer-swilling omega males, determined to have the time of my life, regardless of what actually transpired on stage. Even seeing an ad-hoc GBV tribute ensemble play a one-off 20 minute set last year got me so giddy I spent the remainder of the evening in a state of reverie. Imagine seeing THE REAL THING. Imagine them playing for hours, doing the hits. Too much, man.

But wait a minute – aren’t GBV the very epitome of everything that is ugly and mediocre in ‘indie’ culture, of everything that reduces the joy of musical expression to a bad throat and a hangover, an ill-advised beard, an entry on a spreadsheet? All those endless catechisms of awkwardly monikered, poorly recorded, obtusely self-pitying songs hidden behind slabs of poorly executed GCSE collage artwork – aren’t they precisely the kind of thing I should be trying to tear myself away from, having shaken my fist in its general direction in the above paragraphs?

No, they are not. Laugh if you will, but whilst the Pavements and Yo La Tengos of this world remain happy to wallow, GBV were all about transcendence. When they missed the mark, they missed it wide, but when they hit (and in their hey-day they were capable of knocking out bulls-eyes for ten songs at a time), they hit hard, taking all the detritus that circles around the lives of aging, disgruntled nerd-men trapped in suburban pitstops – the scrap-books full of scrawled nonsense, the mis-read road signs and slurred, half remembered conversations about old records, the hissing, dust-covered pile of cables in someone’s neglected basement home-studio set up – and transforming it via the alchemy of rock n’ roll into moments of towering, cosmic celebration. As synonymous as they may be with all that lo-fi indie-rock aesthetic bullshit, GBV were not about celebrating it, they were about CONQUERING it – acknowledging it as their natural state of being, then channelling it into something bigger, stronger, more universal… and then celebrating that instead, cos why the fuck not?

So yes, to be able to check in on that celebration once again, with the now-probably-approaching-actual-old-age membership of the collective that gave us ‘Propeller’ and ‘Bee Thousand’ and ‘Alien Lanes’ would be a great and special thing, and I wish they’d change their mind and get a Big Tour in the diary whilst the demand for one is still there. Hearing them make new records though..? No, that I think I could live without.

Labels: album reviews, Guided By Voices