Verging on Pertinence

Philly Bliss
On Wed., Dec. 8th, Marah and Nick Hornby will be playing at the North Star Bar in Philly (Poplar & 27th Sts.). Mr. Hornby will be reading selections from his book Songbook. Marah will be playing the songs he's reflecting on in his stories. I'm still kicking myself for missing last month's double-billing of Ozomotli and Galactic. This will serve as salve.

Here'a an Op-Ed piece Nick Hornby did in the NYT on May 21, 2004 on Marah and the injustices of life:

NYT Op-Ed
Nick Hornby | 2004-05-21

LONDON- It's just before Christmas last year, and the Philadelphia rock 'n' roll
band Marah is halfway through a typically ferocious, chaotic and inspirational
set when the doors to the right of the stage burst open and a young man
staggers in, carrying most of a drum kit. My friends and I have the best seats
in the house, a couple of feet away from Marah's frontmen, Serge and Dave
Bielanko, but when the drummer arrives we have to move our table back to
make room for him. He's not Marah's drummer (the band is temporarily
without) but he's a drummer, and he owns most of a drum kit, and his
appearance allows the band to make an even more glorious and urgent racket
than they had managed hitherto. The show ends triumphantly, as Marah
shows tend to do, with Serge lying on the floor amid the feet of his public,
wailing away on his harmonica. This gig happens to be taking place in a pub
called the Fiddler's Elbow, in Kentish Town, north London, but doubtless
scenes like it are being played out throughout the world: a bar band, a pickup
drummer from an earlier gig, probably even the table-shifting. It's just that
three or four months earlier, Bruce Springsteen, a fan of the band, invited
the Bielanko brothers to share the stage with him at Giants Stadium for an
encore, and Marah will shortly release what would, in a world with ears, be
one of 2004's most-loved straight-ahead rock albums, "20,000 Streets Under
the Sky." These guys shouldn't be playing in the Fiddler's Elbow with a pickup
drummer. And they shouldn't be passing a hat around at the end of the gig,
surely? How many people have passed around the hat in the same year that
they appeared at Giants Stadium? Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Jon
Landau published his influential, exciting, career-changing, and subsequently
much derided and parodied article about Bruce Springsteen in The Real Paper,
an alternative weekly — the article that included the line "I saw rock 'n' roll
future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." I had never read the rest of it until
recently, and it remains a lovely piece of writing. It begins, heartbreakingly:
"It's four in the morning and raining. I'm 27 today, feeling old, listening to my
records and remembering that things were different a decade ago." I'm only
guessing here, but I can imagine there are a number of you reading this who
can remember what it was like to feel old at 27, and how it bears no
resemblance to feeling old at 37, or 47. And you probably miss records
almost as much as you miss being 27. It's hard not to think about one's age
and how it relates to rock music. I just turned 47, and with each passing year
it becomes harder not to wonder whether I should be listening to something
that is still thought of as more age appropriate — jazz, folk, classical, opera,
funeral marches, the usual suspects. You've heard the arguments a million
times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being
young, and if you're not young and you still listen to it, then you should be
ashamed of yourself. And finally I've worked out my response to all that: I
mostly agree with the description, even though it's crude, and makes no
effort to address the recent, mainly excellent work of Neil Young, Bob Dylan,
Robert Plant, Mr. Springsteen et al. The conclusion, however, makes no sense
to me any more. Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater
abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. (And not all young
people are lucky enough to be young. Think of those people at your college
who wanted to be politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I'm not
talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined faces, the washboard
stomachs, the hair. The young are welcome to all that — what would we do
with it anyway? I'm talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the
inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that
stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated these
feelings, and now that I'm older it stimulates them, but either way, rock 'n'
roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn't need exhilaration and a
sense of invincibility, even if it's only now and again? When I say that I have
found these feelings harder and harder to detect these last few years, I
understand that I run the risk of being seen as yet another nostalgic old
codger complaining about the state of contemporary music. And though it's
true that I'm an old codger, and that I'm complaining about the state of
contemporary music, I hope that I can wriggle out of the hole I'm digging for
myself by moaning that, to me, contemporary rock music no longer sounds
young — or at least, not young in that kind of joyous, uninhibited way. In
some ways, it became way too grown-up and full of itself. You can find plenty
that's angry, or weird, or perverse, or melancholy and world-weary; but that
loud, sometimes dumb celebration of being alive has got lost somewhere
along the way. Of course we want to hear songs about Iraq, and child
prostitution, and heroin addiction. And if bands see the need to use electric
drills instead of guitars in order to give vent to their rage, well, bring it on.
But is there any chance we could have the Righteous Brothers' "Little Latin
Lupe Lu" — or, better still, a modern-day equivalent — for an encore? In his
introduction to the Modern Library edition of "David Copperfield," the novelist
David Gates talks about literature hitting "that high-low fork in the road,
leading on the one hand toward `Ulysses' and on the other toward `Gone
With The Wind,' " and maybe rock music has experienced its own version.
You can either chase the Britney dollar, or choose the high-minded cult-rock
route that leads to great reviews and commercial oblivion. I buy that arty
stuff all the time, and a lot of it is great. But part of the point of it is that its
creators don't want to engage with the mainstream, or no longer think that
it's possible to do so, and as a consequence cult status is preordained rather
than accidental. In this sense, the squeaks and bleeps scattered all over the
lovely songs on the last Wilco album sound less like experimentation, and
more like a despairing audio suicide note. Maybe this split is inevitable in any
medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in
film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a
time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to
exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, "that high-low fork in the
road" is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting.
It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to
try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who
has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words,
who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but
that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of
seeming not only sincere and uncool — a stranger to all notions of
postmodernism — but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well. Marah may
well be headed for commercial oblivion anyway, of course. "20,000 Streets
Under the Sky" is their fourth album, and they're by no means famous yet, as
the passing of the hat in the Fiddler's Elbow indicates. But what I love about
them is that I can hear everything I ever loved about rock music in their
recordings and in their live shows. Indeed, in the shows you can often hear
their love for the rock canon uninflected — they play covers of the
Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," or the Jam's "In the City," and they
usually end with a riffed-up version of the O'Jays' "Love Train." They play an
original called "The Catfisherman" with a great big Bo Diddley beat, and they
quote the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the Who's "Magic Bus." And
they do this not because they're a bar band and people expect cover
versions, but because they are unafraid of showing where their music comes
from, and unafraid of the comparisons that will ensue — just as Bruce
Springsteen (who really did play "Little Latin Lupe Lu" for an encore,
sometimes) was unafraid. It was this kind of celebration that Jon Landau had
in mind when he said in his review that "I saw my rock 'n' roll past flash
before my eyes." For Mr. Landau, the overbearing self-importance of rock
music of the late 60's and early 70's had left him feeling jaded; for me, it's
the overbearing self-consciousness of the 90's. The Darkness know that we
might laugh at them, so they laugh at themselves first; the White Stripes
may be a blues band, but their need to exude cool is every bit as strong as
their desire to emit heat, and the calculations have been made accordingly:
there's as much artfulness as there is art. In truth, I don't care whether the
music sounds new or old: I just want it to have ambition and exuberance, a
lack of self-consciousness, a recognition of the redemptive power of noise, an
acknowledgment that emotional intelligence is sometimes best articulated
through a great chord change, rather than a furrowed brow. Outkast's
brilliant "Hey Ya!," a song that for a few brief months last year united races
and critics and teenagers and nostalgic geezers, had all that and more; you
could hear Prince in there, and the Beatles, and yet the song belonged
absolutely in and to the here and now, or at least the there and then of
2003. Both "Hey Ya!" and Marah's new album are roots records, not in the
sense that they were made by men with beards who play the fiddle and sing
with a finger in an ear, but in the sense that they have recognizable influences
— influences that are not only embedded in pop history, but that have been
properly digested. In the suffocatingly airless contemporary pop-culture
climate, you can usually trace influences back only as far as Radiohead, or
Boyz II Men, or the Farrelly Brothers, and regurgitation rather than digestion
would be the more accurate gastric metaphor. The pop music critic of The
Guardian recently reviewed a British band that reminded him — pleasantly, I
should add — of "the hammering drum machine and guitar of controversial
80's trio Big Black and the murky noise of early Throbbing Gristle." I have no
doubt whatsoever that the band he was writing about (a band with a name
too confrontational and cutting-edge to be repeated here) will prove to be
one of the most significant cultural forces of the decade, nor that it will
produce music that forces us to confront the evil and horror that resides
within us all. However, there is still a part of me that persists in thinking that
rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play in the
increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive. I'm not sure that
Throbbing Gristle and its descendants will ever pull that off, but the members
of Marah do, often. I hope they won't be passing around the hat by the end
of this year, but if they are, please give generously. Nick Hornby is the
author, most recently, of "Songbook."


It's Philly this time around. They're back home. Christmas is coming early.