Independent Perspective News

Translation by Carolina Friszman.

Far from the grunge boom a decade ago, when Nirvana came into the scene, now there's the so-called retro rock, a return to the origins.

In the US, people have been organizing "Air guitar" contests. In them, the fans compete by imitating without any instrument (that's why "air") their favorite guitar player's movements when playing a solo. If there's an iconic cliché of rock, it's this. Those contortions and exaggerated gestures seem to reflect unique feelings that the fans envy and copy until they perfect them. The romantic myth of rock makes us believe that this is how the body and soul express in a direct way. (...) That's why every time we are announced that "Rock's back ", we can be sure that what's back is a semantic area that includes words such as "raw", "direct", "wild".

Today, in the year 2002, we are yet once again celebrating this eternal return. All to promote definitely retro bands such as the American The Strokes, White Stripes, And You Will Know Us by The Trail of Dead and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Swedish The Hives and the Australian The Vines.

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The Strokes' New Yorkers in their twenties, the best in the retro pack, went from nowhere to be in the covers of the main music magazines, and that was before their debut with Is This It (of which 600.000 copies have been sold in the US). It only takes a glance at the picture of Albert Hammond Jr.'s quintet to understand the "retro" about it: it looks like an image of the Ramones and Blondie's New York in the year 1977.

In times when electronic music goes back to the 80s, each of these groups is working on their own revival. The Strokes inspired in Television, Velvet Underground and Wire to create an burning dynamic that experiences situations of indolence and hypertension (...). White Stripes is a duo formed by an ex couple who call themselves siblings (drummer Meg White and guitar player Jack White). The paranoid fables that involve useless waits, rats and hotel rooms are a part of this "return to the origins" (blues, country) whose economy of resources is the only surprise.

And You Will Know Us by The Trail of Dead plays Replacements and/or Hüsker Dü twenty years later. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is a pathetic collage of Jesus & Mary Chain from the year 1989. The Hives goes back to Buzzcocks and the Stooges glam, while The Vines revise The Kinks via Nirvana. In other words, second hand rock. You hear from them a "C'' mon" and it sounds like a cliché, not like the interjection of an irrepressible impulse.

David Stubbs, from England, wrote: "The problem is that rock has already been a museum for twenty years, and if it wants to revisit its history it should be to make it blow like The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine or Nirvana. In Strokes there isn't a sense of kidnap or catastrophe, neither they represent a threat to the public order."

Today, when the teen pop loses its charm and needs credibility, the market invests in retro rock (the Hives were found by the multinational Universal and hired for U$S 10 million). And the press -with critics who never understood the hip hop, the electronic and the dance revolution- supports these bands that sound like the ones they used to listen to as teenagers, only to soften any real conflict between generations. Nothing about a punk attack. These bands respond as school students to the canons that mediums such as Rolling Stone, NME or Mojo have been promoting with their lists that go "The best records ever ". That's right, what's new is no news at all. And the young are old. What year is this again?