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Well with the exception of the Babyshambles record, which was not so good, the music's ... all right, I suppose. There are a few genuinely good songs spread across the two Libertines albums, I'd say ('Radio America,' 'I Get Along,' 'What A Waster,' etc, although almost everyone I know IRL would disagree with that statement, forcefully,) and even their weaker stuff seems to chug along quite pleasantly in the background if you're doing something else, be it the dishes, the garden, or, er, 'horse.'
But, and this I think is at least part of the problem that people have with Pete and co, a lot of the appeal seems to be to do with something other than the music, per se. What The Libertines, and especially Pete D and his crazy antics arguably hark back to is a time, pre Napster, pre I-pod I guess - how I hate those things - when pop was a lot more personality driven, when you, as a fan, wouldn't just worry about what a band sounded like, but what they looked like, what they said in interviews and so on. What they *stood for,* in other words, although it is a bit suspect in the case of The Libs. It's no good dealing with a crack person at four in the morning, for example, and that's why my grandson is where he is.
So the way music is consumed these days is possibly a lot more healthy, in that I suppose a lot of the time, with the declining influence of the NME and such, and the sort of pick'n' mix approach that the new technology purportedly facilitates, bands tend to get judged on the last good thing they did, and don't seem to be able to inspire the same amount of brand loyalty that they could at one point - As late as the very late Nineties, you'd go off and buy the new 'band X' album out of a sense of obligation almost, even though you knew it was probably going to be awful, and it usually was. And you'd feel like a fool for being suckered again.
Nowadays that seems to happen far less often - if you can download the best tracks on an album off of the internet, and use them as a soundtrack to your own personal movie, why bother with all the extraneous detail? Similarly, if you're not going to have to read about 'band X's' bird-witted opinions, or worse still, look at the photos in the music papers (this, I appreciate, may seem very strange to people under 25, or from the States,) everything else becomes secondary to the songs.
In Pete's case though, and really, that's who we're talking about - I'm not sure if anyone's interested in Carl from The Libertine's new album - the music itself seems a bit by-the-by. I suppose a relevant comparisson might be Shane McGowan. In spite of sixteen years of glaring evidence to the contrary, and a reputation, in any case, that's only based on five or six songs, at least one of which was a cover, McGowan is still feted about the place as a poet and a genius. I doubt he's stood his own round since the early Nineties, and he certainly hasn't recorded anything all that, all that, since, but it doesn't seem to matter. There was that indefinable essence of poetry, I guess, to a few of the tunes on Shane's two decent albums, in spite of all the filler, and the same seems to apply to Jim Morrisson, and also to Pete, it appears. God only knows how he managed it really, but Doherty seems to have got to the point where he's Chatterton-esque, (sp, poss) and I suppose everyone loves that.
('Up The Bracket' is polly worth buying, Vincennes, it's more than the sum of it's parts, but, on the other hand, you have to listen to it for a while.) |
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