Thomas Scott (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} thomascott) wrote,@ 2008-04-26 18:46:00 |
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The Correct Use Of Self-Loathing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazi
Relative to the artistic merit of the music they produced Magazine must be one of the most undervalued of all the post-punk/new wave bands that emerged in the late seventies.
I could never quite fathom just why exactly they did not received the kudos they deserved, but I surmise that it was because they were just too cerebral, too ober-literate, too avant-garde to dovetail in with much of the numbwitted, rebellion-by-numbers conformity of the mainstream post-punk scene.
Take for example 'A Song From Under The Floorboards', the closer on their 1980 album 'The Correct Use Of Soap'.
I normally hate songs about self-loathing as they usually tend toward a maudlin, humourless, ultra-mundane mewling that is so inherently solipsistic as to be the exactly the same thing as self-vaunting ego-parading.
Devoto's self-loathing is - by counter - laced with barbed humour, with scabrous irony and with a knowing self-parody that make the song actually quite edifying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazi
Relative to the artistic merit of the music they produced Magazine must be one of the most undervalued of all the post-punk/new wave bands that emerged in the late seventies.
I could never quite fathom just why exactly they did not received the kudos they deserved, but I surmise that it was because they were just too cerebral, too ober-literate, too avant-garde to dovetail in with much of the numbwitted, rebellion-by-numbers conformity of the mainstream post-punk scene.
Take for example 'A Song From Under The Floorboards', the closer on their 1980 album 'The Correct Use Of Soap'.
I normally hate songs about self-loathing as they usually tend toward a maudlin, humourless, ultra-mundane mewling that is so inherently solipsistic as to be the exactly the same thing as self-vaunting ego-parading.
Devoto's self-loathing is - by counter - laced with barbed humour, with scabrous irony and with a knowing self-parody that make the song actually quite edifying.
