A spooooooky Halloween to all you rockers! Vampires are still boffo box office, and werewolves have been getting some lovin' of late, but it's zombies that rule the day. Rock Zombies.
I suppose it stems from the necessary, juvenile bent of the rock genre. Unlike blues, jazz, bluegrass, hip-hop, and so on, which get by with fluid combos and ever-changing combinations of players, rock n' roll has always traded on the image of the band as a unit/ gang/ family identifier. Them's the rules. It's a fine line for band to walk, and it can make for a good ride, but forestalling evolution or extinction is always going to fail in the end (not to mention that it's an absolutely unnatural state of being). What's it gonna be?: Evolution, extinction or that grey land in between?
Your average zombie band, of course, doesn't know it's dead. It walks on past its prime and slogs through decline, stumbling onward but rarely forward. REM announces retirement. World shrugs. Other bands such as the Pixies die perfectly respectable, natural deaths (see also Pavement, X, Camper van Beethoven, etc) only to later rise from the grave in response to some mysterious call (usually that's the money talking). They might, deep down, understand that they're not gonna be flowering back to full life anytime soon, but can manage to ride the cultural mojo for some fun and a cash grab (or several) and maybe make an event (as is now de rigueur) of playing the seminal album(s) in its entirety. That sack of flesh rarely can it tuck itself in, straighten up and make some "valid" new music, whatever that is but I guess that, in the right light, it doesn't really matter to me, so long as whoever's playing is actually, as they say up here in Boston, "puttin' some haaaaaaahht into it". I can love me a zombie just fine. I'm a guy who can watch those PBS fund-raising oldie-fests for quite a while.
Lord knows where that leaves Buttsteak and the Haggises Five, living dead-wise. Feasting on the flesh of rock zombies perhaps? As ever, I suppose. We were sodden carrion -pickers from the start, so I say "Huzzah"! Hoist a glass and gnaw some bones!
Driver 8:
Here Comes Your Man:
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