Many others, like Bruce, had no such trouble. I’ll allow that it is a wonderful and important thing to define and document a subculture, but I lacked the will to project myself and my adolescent concerns into mod London. Oh, sure, I liked about half of Sound Affects and happily spun “ Town Called Malice” when the dance floor needed filling, but I am mostly grateful to the band for having had the taste to cover, and thus introduce me to, the ChiLites “ Stoned Out of My Mind.” (Was this, in effect, the first Style Council single?) I recognize the craft and the passion of Weller’s songs for the Jam, but frankly his concerns were often so parochial that he made the Anglocentric songs of the brothers Davies seem positively universal. I never got the Jam-not really and despite some effort. For another stripe of music fan, it would have been like Joe Strummer breaking up the Clash to start a Serge Gainsbourg tribute band. So he had a hard time with the fact that the creator of the razor sharp songs he esteemed above most others could suddenly be producing airy, neosoul bagatelles. He may never have uttered the word, but hanging over his head was an acid green thought bubble containing the word, “sellout.” Bruce had a Mosaic sense of pop ethics, and when he came down from the mountaintop with a judgment, he was not inclined to revision. When Style Council came out with its first record, Bruce, the biggest Jam fan I knew, shook his head sadly.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |