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Monday, August 18, 2008
I'M A ROCKET
Spinout
Delicious Vinyl : 1991
Spinout
[Buy It]
ROCKET TO NOWHERE
Mike Rep and The Quotas
Rocket to Nowhere/Quasar 7"
Moxie : 1978
Out of Print
SEVENTEEN
Rocket From The Tombs
1975
Available on The Day The Earth Met Rocket From The Tombs
Morphius Records : 2002
[Buy It]
ROCKET USA
Suicide
Red Star : 1977
Suicide
[Buy It]
STARSHIP
Spacemen 3
Space Age Recordings : 2003
Forged Prescriptions
[Buy It]
ROCKET MACHINE
Opal
SST : 1987
Happy Nightmare Baby
[Buy It]
SPACE COWBOY
Spinout
Delicious Vinyl : 1991
Spinout
[Buy It]
NUCLEAR WAR
Sun Ra
1982
Available on Nuclear War
Atavistic Records : 2001
[Buy It]
"Rock n roll comes from outer space." I woke up this morning with this refrain, from an unknown scuzzy garage-rock song, cycling through my head and thought...so it does. Doesn't it? Ziggy Stardust, Sun Ra, the Mothership. These are pieces of a familiar iconography, an iconography of a familiar strangeness. Insofar as the history of rock music is parallel to that of teenaged alienation, the trope makes sense. Shy kids put on feathers, platforms, glitter masks. They announce themselves as stars, collapse thermodynamic and nihilistic power into their very band names, perhaps even declare themselves, like Herman Poole Blount aka Sun Ra, extraterrestrial. They exaggerate their awkwardness into an advantage. Except maybe there's another reason, maybe the history of rock music also parallels that of modern hysteria. Tell me those people screaming for, or at, the Beatles at Shea Stadium were doing so on the basis of music alone. (If so, surely Duke Ellington--say--was exciting enough to prompt a similar response, although he didn't.) That particular frequency, that shrillness splitting the stadium air, has always seemed to me a Nuclear Age, a Cold War-era response. Now that the Cold War's ended, maybe, the screaming continues since the menace never really went away. But I was always a space cadet, myself, ridiculed as such when I was a teenager, obsessed with planets from a much younger age. And I might never be a star, in my own field or any other, but I remain attached to the iconography. And to the sound, forever dirty, that goes with it. Listen to the hopeless pulse-n-throb of Suicide, say, or the lunar grind of Opal. Fly me to the moon...Labels: Matthew, punk, space
posted by Matthew
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