Simon Reynolds

‘Serious rock’ has never been so white, mainstream pop so black, so exclusively based in R&B, soul and disco.

Green once described the music of indie groups like The Smiths as ‘racist’, and, in a sense, he’s right – there’s a hopeless lack of exchange or communication between hip white rock and black pop.

The irony is that these indie hipsters tend to be more politically aware than most, more keen to align themselves with anti-racism, yet are totally estranged from black culture.

Moreover, latent in our indie scene are ideas that echo the concerns of the sexual/psychoanalytical politics of the sixties. The flirtation with androgyny and camp, the prevalence of love songs with genderless love objects and free of fixed sexual protocol, the defence of sensitivity and ‘the wimp’, the refusal of performance-oriented sex – all these connect not just with feminism but with radical psychoanalysis’s project of a return to the ‘polymorphous perversity’ of the child (an undirected and limitless sensuality).

In The Smiths, for instance, the refusal of maturity is as much a rejection of the strictures of adult sexuality as of work.

If The Smiths had only produced sunny, cuddly stuff like ‘Heaven Knows’, ‘Ask’, ‘Vicar in a Tutu’, they would have merely presaged the perky negligibility of The Housemartins, the sound that grins itself to death.

All year, the US alternative scene has been dominated by bands who take their cues from the early seventies, when groups like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Mountain, etc. bastardized and brutalized the blues.

As one real-life teenager in the book says, ‘no job is worth cutting your hair for’.

Even after Bill Clinton’s victory, things look bleak for American youth. Paying off the deficit will depress the US economy for years. So you can expect to hear US bands singing the ‘born to lose’ blues for a long time to come.

Like a clapped-out stretch limo cranked in reverse, today’s ‘alternative rock’ is synonymous with a retreat to one of a number of period genres from rock history. For Primal Scream think Exile on Main Street-era Stones. For Suede think Ziggy-phase Bowie. In 1994, just six short years from a new millennium, this is where the money is at: in the musical equivalent of reproduction antiques.