testing2 by Crystal Brusch

The Quietus Steven Wells

Contents 1

self-loving, knock-kneed, passive aggressive, dressed-up-inkiddy-clothes, mock-pop-creepiness peddling, smug, underachieving, real-pop-hating no-talents celebrating their own inadequacy

7 a beige coloured and willfully underachieving fan/muso mutual masturbation industry thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been slowly and dismally choking on its own vomit for years

itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a crime that a naked Sting and a naked Sir Paul McCartney arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hauled around a never-ending loop-tour of US Starbucks where, every night, the two old fools are fed amphetamines and raw meat

This is the start of American music taking over, argued a reader from an alternate dimension not entirely dissimilar to our own, but where rockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;roll was invented in Croydon in 1995

if you don't like everything the Beatles ever did apart from some of the filler on the White album then you have the cocks of 50 corpses in your mouth

reality is the base metal anchor that keeps us mired in the fetid shite of the mediocre. I'm an empire, I make my own fucking reality.

23 trapped in a dementoDisneyfied post-modern Frankensteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s monster version of the subculture he helped invent

vast hordes of lighter waving, titexposing, drooling, overweight and corn syrup addled human dung beetles eating up the shit thrown at them by the rock music industry with a gusto that borders on the disgusting

that's me virtually stamping on your virtual head until your virtual brains leak out your virtual nostril. With my cosmic Skinheed from the fourth issue of Viz sized pop-powered steel-toecaped 19-holer DMs

50 53

to save you the trouble of bending over backwards and twisting logic like a demented semi-sentient spastic pretzel in a Twister competition to defend your hero, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve done it for you

The world stands, yet again, on the brink of the nuclear war, while simultaneously frying, blowing, flooding and burning to a premature end. How do twee band respond? By jumping up and down, shouting 'Yay!' and drinking Cherryade.

Los Campesinos! FIRST

the

AGAINST WALL

T.W.A.T.

(The War Against Twee)

Swells is unimpressed. "Dad, it’s some old English cunt!" screams my six-year-old daughter Tracey Trotsky Spinoza Jones. "It’s three in the fucking morning," I grunt, grabbing the phone. "It’s only six months since the 14legged abortion that is Los Campesinos! released their first abomination," roars Quietus editor John ‘Duran’ Doran on the line from London, England, "and now they’re already about to release their second album." He weeps as he speaks, and within seconds I am weeping too.

The world teeters on the brink of World War fucking three and Los Campesinos! — an exercise in reverse engineered paedophilia — are relaunching their Frankenstein's monster twee revival showband with a new fucking album and a tour entitled Wet Yr Bed — presumably a

Suburban jungle warfare

fair warning to the UK's groupies that this is what’ll happen if you take one of Los Campesinos! home. I’m sorry, I misread that, the tour’s called Shred Yr Face. Which appears to a glassing reference. Which makes no fucking sense at all. Last month Jilted John reformed himself. This made me hard. It made me yearn for the return of Plastic Bertrand on the condition that he only perform ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ It made me nostalglitoggle the Television Personalities ‘Part Time Punks’ and The Members ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ on my punk pathetique packed i-pod. But what it didn’t make me do is yearn for a twee revival. Are you fucking listening, Pitchfork’s Nitsuh Abebe? Nitsuh used to be a hero of mine. He once defined twee as "Undramatic kids (who) saw an opportunity to make music as themselves, for themselves: regular middle-class white kids in plain clothes, not especially sexy, not exactly musically brilliant, and more often sad than angry." Which I thought was as damning an explanation for the existence of these boring, unsexy and stupendously dull Paddington Bear’s tiny furry cocksucking cunts as I’d ever read. Indeed I thought it an even better put down than John Doran’s splenetic "how does sucking your thumb

and listening to the Field Mice combat sexism anyway? Fucking blinkered appeasers. Who the fuck sings songs about running out of cherryade at a party anyway? They're all in their late 20s and the world is about to end. Kill them. Kill them all." Or Tracy Trotsky Spinoza Jones’ comment that "twee is a way to make dull, uninteresting and suburban people feel good about themselves." Or indeed my own description of the loathsome Belle and Sebastian and their irritating paedo-pop ilk as "self-loving, knock-kneed, passive aggressive, dressed-up-in-kiddyclothes, mock-pop-creepiness peddling, smug, underachieving, real-pop-hating no-talents celebrating their own inadequacy with music so white it’s translucent." Imagine my shock when the aforementioned Mr. Nitsuh Abebe got in touch to say that—while he stood by his original quote about how twee had basically skullfucked punk’s original DIY aesthetic to death with its rank cowardice—this was, in his opinion, a good thing. This provoked a flurry of correspondence which ended only when I ascertained that Mr. Abebe is American and that therefore listening to his comments about twee — as erudite as they were — was a little like getting advice on the correct way to play cricket from a Martian.

Not only does Mr. Abebe think dressing up like a simpering ninny from some 1930’s jolly hockeysticks, barely-disguised kiddy-fiddler wank fantasy is a good thing, he also — in an article that is considered by many to be the definitive piece of writing on the twee phenomenon on Pitchfork — traced the gangrenous genre back to The Television Personalities. Fuck off. The Television Personalities (and their alter egos The O Levels) were not twee. The clue is in the fact that they didn’t suck. They didn’t simper. They didn’t peddle a drainedof-all-ideology, passive-aggressive, un-analysed and hideously ill-defined porridge of cringe-worthy pederasty, noxious nostalgia, oblique poetastery, tuneless fax-pop, bourgeois arrogance (posturing as DIY separatism) and right-wing anti-proletarian middle-class smugness (posturing as anti-macho anti-sexism). Was twee ever genuinely radical? Was it ever anything more than a cowardly retreat from subversion, empowerment and experimentation into a nauseatingly reactionary paedo-aesthetic? Surprisingly, yes it was—for about 5 minutes. In Olympia, Washington State in 1984, a young man called Calvin Johnson decides to rip the piss out of the brutally macho, one-dimensional, throw-the-baby-out-with-thebathwater straight white male

travesty that is American hardcore punk with a superlimp pissrippery called Beat Happening — the first American twee band. Beat Happening make also-on-thebill Henry Rollin’s superbly muscled head hurt. He stares at this abomination like a confused dog. He screams abuse. He reaches up and grabs Johnson’s cock—at which point Johnson deigns to notice him, looks down at Rollins and says: "Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?" (It’s in the book Our Band Could Be Your Life.) But, as Joe Strummer never wrote: "Those who fuck with nuns will later dress up like seven year olds in a way that is creepy without ever being fun." Twee is a frequently reoccurring herpes virus under the foreskin of the popcock and Los Campesinos! are the weeping sore. Unless measures are taken to stop them I predict a full-blown twee pandemic by the end of the decade. So the only question is — what are YOU going to do in The War Against Twee (TWAT?) I myself will be breaking into the homes of all eight members of Los Campesinos while they are away on tour and urinating in their empty beds. And placing razor blades in the orifices of their suspiciously life-sized teddy bears. It’s the only language they understand.

Swells on Topshop Playlisting The Rotted

Topshop, popular outfitter to the nation's youth, have recently added malignant grindcore types The Rotted to their instore playlist.

In 1997 David Bowie flogged $55 million worth of 10-year bonds backed by his album sales. These bonds are now worth fuck all. Tramps use them for toilet paper. Hurrah. The scam that this is the music industry is being gang-raped in every orifice by millions of baggy-trousered cybermonkeys. Economists reckon that by the year 2013 these stripey-jumpered virtual burglars will have stolen all our money back and spent it on lap dances and sweets. This is undoubtedly a good thing. But what about all the slack arsed chancers who blagged their way into the music industry and are now facing the screaming fucking nightmare of having to get real jobs? I feel their pain. I do really. I had a job once. For three months in 1977 I worked in Morrisons supermarket in Bradford, stacking potatoes. It was fucking murder. And so I feel obliged to suggest some new music industry jobs that desperately need doing but are currently not being done.

Swells explains why this means he should have been an A&R man, rather than working in Morrisons, back in '77 their task is to shout: “It’s just pop music, you pretentious cunt,” and punch him really hard in the back of the head. 2) It’s a crime that a naked Sting and a naked Sir Paul McCartney aren’t being hauled around a never-ending loop-tour of US Starbucks where, every night, the two old fools are fed amphetamines and raw meat and cattle-prodded into fighting with blunt knives with Sting wearing Spock ears and Sir Paul in a rubber William Shatner mask, with that Star Trek fight music blasting out of Motorhead sized speaker stacks. Just think of the jobs this menagerie could provide, not least to the former A&R men one can imagine sweeping up the blood and shit smeared straw.

1) Someone to stand onstage behind Thom Yorke. Every time he looks like he’s getting all angsty or existential, 3) Someone could be hired to sit next

P op ess Pr i n c

to whoever the person is on the Starbucks board who sticks up their hand and says: “I know, why don’t we carry the new Coldplay/Sting/Paul McCartney/James Hunter/Alanis Morissette/SonicYouth albums and then play a looped mixtape of their combined inoffensive beige doodlings over the tannoy, or PA as we call it here in America?”

The new employee’s task would be to then hit that board member with a baseball bat, just hard enough to break their arm, and then say (speaking quite loudly to be heard over the screaming): “What my colleague meant to say was we should play the band Rotted (formerly Gorerotted)"authors of such coffee-

Ri gh B a b e t eo u s played by Belle and Sebastian as a warm up before they get down to some serious kick-ass passive aggressive mock pop. Which means someone at Topshop bottled the chance to blast the track ’It’s Like There’s A Party In My Mouth (And Everyone’s Being Sick)’ at that oh-so-crucial treats-buying-knickers-as-a-leisureactivity demographic. Or could ’A Brief Moment of Regret’ be the tiny but well lubricated thin end of the most enormous industrial jackhammer-powered fuck wedge? Soon you’ll hear ’Only Tools and Corpses’ in Homebase, ’Zombie Graveyard Rape’ in Anne Summers, and ’Kissing you With My Fists’ in Boots. And it won’t stop there. Some

ex-Bradford Cathedral choirboy wins Pop Idol with a falsetto cover of Cannibal Corpses’ ’Rotted Body Landslide’. Howard the geek from NatWest charms us all by selling mortgages to the tune of ’Vomiting the Fetal Embryo’ by Dying Fetus, while Carcass’ ’Vomited Anal Tract’ becomes the new national anthem (74,000 England fans pack Wembley, bulldoggish tears in their eyes, hands on their pounding lionhearts, all passionately singing: “Liquidized oesophagus mixes with bloodied excretion / As you pathetically gasp for breath/ The stench of hot faeces scorch your nose / As you violently vomit to death |” and so forth. The sheer tantric power of their concentrated patriotism actually causing the watch-

ing Queen to actually vomit her anal today’s Starbucks who have to listen tract which is to torn to bits and eaten to the worst loop tape ever made by corgis. Live on TV). (while smiling politely at Morrissey fan customers who, while in no way Oh no, I’ve held it off long enough, racist, are prone to loudly express the her it comes: OBLIGATORY OLD opinion that the baristas, with their FART THERE’S-NOTHING-NEW “vile” foreign accents, are underminUNDER-THE-SUN PUNK ANEC- ing the unique culture of England) DOTE, JUST TO PISS OFF but mad enough that I wasn’t ever EVERYONE UNDER FORTY. going to be offered a job in the music industry. It’s summer 1977 and I’m working my arse of in Morrisons supermarket in Which is cultural tragedy. Had I been Bradford, England. Every two weeks made A&R Czar at the age of 18 and some godforsaken Muzak Corpora- been given unlimited emergency tion clone company sends Morrisons power, almost none of the shit bands an updated mock-muzak version of you like would ever have been signed. the current top 20 that sounds like it’s I could have kicked indie to death in sung by Christian eunuchs on valium. its cot. I could have chased it back into the womb, ripped the egg and This is played on a continual loop, 12 sperm apart and forbidden them hours a day, every day. from ever co-joining again. Which in turn would have made you less of a This particular week the top 20 con- pop-hating cloth-eared cunt and the tains ’God Save the Queen’ by The world a much nicer place. Sex Pistols, ’Gary Gilmore’s’ Eyes by the Adverts, and ’Peaches’ by The Curse you. Morrisons. Only two letStranglers. ters away from Morrissey, the Lord Voldemort of shit pop. Coincidence? “Gary don’t need his eyes to see, Gary (All the Sub-Pop employees and many and his eyes have parted company” of its band members worked for the billycoos the PA, or Tannoy as we call real Muzak Corporation in Seattle. it in England. One of them, Kurt Cobain from the band Nirvana, would later get so irraFor the first 345 times this is quite tionally depressed " despite the fact shocking (post modernism hasn’t that he had all the dosh, drugs and even been invented yet, we literally swimming pools full of gold tits that have no defences). Then it gets bor- anyone could ever ask for " that he ing. And then, at around play 9,458, it blew his pretty brains out with a shotquite literally drives me mad. Not gun. That’s the power of muzak.) It’s quite as mad as those poor cunts in all connected man, it’s all connected.

DEATH TO COR DUROY

Dulll American music mags are dying in droves, and Steven Wells cares not one jot. Hark as he dances around the bonfire in joy...

OMG it’s the indie mags. Man, it’s some kinda horrible virus. They’re lying in piles in the corners. Shaking like shitting dogs, coughing up their vile pink froth corrupted lungs. It’s horrid, absolutely horrid. It’s as if some hideous mass-murdering heavy metal psychopath had concocted an air-borne virus that only killed those who like unchallenging and comfortably conservative guitar music made by white guys. Oh the horror. Oh the humanity. What’s on TV? Be serious. Show some empathy. Middle of the middle of the middle of the road US indie music mag Harp (slogan: “For nice chaps with beards, by nice chaps with beards” ) has just double-dropkicked itself in its own incredibly unremarkable and unmemorable face and dropped down dead. Oh no. Harp is the third unreadable and entirely interchangeable US indie print mag to traumatically poop its hand-knitted cheesecloth colostomy pants in as many months. January and February saw the demise of the spectacularly interestingly named No Depression and Resonance magazines. Both, like Harp, not so much the spunky young inheritors of the revolutionspewing underground press of the late 60s and early 70s, as part of a beige coloured and willfully underachieving fan/muso mutual mastur-

bation industry that’s been slowly and dismally choking on its own vomit for years. Imagine all those whining epsilons who have"over the decades"bemoaned the fact that music journalism isn’t more “about the music,” imagine if those idiots actually started their own magazines. Dude, they did. Imagine a music press without hate, bile, anger, wit, imagination or attitude. Congratulations, you’ve just imagined Harp and No Depression and Resonance and Paste. Actually Paste is still going. There’s a magazine called Paste. Christ but that’s depressing. Then there's Beige, Corduroy, Bland, Blend, Blah, Pah, Meh, Huh, Mush, Fridge, Magnet, Carpet, Desk and Whatever. There really is a mag called Corduroy. I might have made some of the others up. I imagine "corduroy" came up at an early brainstorming meeting. "What is corduroy exactly?"

"It’s those horrible beige trousers worn by sad bastards who look like they’re still dressed by their mothers. People like us, in other words." "Awesome." Founder Scott Crawford recently described Harp as “a nice middle ground between the indie-centric Magnet and the dad-rockin' Paste”. That sound you hear is the disgusted ghosts of the surrealists, futurists and dadaists spinning out of their graves and converging on the Harp farewell party with flaming torches and gasoline soaked tires. The death of Harp fills me with joy. I wrote for them for about a month. They paid fuck all and they cut the line "Joe Strummer must be laughing his rotting cock off" because it was "disrespectful". Then they sacked the fool who commissioned me. We’re talking security guards armed with garbage bags. Irreverence had inadvertently been allowed into the magazine and was now being efficiently expelled.

All these dead and dying magazines have one thing in common - they all hold that the journalist is the servant of the musician. And that the writing is in and of itself without worth. Thus this cull is a good thing. But it does not go far enough. Music journalism needs to be scoured by the righteous, flaming sword of God. Fan-journalists need to be driven from their stiff tissue filled pits, blinking into the sunlight, where they are set upon by gangs of teenage girls armed with insouciance, rocket propelled grenades, AK-47s and attack dogs. This is not a solution. The willfully insipid will always be with us. They will use the internet as both platform and mutual support system. They will thrive and multiply like maggots. I merely argue we should organise and torture and murder them for fun, and be proud of our sport.

Glastonbu ry Black Sky Thinking

: Aryan Fo lk Festival