Nowhere is this more evident than in rock ‘n’ roll – a genre that has at its best stuck to playing "three chords and the truth." (And, of course, wearing the right clothes and pouty expression.) With so much depending on charisma as much as chops and talent, why exactly a band works and becomes successful remains a mystery and unverifiable by science.
Talent or skill alone does not make a good band. Two reasons for this are: first, there’s always someone more talented than you (or at the very least someone to market them as such); and, second, talent and skill mean nothing if that’s all there is in the music. For industry analysts and mass entertainment people, it’s the "X factor" while the line of manqué pop stars populating the call centers might sour-grape and put it down to luck. The former is driven by money and need not be tackled for now. The latter is more interesting because, in short (and for a lack of a better term), it requires "magic."
Roll your eyes if you must, but all great bands will attest to it. To be worth a damn, every group should be more than the sum of its parts and what gives that extra dimension remains an uncertain quality. The phenomenon of the "superband" should elucidate this. Put simply, they will almost always fail to live up to expectations. Given the degrees and résumés of the musicians that make up the progressive outfit Dream Theater, it’s ironically unsurprising that all of their output is unlistenable. To a lesser degree, local band Cambio have a couple of good songs but remain an underachieving and lackluster enterprise considering that that band consists entirely of luminaries from the music scene and counts at least three proven songwriters among its lineup. But there are, of course, exceptions like the Eric Clapton-Jack Bruce-Ginger Baker trio Cream, or our own Bamboo that manage to transcend individualities and offer up something unexpected.
Curiouser even is the fact that a band like The Dorques needs only a single, proper musician to be best new pop group in the country. (Throwing someone like Jun Lopito, Louie Talan or Kakoi Legaspi in there would almost surely be ruinous.) If we were to push the example to its extreme, we need only consider an act like The Chenelins or upstarts like EAT TAE: both hardly have any virtues musically in the traditional sense (i.e., a firm grasp of rhythm, melody and form). However, the former plays effervescent guitar pop with a pulse that exposes the rote-rock of Spongecola, Hale and their ilk; the latter hardly gives a f**k and makes music no less compelling for that.
Where’s the justice in this? Obviously none. Despite the pseudo-religious mythmaking about immortality or the oxymoron that is "Christian Rock," rock ‘n’ roll is, at its core, atheistic, preoccupied with the ephemeral and a tad existential in its absurdity. This brings to mind a musician-friend who, after majoring in classical guitar and graduating from the UP College of Music could only find work for a time playing bass for a show band. They opened their sets with a rendition of the Baha Men’s mesocephalic hit Who Let the Dogs Out. It was depressing to note as the band ripped into the song that the last time I watched him play was his recital, where he rendered Nikita Koshkin’s Usher Waltz. This time, he even provided the backup vocals, providing the barks behind the band’s two singers. (Even worse, the next song was Buttercup.)
Still, it still has that allure the kind that attracts the visionaries and the charlatans alike to trespass into its minefield. The field is level anyone can carve a niche in the monolith of rock. Bringing power tools might help but somehow sleight-of-hand is more effective.
If Oprah can do it, so will we. This week we start a feature that spotlights a book or author that we highly recommend you check out. It has struck me that bookstores like Fully Booked carry a wide variety of titles that you don’t expect to be sold in Manila. At the Rockwell branch the other day I came across Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shepard’s Cult Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and decided to see how many of these authors I could find in the store. Every week from now I’ll feature one that you can find there.
If any contemporary author strikes us as firmly "rock ‘n’ roll" and of the present, it would be none other than Will Self. Primarily a satirist, his humor is cruel, absurdist and affecting despite its horrors. His entry in Cult Fiction: A Reader’s Guide describes him as a "Nouveau Jew" who after a "third-class degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford" devoted himself to heavy-duty drug use. His writing has themes that deal with psychiatry, insanity, prescription drugs, violence and sex. (He did walk out of Quentin Tarantino’s first two films because he found them disgusting.) In Cock and Bull, he presents two novellas: one wherein a man grows a vagina and another with a woman sprouting a penis. Still not hardcore enough? In 1997, he got caught snorting heroin on the Prime Minister’s plane to which he confessed and has since expressed regret. Not that he’s mellowed, as evidenced in his work since.