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photo by Sam Levin
A few weeks ago the NYC synthpunk band Balaclava played a gig in Baltimore. Maybe you read about it here, in Tim Kabara’s crucial weekly column ANYTHING FOR A WEIRD LIFE. They’re a good band. It was a good show. That’s not what this is about. It’s about a shirt Bala, the pseudonymous Balaclava frontman, wore during that set. A shirt that stridently reads KILL A GARAGE ROCKER FOR PUNK — a sentiment that at various points in my life I’ve agreed with, but one that provokes more than a little soul-searching. What even IS garage rock, and what’s wrong with it, anyway? Why are the punks out for garage rocker blood? Which side of the line do I fall on? And what’s up with this “garage punk” bullshit?
Here’s the deal: the ever-expanding spiral of discovery, regression, appropriation, dominance and abandonment that is the history of garage contains countless peaks and valleys, innumerable musical and cultural signifiers. It’s a monolith and it’s a slippery bitch. And for better or worse, I’ve spent most of my adult life falling in and out of love with it. But rather than taking this space to establish my ignominious garage punk bona fides, let’s start with the basics. Not a history or hagiography or even the sound (those will come later), but the IDEA. What makes garage GARAGE?
At its core garage is a sensibility, an approach, a VIBE. And beyond all its other signifiers, it’s likely that vibe that makes the genre contentious. While there are plenty of complicating factors we’ll consider later, garage is rocknroll’s raging id, guitar music stripped down to its most rudimentary chord progressions and hamfisted melodies, rapid-fire blues about girls, parties and self-destruction. It’s Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly going on a bender. It’s the sound of the middle class in decline, tracing a path from fraternity house basements and suburban garages to the displaced working classes of deindustrialized cities like Detroit and Memphis. It’s a dance beat for horny teenagers. It’s bad music for bad people. It’s dumb as shit and it fuckin’ rules.
Garage is a semiconscious exercise in balancing competing musical priorities. While proudly degenerate, dissolving the glossy excesses of mainstream guitar music back into the primordial ooze of rock & roll, it also portends new developments in the genre — or even new genres entirely — in a reset that creates a new foundation for that which is to come, and eventually to be deposed once again. It is reactive AND proactive, a controlled burn that occasionally escapes containment.
And so I present a theory: THEE GARAGE WAVE FUNCTION, where rock & roll, having been mainstreamed and glossified, gets stripped down to its barest essentials before cycling through phases of experimentation, intensity, sophistication — and, invariably, synthesizers — before arriving again at pop. Garage begets punk begets the next big thing begets garage again, over and over and over.
Back to Bala’s shirt, and why I like it even though it spurred this overthought apologia. Bands like Balaclava exist at a crux in musical evolution — which these days happens at speed, the waves crashing down on top of each other. And based on the sound of the band itself — and their bandcamp tags — they’re as aware of this as anybody. In fact (and I know how far this lede is buried), this shirt is official merch from garage prodigy Ty Segall, and is itself based on a shirt pictured on the cover of the Oblivians’ 1996 album POPULAR FAVORITES, which reads KILL A PUNK FOR ROCK & ROLL. When you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. When you become the Buddha, keep your head on a swivel.
photo by Marty Perez
Digging deep into something rich with meaning, expertly crafted and assembled in a dizzying monument to human creativity is all well and good, but you know going into it that’s what you’re SUPPOSED to get out of it. Nobody goes into ULYSSES blind. Everybody knows SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND is a meticulously constructed creative masterpiece. But you know what’s even better? Finding meaning in something that insists upon its own meaninglessness. Garage, in its studied stupidity and enthusiastic regression, doesn’t speak to your brain — it speaks to your hips, your feet, your fucking balls. It is the physical truth of 20th-century guitar music. It IS art because it strives so desperately to be anything BUT art. And of course its blank slate nature makes it all the more ripe for over-intellectualization; here I am explicating a fucking inside joke.
It is good to love and create dumb things. Not ironically, not “so bad it’s good,” but because humans just need to be dumb sometimes. Our basest urges are still OUR urges, after all, and ignoring them only makes them stronger. It’s better to be who you are than who you think you ought to be. And it’s a lot easier to enjoy something silly or stupid or crude when you don’t have self-seriousness whispering in your ear that you’re above all this. Enjoy earnestly and with a sense of humor and you’ll be a better person for it.
That brings us to the end of DOCUMENT #000 of this Garage Punk Dossier, a file that will grow over the coming months as I dig deeper into the cyclically robbed grave that is garage, exploring its history, touchstones and music in all its many iterations. I am no high priest of the genre, but rather a common layman. By no means definitive, this effort nonetheless may serve the curious and the faithful in their own paths up and down Thee Wave.
