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Shreds
(This is the fourth installment of the Thing About 2007 In Arbitrary Order series, which has appeared at intervals on Glued On Horns.)
Say what you will, Pitchfork is still good for a few things. At the very least they seem to employ columnists with heads on their shoulders, though I’ll take pains to avoid speaking to the actual content of their writing or the questionable nature of some of their opinions. To get particular and complimentary, though, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Tom Ewing’s “Poptimist” column is consistently one of the best reads in the increasingly shit colored sea of internet music journalism. In September he hit the nail on the head in regards to the Cadbury Phil Collins Gorilla commercial that was all the rage at the time.
The drum moment in “In the Air Tonight” is, much like a gorilla sitting at a drumkit, incongruous and showy and absurd and powerful and violent and crude and pathetic, all at once. But if you had been a critic, writing about Phil Collins, and had said something like, “He smashes at the drums like an unleashed gorilla,” it would not have worked. The reader would only have picked up on one part— the unleashed-ness or the gorilla-ness (i.e. the power and violence), and ignored the fact that the animal is sitting at a drumkit (i.e. the showiness and absurdity).
For these reasons and more, Ewing goes so far as to say that the Cadbury commercial is, “one of the year’s best pieces of music criticism”. I’m totally on board as far as the commercial being an exemplary piece of criticism, and judging by recent statements made on this particular site, I would reckon that I am not alone here.
My views diverge from Ewing’s, in fact, only in that I believe there are greater examples readily at hand for the sort of criticism he’s talking about. The gorilla ad certainly is one of the year’s best pieces of music criticism, but StSanders’s “shreds” series is the best.
Since “Eric Clapton Shreds” is there for all to see at the bottom of this post, I’ll assume you’ve either seen one of the videos in question prior to your reading of this article, that you took a break in the article to scroll down and watch the video, or you don’t care and will leave it to me to convince you, from here out, to watch the video. Or that sentence turned you off entirely, and now you’re off to do something else and good riddance to you.
What’s great about “shreds” isn’t that they are produced well enough to fool even actual musicians (even actual musicians! fuck!) into thinking they’re authentic, and it isn’t the fact, alone, that they are funny and make people laugh. I’ll admit that I laughed harder the first time I watched “Eric Clapton Shreds” than I have in a very long time because who’s the asshole who has something to lose by admitting that something is funny? What’s great about these videos has to do with the fact that they’re funny, and I guess it has to do with the fact that they are well made, but it has more to do with why they’re funny. Very little is funny for the same reasons that the “shreds” videos are funny.
I didn’t come here to proclaim a new age of comedy or a new age of music criticism, but I will say that StSanders is on to something here whether he realizes it or not. It’s pretty easy to note that by putting horribly dissonant amateurish playing in the hands of Slash, Steve Vai, and other great “virtuoso” rock guitarists, StSanders is bringing guitar gods down off of Olympus and providing a platform from which 13-year-old kids (or, unfortunately, actual adults) can see them as actual people who play guitars that look and sound basically like the guitars they have and, believe it or not, sound similar to how they sound when they try to play the guitar. Some people would say that the videos “make Carlos Santana look like an asshole”, which is basically correct because I think what they mean is that it makes Carlos Santana sound like them. This alone is praiseworthy and hilarious — though judging from YouTube comments, it can also cause the sort of also the sort of enlightenment, or perhaps disillusionment, that leads to denial and anger (ex. “Metallica rules!”). While it is always good to resist the impulse, one has the urge to call these videos “punk rock”, in respect to their ability to level the playing field, exalt the lowly and make the rough places plain.
The real power of these videos, though, isn’t at heart in their status as ethical, ideological, musical, or comedic statements, but in the way they fuck with your head. The most brilliant thing StSanders did with these videos was eliminate extraneous noise. No effort was made to duplicate the sound of a full band, even when a full band would obviously have been playing in the original clip. What you hear is what you see only, and sometimes less. Sound becomes something visual, and in that sense, these are maybe some of the first totally legitimate “music videos”. There is no such thing as music in these videos, there is only sound as created as a result of the activity explicitly represented in the videos. On an abstracted level, this calls into question many of the bases for the existence of live, performed popular music.
It’s been agreed upon for a while that live popular music performances are more spectacle than substance, and sometimes totally spectacle, sometimes totally substances enhanced by some spectacle. The guys featured in these videos are different, though. They were real. Clapton, Santana, these were real musicians — they didn’t need flash or smoke machines, they did it with their hands and a guitar. Milli Vanilli proved that that’s not good enough, and StSanders does it again. If what you see is what you get, what you get is a cacophonous, unintelligible mess. Without the context of staging, the accoutrements of modern popular music performance, the rock god is nothing but some dude making ridiculous faces and acting self important while a lobotomized clap track cheers him on.
But, again, the greatness isn’t just in the fact that he sounds like shit — it’s that he sounds like shit and there is nothing else. No band to back him up other than the one that’s one screen, no crowd other than the one that cheers on a loop and for no reason at all, no groove to protect him. Take Clapton’s sound track away and overdub some Finnish guy jerking off and the obvious, and correct, response is “that’s not Clapton”. The image of the rock god is revealed to be nothing other than the music. And yet, without the spectacle, without the crowd supporting him, without his invisible band and without a context to justify his ridiculous actions (please see the Steve Vai video for the best example of this), the rock god is revealed to be an insufferable lunatic. The rock god, in these videos, is rendered empty and, more importantly, everyone who suspected deep down that there was just something wrong with the idea of classic rock music now has something point to and say “that’s it!”1
1 Though, I suppose, this is nothing new.
Remarks: 2 of 2
Remark · Chris · 28 December 2007
Oh, I’m glad you commented on this. I was pointed to the Santana overdub recently and thought it was brilliant.
The comedy here, however, is probably better appreciated by musicians — at least those who spent their burgeoning years in the amp room at Guitar Center.
Guitar Center was full of assholes.
Remark · Doug · 1 January 2008
Strange that I forgot to mention Guitar Center, because I meant to.
The Guitar Center experience is vital to understanding and, I’d like to think, creating these videos. Though maybe not, since I doubt they have Guitar Centers in Finland.