Mild Horses: Alternative Music’s Passion Problem

In my local town centre, a withered old man in a yellow raincoat sits on a fold-up chair outside Sports Direct. Hunched over a sequin-encrusted mandolin hooked up to a tiny amplifier, he plays improvised, scratchy blues with the amp’s overdrive turned to max. His eyes remain closed and his only visible movements are the slight shifts of his fingers. He meanders through dead notes and dissonance for hours at a time, oblivious to the stares and giggles of Saturday shoppers and hip teens. He is the antithesis to every mistake made in guitar music’s grim last few years.

A combination of uninspired songwriting and an increased focus on synth-fuelled pop and alternative music has left the idea of using a guitar to change the world looking decidedly uncool. However, it is not the instrument itself that is to blame, far from it in fact. The problem lies in motivation. In the rough-around-the-edges Nirvana film “Live! Tonight! Sold Out!”, Kurt Cobain describes what he sees as the essential for good rock music. “As long as it’s good, and has passion”, Cobain says, then it is worthy.

The Nirvana frontman’s viewpoint may seem characteristically simplistic, but his point highlights exactly the sort of vitality that is lacking from far too much of today’s alternative music. Music should be about more than just haircuts and denim. The songs should be life-affirming, they should inspire us to create something in turn - whether it be more great music or just a loud, drunken howl of wild appreciation.

The problem is that passion suffers an image problem. Picking up a guitar to nervous silence for the climax of gigs on his last tour, comedian Stewart Lee bemoaned the fact that “People find nothing more embarrassing than the sight of someone trying to do something sincerely and well”. Image is everything, and  passion seems dangerously unselfconscious. There are lots of decent  electronic artists pushing the envelope at the moment - far more than there are good guitar bands. But sometimes electronica can be stark, clinical and calculated; it can register the disconnection between music and creator, and possibly – dare I say it - between product and passion.

Of course, many of those brandishing guitars are partly to blame. For every decent act there are 1000 indie bands united only by haircuts and a lack of soul. It is music dictated by the adverts in fashion magazines, when it should be the other way around. To some extent our heroes make us who we are. Our adoration moves us to try and emulate them. Now, no one wants legions of Nirvana copyists out there - we tried that 20 years ago and it was rubbish - but absorbing the spirit of our heroes can drive us to do incredible things. But what if our heroes are nothing more than the limp, tweed-clad ‘discoveries’ of increasingly nervous record labels. Who wants heroes like that? Does anyone really want to worship Mumford and Sons?

There are bands around that get this.

Titus Andronicus’ 2010 album The Monitor is a concept album based on the US Civil War ship of the same name. Try telling me that sounds cool. The thing is, the songs on The Monitor bleed and screech passion. The vocals don’t always hit the notes they aim for; guitars drown in their own feedback. There are saxophone solos, bagpipes; long spoken word samples interrupt the songs. The album is too long - the last track alone clocks in at over 14 minutes. And all of this makes The Monitor the album that it is: a raucous, defiant, and at times beautiful listen.

The Men are another band revelling in the possibilities of six strings, as demonstrated on 2012’s Open Your Heart - the title of which alone serves as an apt rallying call to the alternative music community. They are not afraid of loudness, neither are they afraid of placing 7 minute Sonic Youth-country-rock instrumentals alongside black metal freakouts. They have been dubbed Thurston Moore and the E-Street Band, and while the crossover between fans of the Sonic Youth guitarist and those of The Boss may not be notable, the combination of genre-busting experimentalism and all-comers-welcomed blue collar rock suggested by the nickname is not far wide of the mark. In the hands of bands like these the rock template is left twisted and broken – a testimony to the impulses and flaws of a truly honest group of musicians.

There are plenty of other honourable mentions. No Age are three albums into a nicely developing career championing free-spirited and increasingly mature silliness; young bands like Iceage and embryonic Londoners Savages are displaying an adeptness for fuzz and urgency; Black Keys have been plying their trade admirably for some time and their apparent storming of the mainstream could well position them as the Pied Pipers that lead the scenesters back into that dark, damp pit where rock’s true soul lurks.

Good things are happening.

Cathy Pellow, the head of LA-based label Sargent House - who themselves boast an admirable roster of up and coming young rock acts - tweeted recently “Is it just me or are the hipster blogs and magazines finally giving heavy music some props?” It isn’t Pellow’s imagination, nor is it just heavy music. There are deeper rumbles in alternative music’s undernourished belly, a rediscovered longing for some substance, for some meat to devour. And while that repast may not come in the form of a wizened space-blues mandolinist from Truro (though I for one don’t see why not), his is exactly the sort of uncompromising passion and off-kilter obliviousness that today’s acts must have if they are to whet the appetites of discerning music fans.