Time Meant Nothin', Never Would Again

254. RICHARD O'BRIEN et al., "Time Warp"
Produced by Richard Hartley; written by Richard O'Brien
1975 Did not make pop charts

As you may have guessed by this point, I frequently measure musical history as being B.R. and A.R.--Before the Ramones and After the Ramones. If I were just speaking culturally, I could use The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a similar watershed, since I believe it marks an important milestone for a sizable segment of my own generation.

But Rocky Horror is only a cultural milestone. It is not a musical milestone. The whole point of Rocky Horror, both on stage and on screen, was its references back to an earlier mode of pop. Like the original stage version of Grease (but not Randall Kleiser's eventual film adaptation), Rocky Horror was part of a general deconstruction of the 1950s that went on in the 1970s. Like the original Grease, The Lords of Flatbush, The Wanderers, etc., Rocky Horror was about uncovering the simmering sexual conflicts that were under the mainstream culture of the postwar era.

But the key to this particular deconstruction (much of it innocuously filed under the greater heading of "rock and roll revival") was that it was innately conservative. The music had to sound like the music of twenty years before so that the sexual undercurrents of that earlier era could be uncovered. From a purely musical standpoint, the only odd touch in a track like "Time Warp" are the theraminlike harmony vocals on the choruses. Those seem like a bit of an overstatement.

At least for this particular song, I think the sound of Rocky Horror was much less transgressive than its image. Listen to the soundtrack recording of this song, and it's just a lovely little dancetrack. But do you see how those people are dressed? If Brad and Janet just stepped out of a 1950s movie, the music wouldn't necessarily unsettle them but the thriftstore aesthetic of the guests' outfits would. Hippies popularized thrift stores, but punks and proto-punks turned them into essential supply depots for subcultural style. Call it postmodernism, call it bricolage, but the youths of the Sex Pistols' generation went into a thrift store to find familiar clothes that they could reassemble into an unfamiliar, slightly offputting ensemble.

Greil Marcus and others later called this detournage. During the 1970s, that's what Rocky Horror did visually to the 1950s and the Ramones did aurally to the early 1960s. They pioneered the mashup in a pre-digital world. Eventually, the technology caught up with them,

In Praise of Certain Youthful Naivete

87. SANDI THOM, "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)"
Produced by Ian Brown; written by Gilbert & Thom
Hungry Dog/Legacy 03 2006 Did not make pop charts

Damn, do some people hate this song. I mean, really, really hate it. Try Googling the title and you'll see what I mean. The feeling seems to be strongest in the UK, which only makes sense since the single broke much wider there. But if you listened to some of these people, you would think that this woman is sanctioning genocide.

Listen, I get it. As you can probably tell, I'm an ex-punk, and I really do hate hippies. When you get right down to it, though, the thing that impresses me most about this lyric is the way it tries to yoke those two truly antithetical youth movements together, precisely because they have almost nothing in common. The bigger the dare, the more you impress me, and I love watching the specifics of this patently ridiculous pas de deux play out across these verses.

What most of the rabid antiThomians I've run across seem to miss about the song is that it's not just mindless ancestor worship. It isn't just another one of those everyone-in-my-parents'-generation-was-cooler-than-we-are songs. More like Smashmouth's "Walking on the Sun," this song is fully cognizant of the fact that many of those young rebels became old farts. Does it change anything when the heads of state play guitar? Well, no, as a matter of fact it doesn't, not for the most part (although Vaclav Havel's got to count for something, doesn't he?). It's not just that she missed the revolution(s). She has to deal with its decadent aftermath, and with the full knowledge as her own generation moves forward that subcultural rebellions sometimes change little more than style.

Plus I like the homemade percussion. On about the third hearing, I started thinking that that was the sound of barely suppressed rage being vented through the extremities so that Thom didn't blow out her vocal chords screaming in frustration. So apparently this time the hippies won. Who's up for a rematch?