Encounterculture

#8: Scrumtrillessence


(yes I hate that little dot too. I couldn't find a better picture.)

There are galaxies of reasons as to why this project seems to have (predictably) tailed off, but a few of them brush shoulders with legitimacy, and chief among that subset is the fact that Pete Doherty's fingerprints are all over it. Most people, of course, wouldn't hesitate to ramble on about arguably their favorite musician (it's either him, James Murphy, or the Strokes as an concept condensed into the person of Julian Casablancas), and usually I am no different. It's just that with Doherty, I've discovered that I'm unable to talk about Pete Doherty without venturing off to the frontiers of Will-Ferrell-as-James-Lipton-dom ("Mr. Doherty, your gift for songcraft truly makes the works of Bach sound like those of a retarded eight-year-old. Would you be so kind as to bestow upon us your opinion of Brian Eno?"). This is, in short, a problem.

Those of you who read all seven posts I made last year will recall my ferocious seizing upon any opportunity to ridicule the institution of emo. To some extent I still believe this is a justifiable crusade - it's hard for me to take any genre of rock seriously which won't even own up to its usefulness in getting girls - but at this point I'm willing to at least accept it as something of which someone could legitimately be a fan. I mean, at least there's a character to emo, right? Emo songs are hardly some work of Aphex Twin-esque icy perfection; those sweater-vested guys on stage at Spaceland make no attempt to hide the stitching on their songs. It just comes down to shared values - if your emotional makeup happens to have a pronounced wussy side and you look for the same in the music you listen to, then odds are you're going to like a bunch of emo. It's just logical. (I suppose you could take my alternative and stockpile albums by Jackson Browne and pre-George-H.W.-Bush-era Billy Joel; unfortunately, this alternative is a GREAT way to meet zero girls.)

The funny thing about all of this is that it took a British crackhead to make me realize it. I know I unfairly give Pete Doherty too much credit (and poor Carl Barat zero credit whatsoever), but fuck it: there are facts you can prove, and then there are facts that you experience, and in my experience Pete Doherty is responsible for all of that loose-as-fuck, loud-as-fuck, abrasive-as-fuck-but-not-really rock music coming out of England right now. Before I got into the Libertines, all I heard from bands like the Others and the Paddingtons were Nice Enough Rock Songs played Very Loosely, but between the tortured yowl that opens the Libertines "Up The Bracket" and the jarring (yet entirely appropriate) conclusion to Babyshambles' "Killamangiro", it dawned on me that this might actually be a legitimate attempt at making music - music specifically For Me, even. (The acid test, incidentally, is to sing along with it in the car, and try to figure out if you're attempting to copy the lead singer's style or if *you* are actually doing the singing. When I sing along with Bowie, f'rinstance, it's practically grand theater, but with the Libertines I can't help but exude terrifying sincerity and hilarious ferocity - both *mine*. As you might imagine, I go to great lengths to avoid driving anyone anywhere.)

At their most compelling, The Libertines make songs which constantly sound like they're on the verge of ceasing to be - either they're going to turn into something new and overwhelming all of a sudden or they're just going to collapse entirely. Finding music which can get across a true sense of urgency, I've found, is rare and to be treasured; most music - ESPECIALLY music made for lots of people, which covers everything the Libertines ever wrote - is by and large passive stuff intended for the audience to enjoy until it's time to hop to the next rock (see Ferdinand comma Franz). But something was always happening with the Libertines' songs: either all of a sudden they were owning up to their inherent Monkees-ness, or they were wailing away on a woodblock, or they were turning a lyrical phrase with an enviable glibness. You had to enjoy it NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW, the premise goes, or you're going to miss being blindsided by something gigantic.

The tragic genius of Pete Doherty is that he's managed to extend this premise beyond just his music into his actual life. Doherty is infamous for missing gigs/showing up in no condition to perform/performing a song or two and then losing interest/etc, and yet if you like what he does, you'll grin like a jackass while you hand over money for a chance at deflation. To reiterate, I fucking LOVE what Pete Doherty does; even when I don't particularly care for one of his songs with Babyshambles or Wolfman, I never feel disappointed by them.

I am breaking the paragraph here in order to let the last line sink in. Bands that I love disappoint me all the time; it's most frequently identified albums (as in "I was pretty disappointed that the Franz Ferdinand album didn't prove to had the legs I'd hoped for it"), but it actually happens most commonly with individual songs. Songs are funny things; even the best ones have parts which go somewhere other than where you'd like for them to go. Not Doherty's solo stuff. Even the non-great songs ("Babyshambles", "Back from the Dead") are at least buoyant; I never feel like I'm wasting my time, which is all you can really ask for. And then there are the great songs. Exhibit A, of course, is "Killimangiro", but c'mon, that one's almost too obvious; if you make a song which is upbeat and rocks hard and hits you in the chest with percussion and builds like Pharoah's slaves and where Every. Fucking. Part. of the song goes EXACTLY where you want it to - well, I mean, duh. But then there's "For Lovers", Doherty's collaboration with Wolfman, which is very possibly the most dreamy and beautiful song written last year in spite of being written by the rock-addled Doherty. Frankly, I still don't know how he pulled off such a magnificent prom song, but there it is, seeming for all the world like it's going to stop working at any moment until it actually fades to silence. I waste my life digging around your files on SoulSeek specifically in search of stuff like that.

I'm rambling. My point is this: I can be told over and over again that other people's music is more sophisticated, even better suited to my life, but damned if I wouldn't throw it out the window in favor of something that I like dealing with and which I am forced to deal with Immediately. Put differently, I get urgency out of Pete Doherty's work just like emo kids get sincerity out of Conor Oberst's's's;s, and "more of that" is always on my shopping list. Hence, this album; I originally hauled ass to Amoeba to buy it the day I heard "Killamagiro" (only to discover that Bring Your Own Poison is a collection of live performances, meaning I actually had to go back in to buy Babyshambles' actual single), but ended up discovering a scene in general and a bunch of new bands in particular as a consequence. It warms my heart to hear bands like the Paddingtons and the magnificent Dogs (who aren't actually on this compilation, but whose single "London Bridge" is BY FUCKING FAR the best song from the scene in which Doherty had no hand) make attempts at songs which try to be logical, reasonable, and totally fucking out-of-pocket all at the same time. Which isn't to say that they're Libertines clones; most of these bands are marked by paranoia rather than swaggering rockstar confidence, and it's a damn near fact that none of them could write a radio song half as well as Pete y Carl (note the irony of the most wistfully Monkees-esque love song of recent years - "Time For Heroes" - coming out of the motherfucking LIBERTINES). And yes, there are some weak songs (Art Brut, I fling my poop at thee), and yes, maybe it's cheating since it's a live album, but at the end of the day, when I listen to this album, I hear something going on, something that pays off. If nothing else, they learned the most important lesson that the Libertines had to teach.