On paper, the October 1982 pairing of the Clash and the Who at Shea Stadium in New York should have been historic. And maybe it was. In theory, the intergenerational punk invitational was a momentous relay, at which the once-fiery godfathers of alienated youth rock could pass the torch to their most eligible offspring. But the flame had already gone out, and the race was over long before soundcheck. What spectators in the stands saw was no climactic showdown but a dismal zombie dance of two once-great bands now fueled by success rather than inspiration. By the time the Clash and the Who were done pulverizing what was left of their punk ideals, the only thing that had been revealed was that self-delusion and crass hypocrisy can strike without regard to age.
Yet on the Clash’s new live album, the grandly titled “From Here to Eternity,” the one track recorded at that concert doesnt sound like the bell tolling on punks English dream. While the band plays “Career Opportunities,” a biting proletarian gripe from its first album, a shade slower (and longer), its otherwise true to the studio original, down to the crappy mix and uncoordinated Joe Strummer-Mick Jones joint vocals. Other songs from a Boston theater date a scant month earlier on that same tour are cut from the same loudly flapping but sturdy cloth. In fact, the entire 17-song collection, which documents a four-year stretch beginning in early ’78, sounds like it could have been come from one set. The album’s diversity — the reggae lope of “Armagideon Time,” a cover starring nasal toaster Mikey Dread; the blue-beat guilt trip of “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”; the somber moodiness of “Straight to Hell”; the urban guerrilla-riddim rumble of “Guns of Brixton”; the racing New York rhythm rock of “Magnificent Seven” (with vocal audience participation) — is due less to any growth in the band’s concert ambitions but from the original records, artifacts that are now so far removed from Limp Bizkit land that the Clash fighting the law (… but the law won) in 1978 might as well be the Bobby Fuller Four doing the song in 1966.
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When the Clash crossed the Atlantic and first revealed themselves to obsessed Americans in early 1979, the Londoners welcomed themselves with the defensive disdain of “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.” and then a musical barrage of furiously wound energy and death-or-glory conviction. (Which might actually have been abject post-colonial nerves sublimated into cocky aggression.) Back at New York’s Palladium later that same year, they brought along keyboardist Mickey Gallagher, enough guitars to outfit Cheap Trick and a not-entirely salutary measure of confidence as seasoned stage hands and burgeoning rock stars.
In early ’80, the Clash paid a final call on the Palladium, a rock shrine that is currently a hole that will soon house New York University students. The band’s instinct for onstage anarchy battled to a draw with its self-imposed challenge of “London Calling,” an expanding nova of an album whose restraint, variety and subtlety broke punk’s clutches without renouncing it. With the solipsistic intimacy New Yorkers grow to expect, the cover photo, of Paul Simonon wielding a bass with seconds to live, had been shot at the venue on the group’s second visit there.
What had first excited me about the Clash was also a photo, this one printed in the New Musical Express (or maybe it was Melody Maker) of Joe Strummer, clinging to a mike stand (as he often did) on his knees. The singer’s head was whipping around so that his mouth was trailing a few centimeters in a contortion that reeked of pure rock release. Or so I imagine remembering clearly. The yellowed newsprint is somewhere in a box in my closet, and thats where its gonna stay. Whatever the particulars, that moment in late ’76 made an impression, attaching a sense of excitement to the word “Clash” that was better than any of the other 999 the photo might have conjured up.
In 1991, Legacy Records was preparing to reissue the only Clash long-player not already on CD: “Black Market Clash,” an artistically strong 10-inch oddity of rarities and studio leftovers from 1980. The modest project quickly blossomed into a full-blown box set, fraught with all the complications possible to the estranged, quarrelsome and jealous remnants of a non-functioning band possessing such a favorable contract that no compilation of any sort could be released without their unanimous permission. Which was, needless to say, difficult to obtain. Active vendettas continued, dormant prejudices resurfaced and greedy debates erupted over the inclusion of each songwriter’s compositions.
The more the band (minus alternating drummers Nicky “Topper” Headon and Terry Chimes, both of whom had been kicked out of the band at one time or another and neither of whom seemed to have a say) got involved, the weirder and worse things got. Plans sent to them came back rearranged and broken, like fragile toys loaned to hyperactive children, or an innocent nymph sent out to play by the river with Frankenstein’s monster. The two who were managed by one’s former girlfriend had, years earlier, with the Iago-like encouragement of their highly dubious manager, sacked the third, a disastrous rift that had leveled the band, leaving a now-all-but-forgotten cultural hangover.
At one point, the corporate junta to which I was serving as an unpaid advisor against the promise of getting to write the liner notes plotted four discs (under the dubious title “Scrawl on the Wall” — I was pushing for “Garageland,” but no one wanted to know) with live tracks from the Clash’s calamitous summer-of-’81 stand at Bond’s, a former clothing store in Times Square. Three tracks here are from those shows: “Complete Control,” “Guns of Brixton” and Jones’ smartly rendered “Train in Vain.”
Sensing the rare opportunity of having its hated major label over a barrel, Strummer, Jones and Simonon attacked like vultures. They nixed the box’s live component and instead proposed that it be released as a separate live album the following year. The band’s dreadlocked Super 8 pal Don Letts had filmed the Bond’s shows for a documentary that was going to be called — accurately as well as ironically — “The Clash on Broadway.” So putting seven and seven together to get 22, the Clash — in their infinitely twisted determinism — decreed that “The Clash on Broadway” would suit a three-CD retrospective of their studio work. It didn’t, and left more than a few wondering what the title had to do with anything. (Letts’ film is finished and about to be released as the career history “Westway to the World.”)
“The Clash on Broadway” wasn’t their only logic-busting whim concerning the project (which, for me, turned out to be a financially satisfying fiasco), but it was typical of the irrational pragmatism that ruled an endlessly self-destructive but marvelous career. They ran hard and left a deep and lasting mark, but the Clash — like the romantic rebels they worshiped — were ultimately undone by the surprise of their own humanity.
My own memories of the Clash in concert are indistinct blurs of thrill, thrall and self-righteousness. At the time, the shows provided ear-splitting confirmation that the records were as real and direct as they seemed, that the band was neither a studio creation or an Oz-like projection. But what have we got to show for it now? “From Here to Eternity” is the genuine historical article, a sonic yardstick against which to measure those 20-year-old memories.
While by no means a greatest hits — the band’s eccentric song selection brashly (if not surprisingly) omits the top-20 U.S. hit “Rock the Casbah” (a song they couldn’t make much out of live, anyway) as well as such classics of the studio and live canon as “White Riot,” “Garageland,” “Safe European Home” and “Tommy Gun” — “From Here to Eternity” is raw, energetic and sloppy. With skinny tie culture relegated to bad-hair camp nostalgia on VH1, few bands of the period could suddenly resurface on record and not sound dated and ridiculous, but the Clash were no ordinary band. Except for Simonon’s painfully numb vocals on “Guns of Brixton,” these realistic performances are proud souvenirs, not embarrassing snapshots.
But the fact is (and I confirmed this suspicion by rewatching the concert sequences in “Rude Boy,” the band’s enthusiastically incoherent 1980 drama-cum-documentary), you had to see it to get it. The devout crowds, Strummer’s leg-driving intensity and saliva-spattering bellowing, Jones’ studied guitar-hero shuffle and frilly clothes, Simonon’s animal poses — the impossible cohesion of musicians doing their slashing and slamming with barely a flicker of acknowledgment that they aren’t alone onstage — that was the Clash. Their sound doesn’t adequately convey the fury.
The Clash’s stubborn refusal to do what was good for them was often mistaken for courage, but theirs was a bizarrely principled sort of nerve. Although their lyrics quickly abandoned the free-floating anomie that made so much punk interchangeable, record company malfeasance was a fight they liked. “Complete Control,” the song that opens “From Here to Eternity” (as it opened many of the band’s 1978 gigs), was the band’s third 45, a rocking rebuke to English CBS for releasing “Remote Control” as a single against their wishes. (Not that either side of the dispute had any problems resolving their differences and plucking a hit single from the dust-up.)
While they would go on to name an album in tribute to Nicaraguan revolutionaries, sport Italian terrorist fan T-shirts and sing of “English Civil War,” “Spanish Bombs” and “Washington Bullets,” backyard culture wars were just as good. London Calling’s “Right Profile,” a film-freak’s ode to the troubled life of Montgomery Clift, and “Capital Radio,” which here provides Strummer with a platform to endorse exotic Americans Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (“Wooly Bully”) over London prole peers Sham 69, are typical.
In British parlance, the Clash were all mouth and no trousers, irrepressible rabble-rousers disinclined to shed blood. Their legal troubles were laughable — petty offenses like spray-painting a wall and shooting pigeons. For a time, they did put themselves on the line for their fans, but as their enterprise became more ambitious and complicated (read former roadie extraordinaire Johnny Green’s witty memoir, “A Riot of Our Own,” for details), they generally marched into battle for more usual things. All egotistical rock stars make up twisted rules of conduct for themselves, but the code by which the Clash made people miserable was more twisted and paradoxical. In the end, the Clash disillusioned all but their blindest acolytes, capping a once-proud saga with a shameful coda (including a new lineup and an afterbirth album) and pained attempts to justify the same sort of hubris less self-conscious rock stars admit as bald arrogance. Their achievements in the uncharted world of big-league punk were unique, but their failings were absolutely ordinary.
It feels thoroughly ridiculous, like some old Bolshevik still mourning the death of Stalin, to be rehoisting the partisan flag at this late date, but the old records did, and still do — to borrow from an advertising slogan used at the time — matter. At least in their music, the Clash had standards. Their strongly worded statements about serious issues raised issues and challenged complacency while kicking asses with the sheer joy of their sonic assault. Leaving love, sex and the usual agents of angst to lower-minded outfits, the Clash took a literary approach to morality in songs that still seethe with bravado and invention.
Few groups of their day had the vocal and lyrical toughness to match their slashing slabs of guitar noise or the ability to proffer tender sentimentality without shame. And to their credit, the Clash have still not succumbed to the temptation of reunion, as have virtually all of their surviving contemporaries, from the Sex Pistols to Blondie. The enigma of who the Clash really were — art-project phonies, naive political romantics, confused rock rebels, arrogant pseudo-intellectuals, substance-abusing hypocrites in camo gimmick gear — will never be resolved. As Strummer warns here in a rushed and ragged “London Calling,” “Now don’t look to us/Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.” Don’t expect an answer here.
Nobody doesn’t like the Ramones. They’re as immortal as America’s other band, the Beach Boys. Whatever punk became — ruined canvases of Mohawked body art, hormone-fueled assholes battering each other senseless in mosh pits, uptight activists barking tuneless ideology to conformist converts, Nazis, anarchists, prim straight-edgers and proto-metal dorks sinking into the post-Sabbath sludge — the Ramones remained its true nucleus.
In its original mid-’70s incarnation and expression, the quartet distilled the vapors of a free-floating rebel pop culture into a fundamental music. They intuitively found the common denominator of James Dean and Jan & Dean, the Standells and “The Munsters,” Iggy and the Stooges and the Three Stooges, Marvel comics and model airplane glue. The roar that emerged from their high-speed blender was pure punk perfection.
Everything you need to know about the Ramones is in the brilliant essay by David Fricke included with Rhino’s new two-CD compilation, “Hey Ho Let’s Go!: The Ramones Anthology.” But there’s a bit more than you need to hear on the 58-song selection, which doesn’t dig deep for rarities, rejects the band’s entertaining 1994 covers album, “Acid Eaters,” and leaves the live stuff to numerous other releases. “Hey Ho Let’s Go!” pedals softly over, but does not outright deny, the potholes in a 20-year career that began with a perfectly launched rocket in 1976 and hit all sorts of bumps before ending with “Adios Amigos!” in 1995.
Creatively, the Ramones were more inspired auto mechanics than careful artisans, hammering, grinding and drilling down the sleek vehicles of pop to suit their utilitarian purpose. Stripping away excess is no less a challenge than building up intricacy, and the Ramones — after locating rock ‘n’ roll’s essence — clung to their discovery like Captain Ahab to the white whale. What other band had the nerve or the cloth ears to roll back the unquestioned tradition of rock’s most hackneyed chord progression? When they covered the Rivieras’ 1964 surf classic “California Sun” on their second album in 1977, guitarist Johnny Ramone simply shrugged away the fussy amenities of an E-minor chord and down-strummed an extra natural lift into the surf anthem.
Johnny, Joey, Tommy and Dee Dee ricocheted off the Bowery at the top of their form and filled four classic albums with the scavenged remains of every brilliant thing that had ever excited them. Brief singalong blurts of rudimentary nonsense like “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Teenage Lobotomy,” “Rockaway Beach” and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” were as direct as a sock in the jaw yet never lost their sense of satire, having it both ways for an audience clever enough not to stumble into the chasm between intent and effect. Unlike the contrived saccharine chart junk that had fed the Ramones’ generation as wide-eyed tykes, this Forest Hills, N.Y., factory stamped out bubble gum for the ungullible. The music screamed teenage release with an indignant rejection of mediocrity in each unpretentious affirmation. Irreducible, immutable, unmistakable (but highly imitable), the Ramones’ early records remain a singular archetype.
But then they spent two decades trying to, in David Bowie’s words, hang on to themselves. Perched atop the mountain of their cartoon classics and unrewarded in the charts, stasis was only good for a time. And there was no way up. Changes in the lineup — first drummer/producer Tommy, much later bassist/song-counter Dee Dee — carried the quartet further from its conceptual origins. Fatigue and frustration at commercial failure took their toll. As rock styles changed, the Ramones attempted to adapt, making tentative and self-defeating moves toward metal, depunked pop and their own origins. As they zigged and zagged to tread water in the early ’90s, punk-pop broke without them, making star pupils of Green Day, the Offspring and other bands they had inadvertently schooled.
A procession of high-priced missionaries (including, bizarrely, Phil Spector) bearing a variety of self-help solutions came, produced and split, each leaving the Ramones a little further isolated from their basic faith. There are enough solid songs on Disc 2 (“I Believe in Miracles,” “Something to Believe In,” “Howling at the Moon [Sha-La-La],” “Psycho Therapy” and “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down [Bonzo Goes to Bitburg]“) to prove that the Ramones prototype could withstand both outside tampering and internal growth, but it’s increasingly hard to hear the band’s joy and spirit amid the rising traces of self-pity, bitterness, discord and confusion.
A thorough lack of conviction immersed the band by the mid-’80s, yielding duds like “I’m Not Afraid of Life” and the title track of “Too Tough to Die,” a defensive 1984 album that isn’t worth its six-song sampling here. (By contrast, “Psycho Therapy” is the only evidence of the underrated “Subterranean Jungle.”)
But who can blame them for sounding fed up at their fate? The Ramones innocently marshaled everything great about primal rock ‘n’ roll and ingeniously crafted a way for it to endure. As a result, their music has aged extremely well, far less encumbered by the cobwebs of nostalgia and embarrassing reminders of forgotten fads than many of their inspirational antitheses — what Fricke calls the “’60s superstar aristocracy running on cocaine-and-caviar autopilot.” But like the pioneers of R&B, the Ramones got the respect but not the cash. Their commercial success never met the expectations of such vast and effective pop vision. With this set neatly boxed for posterity, the ex-Ramones can enjoy their bittersweet triumph in peace, without the obligation of carrying the bands tattered flag on the endless concert trail.
The Ramones took their best shot and landed a body blow on the sound of music. But then the world hit back. Bloodied, defunct but — and this box is the evidence — ultimately unbowed, the Ramones have only one more fight to the death: come 2001, they’re eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The battle for rock ‘n’ roll’s soul started out as a straightforward tug of
war between god and the devil over the eternal fate of teenagers. Those sweat-drenched primal screamers of the ’50s knew all about good and evil. They wiggled their whatsits to a thrusting beat and leered out of hi-fi radios in easily decipherable forni-code. The world wasn’t quite ready for an all-out generation landslide, but what was shaking in the back seats of those four-wheeled shrines of postwar prosperity must have seemed — reproductive evidence quite to the contrary — like something Mom and Dad would never have done, and certainly wouldn’t have sung about.
But those satanic verses sure did exist, and the proof comes tumbling out of Rhino Records’ new “Loud, Fast, & Out of Control” box (subtitled “The Wild Sounds of ’50s Rock”) like silver dollars out of a slot machine. These four CDs are packed with chewy passion candies, bite-sized treats pungent with the urges of youth. This sentimental education holds proof of a dozen different truths (like the joys of sax and the fact that the devil does have the best tunes). The 104 tracks achieve a nearly unanimous standard of vigor and intensity, prodded by unhinged abandon or unmistakably bad intentions and nuanced into profundity by the artists’ inscrutable mix of raw talent and dumb luck.
At the time, these records helped teenagers embrace the revolutionary belief that youth is more than a condition on the path to adulthood, and that adulthood might not be the only goal in life. In synch with films of the day (“The Wild One,” “Rebel Without a Cause”), they institutionalized the division between parents and their offspring, and gave birth to the generation gap. Rock ‘n’ roll could be simply — and definitively — defined as music kids liked and their parents couldn’t stand. It spoke for itself, ignored social convention (including prevailing prejudices), undermined authority and couldn’t sit still for as long as it took a record to finish playing.
Today’s short-attention-span kids no longer have much reason to value rock’s tradition, and they’ve been rewarded by bands all but oblivious to it. Exposure to MTV, hip-hop, power producers and hit records by rappers, dance acts and style-crossing female singers has evolved a new consumer who, if not quite color-blind, is free of racial brand loyalty to the sound and symbols of electric guitar rock. Songwriting is no longer the dividing line between pop and serious artist. Timeless melodies are no longer the holy ghost of music. Blueprints that once defined music of quality and distinction — originality, imagination, insight, individuality, creative ambition — have been erased, copied over. What’s left is insipid pop in its purest form — meaningless, disposable, conformist, reactionary.
In other words, the Backstreet Boys, whose new album, “Millennium,” is so controlled that it could probably be launched to the moon. The most popular thing to come out of Florida since oranges is well-crafted, market-tested product, to be sure, but it’s hard to hear where the bug-eyed rockers jammed into the Rhino box could have mistakenly sown the seeds that would have sprouted them. Maybe the Backstreeters, who work with a Swedish Ace of Base producer and became overseas stars before bringing it all back home, are just a genetic mutation foisted upon us by the Europop dance machine, a factory uncontaminated by lewd American impulses.
“Loud, Fast, & Out of Control” is a home run in more than one slang sense. Sexually, these tracks get as blatant as prevailing social mores of the ’50s could possibly abide — after all, making records has always been a business, and as such was subject to various forms of oversight. (The set omits several emission-standards: Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ “60-Minute Man,” Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me Annie,” Etta James’ “Roll With Me, Henry.”) While some black musicians of the day prospered in the white world by singing about moon-June romance in smooth harmony, others diverted their church-learned spirit into songs about fucking. Little Richard somehow slurred “you sure like to ball” past potential censors of “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” Wynonie Harris brags about his “Lovin’ Machine.” In a rare state of ardor, the genial Fats Domino declares “I’m Ready” (… and willing and able) “to rock and roll all night” — and you know he’s not gonna confine his nocturnal business to the dance floor. And scarcely hidden between the innocent-sounding kitchen commands of “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” Big Joe Turner serves up the wickedly euphemistic “I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in the seafood store.”
White rockers — responsible for more than half the tracks selected for inclusion — get their licks in as well. The incomparable Wanda Jackson, who later traded in her libido for Christianity (a temporary victory for the Lord: She’s gone back to singing her hits, albeit with little of the same earthy euphoria), unleashes her multi-orgasmic volcano in “Fujiyama Mama” (“When I start eruptin’, ain’t nobody gonna make me stop”) and promises more wanton immorality in “Let’s Have a Party.” (Writing about Jackson in his delirious paean to “Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the peerless Nick Tosches ventures, “She sounded like she could fry eggs on her G-spot.”) In the Collins Kids’ “Mercy,” 16-year-old Lorrie C. can barely contain her excitement — she sings, “He makes my pulse go-go-go” with enough fuel to have you believe he’s waiting outside the studio with the motor revved and a room booked right around the bend. Tune out the lyrics of “Great Balls of Fire,” and listen to Jerry Lee Lewis share the sinful ways he learned growing up around black juke joints in the deep South. He doesn’t oversell the obvious in “Breathless,” but there’s no mistaking what’s on his mind when he whimper-sighs the song’s title.
Not all these iconoclasts were quite as aroused, at least not on record. Bill Haley, the humble fuse curling into rock ‘n’ roll’s powder keg, sings “Rock Around the Clock” like a Sunday school teacher trying to prove he can let his hair down and have fun with the kids. Buddy Holly, who I’m told once tried to force himself on a young Texas ticket-taker a decade before she begot a buddy of mine, never revealed himself so urgently in song, although he had the surprising nerve to sing Chuck Berry’s nervy black-pride anthem, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” with the aplomb of a civil rights activist. Although it later developed that Berry himself got off by taking sleazy snapshots of adults, his wily songs for teenagers were good clean fun. (Except for the coy novelty “My Ding-a-Ling,” a song not included here.) Carl Perkins was too nice a guy for sleazy innuendo, and all it got him was a second-place finish on “Blue Suede Shoes” behind his pal Elvis, a man who always sold sex, even if he had to park his pelvis when he came offstage to make records. (But what are we to make of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Jailhouse Rock”? Sung by an audibly straight-faced Presley without so much as an embarrassed I-dunno-either shrug, the song contains an immortal passage of male bonding: “Number 47 said to number 3/You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see/I sure would be delighted with your company/Come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me.”
Sublimated sex surfaces in the sounds of some seriously unhinged ravers here. Alabaman Jerry Lott, recording as the Phantom, gasps for breath from the bottom of a churning well in the fully crazed one-off “Love Me.” Still, he’s no match for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, R&B’s great theatrical crypt-kicker, who spits up a double shot of dementia with the gurgling insanity of “Little Demon” and “Frenzy.” (But, alas, no “Constipation Blues.”) And for further walks on the wild side, Chan Romero’s rabid-cat delivery of his “Hippy Hippy Shake” makes it good, freakish company for LaVern Baker’s weird “Voodoo Voodoo” and Johnny Burnette’s shrieking hiccough classic, “Rock Billy Boogie.”
The ’50s eventually settled down. Students did bomb shelter drills but were safe from sex, as Cold War anxieties were balmed by mild-mannered vocal groups filling the tanks while Motown and the Beach Boys got themselves ready to roll. However, the moral scrimmage became much harder to follow when the explosive genesis of fundamental rock ‘n’ roll was swept away by the megatonnage of mid-’60s youth culture. In the eye of the cultural storm, the Beatles took the high road, decontaminating hip-shaking R&B with the purity of romance (1963′s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” set a chaste tone that didn’t go significantly sour until 1965′s “Norwegian Wood”). There was plenty of sexuality in their music (and lives), but they followed the literary mode and dressed it up, resetting the lust lurking in the pants of Clearasil kids into socially acceptable drama. But between the lines of their lyrics, in “A Hard Day’s Night” and in their every bowl-haired head flip, the subversive message was loud and clear: Freedom equals sex.
And they weren’t the only game going. Taking a dirt road to hell, the Rolling Stones didn’t waste their time on teenage tenderness: They looked down and pledged their troth to Jack Flash, serving up steamy platters of what, as they say, the little girls understand.
The Stones can still put (widening) fannies in high-priced seats, but the little girls have stopped listening. Today’s teenyboppers — and, judging by the numbers going up on the sales board of late, some of their moms as well — are no longer entranced by the erogenous zones of grandpa goat and his craggy-faced cronies. After their species’ successive encounters with the ever-more superficial contributions of Michael Jackson, Madonna, New Kids on the Block, Mariah Carey, Color Me Badd and the Spice Girls, what they want, what they really, really want, is the Backstreet Boys.
The new Pat Boones on the block are five Florida preeners who rule the vapid-chart-pop kingdom with the mechanics of modern R&B balladry minus the bump and grind (and melisma, the pseudo-gospel effect that turns notes into veritable symphonies of melodic avoidance). The Backstreet Boys slather vocal cream over the peppy beats of banal Europop, making records that are safe as milk. These white guys don’t pretend to be black, yet they still lay claim to a hypothetical common ground of shoe-store soul, terrain previously danced over by anyone who ever wanted to be Madonna. The mushy sensitivity of polite post-Barry White New Age lover-men comes out of the Backstreet Boys even less threatening to little ones, who are lapping it up like Ritalin-laced soda pop. The quintet’s debut album has sold more than 27 million copies worldwide, and “Millennium” scanned more than 1.1 million units in its first week, breaking a sales record held by another purveyor of hyper-sincere sap, Garth Brooks. Forget about those albums that get held up by rock critics as culture-changing achievements: This is the sound of cash, and that can move mountains.
“Millennium” is a gooey Hallmark-card confection that’s hard to spit out. The album’s mush-hearted romanticism defines itself — and the group, who couldn’t possibly be as sappy as they sing — out of serious adult consideration. As catchy as the sing-song melodies of “Larger Than Life,” “I Want It That Way” and “It’s Gotta Be You” are, this formula is strictly for suckling love-idealizing adolescents. Indicative of just how young the group is aiming, Backstreeter Brian Littrell follows the lead of mother-lovers like Boyz II Men and R. Kelly with “The Perfect Fan,” a cloying homage to his mom. The generation gap is officially over.
Commercially calibrated songs and sharp trend-sweating production may help explain the Backstreet Boys’ rising popularity in the black community, but the group’s appeal to adolescent white females — a demographic that can happily set commercial trends without regard to artistic merit — is intriguing. As a dynastic genre emanates from Florida (collectively, Britney Spears, ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys have sold more than 20 million albums in the United States alone), never before in the rock era has pop music that owes next to nothing to rock held such vast sway.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The Backstreet Boys are thriving, in part, because white kids’ tight connection to their parents’ pop has been severed. The conspicuous guitar solo that barbs “Larger Than Life” on “Millennium” is less a concession to rock form than the sort of symbolic outreach that prompted Michael Jackson to put Eddie Van Halen’s six-string crossover howl on “Beat It.”
Rock lives, but only as a genre among several, and each has its own audience. But young people have grown up hearing “classic” rock as oldies. They need their own idols, and today’s stars are no more aware of the past than their fans are. And today’s flyweight rock titans — whether it’s Korn or Matchbox 20 — are no match for their debt to history, which only magnifies their failings. All they can do is fill millennial mall stores with full-priced product. They’re followers, not leaders, with no courage beyond the obviously viable. For their hollow creations and paltry artistic ambition, they might as well be the Backstreet Boys.
Whatever motivated the barnstormers of Eddie Cochran’s day lives as little in 1999′s Woodstock stars — where you’d hope to find it — as in the callow grooves of “Millennium,” where you wouldn’t. In order to give squealing pleasure to white 10-year-olds, the Backstreet Boys have turned their back on the bullshit-busting values that long-ago typified rock ‘n’ roll and tapped the commercial honey of black pop. But their real debt to modern black artists — turning the clock back two generations in the process — is for making the charts safe for sentimentality.
