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Originally Posted by Glice
The Fall, for me, flal into one of the very few bands who are a lot like 'art' more than 'rock n' roll' for me [warning - exceptionally pretentious statement following]
With art, you can follow it, and not like some of it, and it still forms part of the total narrative of the artist. When the Fall are doing their churning records, I take the time and effort to forgive them, and posit records within the general [aesthetic] narrative of their art. They've always been a garage band, and they've always eschewed [musical] experimentation (in the lay sense), but there's a lot of records, like Levitate, Reformation! or Are you are... where the parity of lyrics, the parity of content seems like a radical idea within the context of the Fall's art in general. I used to be able to forgive SY anything, but the bits that always grated with me - their half-assed postmodernism, the endless pseudo-beat aspirations, their 'hipster' borrowings and their sheer American-ness suddenly, to my mind, left them with zero content a few albums ago (please bear in mind that ATL is probably my second favourite record of theirs). The Fall I have more albums by, and I can still be arsed to seek out the genius in them; moreover, I can still be arsed to see that the duff bits as duff bits and still want to know what the mad old fucker's singing about.
Also, with the Fall, in spite of having read a lot of the books that MES has, in spite of decyphering a lot of 'what they're about', perhaps confuse me more now than they did when I was a lot younger, and there's nothing, absolutely no-one in rock music I can say that about apart from the Fall.
Excuent Euloguous.
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