Some of you
may have thought that rock and roll was dead. Apparently, not only is rock
still alive, but it’s better than ever!
What could be more “rock n’ roll” than a teenage girl putting a cherry in her
mouth? This, in fact, is the new
image of hard rock…and it’s true, hard rock has always put image above
substance. In the 80’s and early 90’s, Guns N Roses, the final rock band, if you ask me, epitomized the trashy, drugged-out
style of decadence that had become the dominant esthetic of its day. True, they
also combined classic songwriting, brilliantly introspective poeticism,
magnificently histrionic vocals, and top-notch instrumental virtuosity; but
they did it all while still being “cool” and making it almost look like anybody
could do it, if they were fucked up enough. After all, that’s pretty much what
punk rock is all about, except for the bit about talent.
The soul of
the band, and probably its most underappreciated member, was always bassist
Duff McKagan. No one could better combine the raw driving energy (and
monotonous straight eighth-notes) of early punk with the deft melodicism of
classic bass players like James Jamerson (of Mo-Town fame) and Sir Paul
McCartney. Onstage and off, Duff was ever the quintessential drunk punk,
finally putting the bottle down on doctor’s orders, after helping to create an
unparalleled reputation of anarchy and intoxication, not to mention some of the
greatest heavy rock music ever made, and accruing stamps in his passport from
countries he has no recollection of visiting. But he left that all behind, to
focus on being a father and husband, take care of himself, and still continue
to make some pretty decent music (although nothing can touch the classics);
which is more than most rockstars can say for themselves. Hopefully he did a
good job keeping his kids away from the dangers he succumbed to in his own
youth, while still encouraging them to have fun and enjoy the freedom of
youth…that’s the challenge every parent faces, who had too much of a good time
when they were young. One thing is
sure, though: he couldn’t keep his daughter, Grace from rock and roll.
I first
heard of Grace McKagan’s group The Pink Slips through a tweet linking to the
following article on Nasty Gal, which colored my perception from the get-go. The tweet claimed
Whoever said rock ‘n’ roll was dead hasn't
met our girl Grace McKagan
and
showed one of the pictures from the photo shoot, of which the article contains
excessively more. I tweeted back my disagreement, saying
actually, Joe, think you just proved it.
image-obsessed
media + a famous daddy's not vital or
revolutionary
because
I really don’t think it is; I don’t think using images of a teenage girl to
sell rock and roll music is anything new, nor is it respectable, whether she is
the artist or merely a model to sell some male artist’s “creativity.” Of
course, I may be alone on this one, as the modern masturbatory media has so
permeated our society that this may seem all perfectly well and good. In any
case, Grace, or “Grave” as she wants to be called, aka @PinkSlips97 did not
appreciate my response and complained
hey! why do you think I changed my name to
GRAVE?to avoid ppl
like u from assuming I'm talentless bc I'm
someone's daughter!
Sorry Grace; did not mean to offend
you! If this is too harsh criticism I think perhaps you are making the wrong
career decision. In fact at that point I had made no statement about her lack
of talent (nor have I so far) but was
merely expressing my irritation that this photo-shoot of a celebrity’s teenage daughter was being used to encourage anyone to listen to her music. In fact, she must
realize the fact that anyone is
talking about her at all (with the optimistic exception of the cute boy in
first period) is due to her father’s fame. It is clear from her tweet, however,
that she still has a school-age mentality, as she cannot handle criticism from
me, let alone a real journalist. In
an interview with Glide Magazine from 2014 Grace calls
her band’s music ‘New Wave/Synth
Pop/Punk but with like a modern 2014 twist.’
‘I think it’s modern because we’re
all so young… we grew up in this technology age and the whole internet age so I
think that has a lot to do with our music and the influence on it.’ Indeed,
this new generation is hipper, when it comes to music, than her father’s
generation of DIY fandom: ‘When I was eight and nine, I’d make playlists on my
iPod Nano and my dad would be like, “Who is this?”
Grace admits the reason for
releasing her band’s debut EP, Say L’or
Venus, is that she was tired of her peers making fun of her for being in a
band, and she wanted to put out the music ‘to prove them all wrong and be like,
“Just listen to it.” You can’t make any judgments without listening to
it. ‘ So, to be fair, I gave her music a listen, after her fans on twitter
insisted I would change my mind once I heard her. Some of them still continue
to favorite her pathetic tweet of upset, one of the decisive factors for my
deciding to write this “review”.
The EP opens with ‘Googlie Eyes’, a
pretty generic 90’s/early 2000’s sounding rock song with a decent guitar riff
over which Grace expresses those new wave influences. The song’s title shows
its sheltered adolescent inspiration, along with tracks like ‘Dream Boy’ and
‘Bratty Attitude’. Not surprising, as songwriting is a painless process she
effortlessly fits into her day: ‘Honestly, every song usually doesn’t take me
more than three to four hours at the most. I usually write like a song after
school…It’s a really quick process and that’s how I
like to work. If I stay on the same thing for too long, I just get bored and I
don’t want to do it anymore.’
The track that all of her cheerleaders
(OK, there really aren’t that many) keep hyping up is the single/video ‘Foxy
Feline.’ In the video, Grace parades around, underdressed on a mock stage,
wearing sunglasses and bright lipstick. Grace monotonously whispers ‘She’s a
femme fatale, she’s a foxy feline’ repeatedly, in a manner that I imagine is
supposed to seem sexy and cool, licking her painted lips annoyingly. Her vocals
in the verse sound basically identical to the plastic modern pop music that
she’s supposed to be an antidote to, segueing into the pre-chorus, which is
supposed to be dramatic by breaking down what passes for the song’s rhythm, in
which the singer repetitively rhymes ‘Your heart starts breakin’ with ‘for
God’s sake, n’; poetry if I ever heard it. The song features a flanged-out No
Doubt rip-off guitar riff. Throughout the video the camera cuts to Grace
flailing on the ground, posing as a rockstar, albeit with no pants on.
Apparently we are all supposed to be in awe of this blond child strutting
around, although Grace says the song is based on her own insecurity, and
basically a fantasy. ‘So when I’m onstage I feel like I kind of personify that
dream of, “Oh my God, I want to have all the boys swoon over me and think I’m
like this amazing girl.”
We shouldn’t be too hard on her,
then. After all, countless male rockstars have chosen their path out of a
similar fantasy, to be liked by women. And most rockstars, male or female, have
been incredibly shallow; in fact, the icons that Grace claims as influence such
as David Bowie and Alice Cooper were more image than music, and perhaps she
could fit in with their company: except her image is nothing new or
particularly exciting. Performing on stage in your underwear and yelling like a
little kid who grew up on Blink-182 does not a very powerful persona make. It
has been decades since there has been any seriousness to rock and roll. At the
same time, teenage angst is not an ignoble or inappropriate theme for rock
music. Chuck Berry, who all but invented the genre, often wrote about high
school romance and related topics. The difference is that Berry was a lyrical
genius and tapped into the heart of teenage America, captivating the youth
across racial and economic barriers and encapsulating something unique about
American culture at that time, solidifying it as high Art. Grace McKagan is
putting on these “bad girl” hard-rock pretensions while quite accurately
reflecting her cultural identity as the sheltered product of consumerism and
the “iGeneration”. In another interview at the Download Festival in 2015 she
talks about leaving school early for photo shoots, and having teachers ask her
whether that was really important, to which she responded ‘Is economics class
really important in my life? I don’t think so’; which is no surprise, why would
she need to worry about money? Her rich and famous father, on the other hand,
learned the hard way that even being in the biggest rock band in the world
didn’t always lead to financial security (especially when you leave the
accounting to someone else, to focus on more important matters like drinking)
and later entered business school to study finance. (In the same interview she
admits the possibility that the real reason for her choosing the stage name
‘Grave’ other than people not referring to her as ‘Duff McKagan’s Daughter’ is
that she had gotten used to her phone autocorrecting ‘Grace’ to ‘Grave’ – I
promise I’ll never use the word ‘autocorrect’ in another article again.)
We can only hope that ‘Grave’ does
not succumb to the typical pressures on a female pop singer (or her family
history for excessive living – which would actually add credibility to the
bad-girl image she supposedly wished to cultivate) if in fact anybody actually
does take notice of her. She may enjoy the attention for the moment, and
perhaps that fantasy does provide her with an impetus, but I think it is sad
that women (and, increasingly, girls) are expected to act so ridiculous in order to be taken seriously, and in
an age where images are used to generate cash flow, by appealing to the base
impulse of a thoroughly manipulated consumer who has been indoctrinated deeply
in notions of how women should look and act, of which the modern ‘bad-girl’
esthetic in indie-rock and now even pop music is but the latest variation, I
hope her record company has her true best interests at heart (as she is too
young and, clearly, naïve to know what those are) and does not start ‘pimping
her out’ as they say – but perhaps it’s too late, as after all, is it really important to leave school
early to go do a photo shoot? Of course, I imagine her father, like myself, and
like most future rockstars, probably used to leave class to go drink or get
high.
And
it’s not only women who the rock industry exploits. GNR’s own frontman Axl Rose
was also used by the media, who used images of the beautiful young man to make
money, just as they did with Jim Morrison, and then weigh every controversy to
get readers (or viewers, or followers, or “Likes” in today’s terms) with no
regard to the artists themselves or what art even is. Entertainment media is a
parasite, a cold-blooded vampire which feasts upon the passions of youth
because it has lost all the vitality of its own save a perpetual hard-on and
the vague literary affect of a cheap hangover. If Duff had any sense he’d tell
his daughter to steer clear of the whole mess – if this article should be the
worst criticism to befall her, I’d say she’s lucky.
Perhaps
she should have stuck with the acoustic ‘singer-songwriter’ vibe she was going
for before she decided she was a hard-rock diva. Or perhaps not. Her acoustic
version of Iggy Pop’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, aside from being a method of
torture too inhumane for the People’s Republic of China, shows how completely
disconnected she is from the source she attempts to draw on, and again, a
teenage girl cooing that she wants to ‘be your dog’ has different connotations
than the fucked-up proto-punk legend evoked, even if it boils down to the same
thing. If she didn’t have her family’s fame to get anyone talking, perhaps you
could find her band playing acoustic covers at local open mics. Clearly she isn’t
ready for any sort of true rock audience, as she tells Glide Magazine ‘it kind
of sucks cause a lot of my shows are 21+ so there’s not a lot of girls out
there, or boys, they’re usually adults’ and what does a 21+ crowd know about
rock and roll anyhow? Don’t trust anyone over 13!
