So it turns out Jay Reatard died this wednesday.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2010/01/14/record-label-confirms-garage-rock-musician-jay-reatard-has-died.aspx. Apparantly he died in his sleep although some police are investigating it as a homicide?? I am not sure if this is due to evidence stuff or that he was known for being uh pretty hostile and fighting with audience members etc and they just kind of extrapolated from that. The article mentions some kind of big punchup at a concert and some sort of fallout from that but idk.
This is probably the first time the death of a musician or just celebrity(?) in general has actually hit me as opposed to just seeming vaguely sad in some far-off, disconnected way. I didn't know as much of his music as I'd have liked, and he was insanely profilic besides, but I really liked what I heard. He was one of the very very few of the garage revival crowd that I respected and liked, a lot, because instead of just reproducing some bullshit dead genre a lot of his stuff seemed to have a lot more uh soul to it, some kind of passion and ferocity in his voice especially and a surprisingly sharp ear for melody that made the music feel alive and actually relevent, like it wasnt so much a revival piece but just excellent raw punk rock that happened to share a few chromosomes with a mostly wothless creative dead-end of a genre. I am kind of emphasising how awful the garage revival scene is because it made me appreciate him a lot more that in something defined by smugness and recycled forms he was able to put together something which was not particularly new or original stylistically but sort of felt that way just because of that undefineable sense of... inhabiting the music there was, where instead of standing ironically off to one side there was a genuine undercurrent of hurt and pain embedded in the worn-out garage record grooves.
His album 'Blood Visions' was a really good example of this and I sorta wanted to bring it up for a while just to see if anyone else felt the same way about it: that the album as well as being excellent fucking punk rock was a kind of reworking of those tired garagerock musical forms and lyrical subject matter (murder, alienation, etc) to make them something other than stale cartoons. Songs like "Not A Substitute" were so musically simple that it constantly kind of surprised me and blew me away that they felt so important and alive and meaningful, not in the sense of dilettentish artschool symbolism horseshit but in the way the best pop music can take these really simple emotions and phrases and everyday moments and turn them into something like myth. It seemed to have an extra emotional dimension that just didnt seem possible given the constraints of the music and lyrics and genre.
I had the chance to see him earlier this year, and I didn't go, because I'd heard his latest album was powerpop and was a little putoff by the vastness of his discography, and it was cold and I wasn't in the mood and so on. I guess it goes without saying that I really regret this now. I think part of what shook me about reading of his death today is not only the fact that he was so young (29) but also that I was kind of, uh. I'm not particularly interested in as many bands and musicians of THIS ERA as I probably should be, but when I am they mean a lot more, like Future Of The Left and Lightning Bolt and The Hospitals and whoever else, because they feel MINE in some weird way, not like I'm grasping at some relic from a culture I never knew but because they almost helped me define myself and my culture. Like you picture uh guys from the sixties growing up with Bob Dylan or eighties kids and the Clash and that's sort of how I feel about these guys in many ways. I want to see how Andy Falkous's music develops and follow along in real time, not just read about it. I guess I felt this way about Jay Reatard, as well, that although I didn't know his music as well as the others I've listed there was a sense that he was one of the guys that MATTERED, that would be worth following outside of some stupid NME music trend or hit album.
I'm not sure that many other people would feel this way about his music; he was something of a JOKE to the indie kids, more well-known for his onstage brawls than his music, and to the repulsively insular and, as far as I'm concerned, creatively worthless garagerock scene he was too 'mainstream' to be taken seriously. I don't think this means anything because I don't particularly respect indie kids or garage kids, or their taste in music or art, so fuck these people. But this is also maybe why I feel the need to write this huge fucking thing about a kind of minor musical figure, because I'm not sure if anyone else will.
I included a song from his band The Reatards on a mixtape I made a few days ago on the Tomatoland forums. It was a mixtape of my TOP TEN, my favorite songs. I put on his song "You Fucked Up My Dreams" for reasons I can't particularly explain, as in many ways it's just PUNK 101 stuff, but theres something about it that GETS ME. The lyrics and music are standard issue but there's something about the vocals and the squalls of guitar distortion that make it something else. Tons of garage bands sing about you know hurt, betrayal, anger, pain all that jazz but Jay Reatard was one of the few people who could SELL IT like a motherfucker and make it seem like something other than some tired 'punk' pose. I listen to it on headphones a lot, with the volume cranked up as far as it can go, and listen to the rawness of the vocals and nervous tooth-rattling energy of the music and it blows me away every time I hear it, makes the hair on my neck stand on end. And everytime I do this I have to stop listening to music for a while and do something else because after it everything else sounds anticlimactic. It loses something in youtube, when you're sitting in front of the computer instead of pacing up and down pushing the headphones against your ears to make it seem louder, but here it is anyway. RIP Jay Reatard.
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jay reatard dead at 29