Pop will blow itself in the Craftmatic adjustable bed

If you were to go back to the conventional timeline of rock history and start with the Sun Records gang [and even Bill Haley and The Comets], you could easily identify the “sunburst” moments in that timeline…

1. Rock Around The Clock
2. Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard
3. Sun Records—Elvis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash
4. The Beach Boys
5. The Beatles
6. Disco
7. The Clash
8. R.E.M.
9. New Kids On The Block
10. Nirvana

Yes, New Kids On The Block. Why? Urgh! Don’t you get it? Everything I mentioned up to that point had been represented as a moment when pop music changed! And I didn’t have to say it changed for better or worse, just that it changed. And if you can stomach it, check out the pop tunes which have had the most enormous success over the past few years and you see it’s all this product which stems directly from Lou Perlman seeing NKOTB and their effect on teenage girls. I hate it, but it’s true.

Nirvana, of course, is just as guilty of spawning a million pathetic imitators who never could hope to make something as worthy as the guano which fell out of Kirk’s brain. I’d say just about all the shitty bands out there today are Nirvana-knock offs, which makes me ill. When shit like Creed gets serious attention, you know you’re glad Kirk put a shotgun to his dome…

I’m biased about The Clash but the reason I cite them is because they truly made a new path in pop music and they did influence a generation of artists. But don’t worry about that, we’ll take care’a that later…

You knew R.E.M. had to be influential when two things happened:

1. Rickenbacker managed to stay in business thanks to sales after “Murmur” was released.
2. The Gin Blossoms were successful.

The Gin Blossoms, god love ‘em, are blameless for what they did. They are Badfinger to R.E.M.’s Beatles. But how can you not listen to the bollocks they spit out and not feel offended for Peter Buck and his jangly jangly jangly I beat up a British Airways steward jangly jangly? Or the splendid Guadalcanal Diary, or Wire Train, or Indigo Girls, or Mr. Crow’s Garden [whoops! Sorry Christopher!]…just I don’t have anything against Gin Blossoms but hey, man, call a spade a spade you are just ripping off R.E.M.!