Word: guitar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recognizable nude or still life from Braque's and Picasso's work in the autumn of 1911. Pop art is born in the letters, headlines and brand names they stenciled and glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar. Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle to "escape the Cubist grid" -- which was never a grid anyway. Cubism, from this simplified and patristic standpoint, becomes the tree in the primal garden of modernism, and Picasso and Braque its Adam...
...played at Woodstock, had already come back, getting a jump on things when they were meant to be gone for good. Keith Moon, their great drummer, had taken some of the band's careening keenness with him when he died in 1978. Pete Townshend, their great songwriter and guitar player, his hearing shredded by more than two decades of high decibels, could not even re-create all his lead parts. Still they soldiered on, three bowed veterans suffering the onset of shell shock from a barrage that hasn't even landed...
Peter Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold...
...They didn't fit into a category." A black band romping in the white world of hard rock is an anomaly (or, as the promo men would say, a hard sell) even today. Musicians may cross over a lot, but radio stations seldom do. Vernon Reid, 31, who plays guitar with an ear on Hendrix and an eye on the Top Ten, recognized the problem early on. "Being black makes it tougher," he says. "It helped that we are a good band. But we had to be real good ; -- better than a white band has to be -- to convince radio...
...birth of a band: at a London flat some eight years ago, Shane MacGowan, who had more of his teeth back then, picked up a guitar and started to play an old Irish tune, Paddy Worked at the Railways. He played it fast; he played it very fast, in the best postpunk, frontal-assault style. His pal Spider Stacy clocked MacGowan's hands at "940 light-years an hour." That time, of course, was unofficial. But looking back now, it has become the official beginning of the Pogues...