If, as Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon wrote in 1983, "people pay to see other people believe in themselves," how are we to explain our fascination in paying to see people drink themselves into oblivion and destroy things?
Is it our morbid preoccupation with this clichÇ that is as old as rock 'n roll itself? Or is it that we feel we can somehow atone for the fact that we missed Pete Townsend and Joe Strummer doing it? Or are we simply fascinated by the spectacle taking place onstage, a spectacle that we know in the end will always be contained and that we can sit back and watch without becoming involved?
These are the questions I ask myself in explaining my own admitted desire to see .And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead smash something when the band takes the stage at the Launchpad tonight.
If a large part of being successful in this commercial culture is promotion, then Trail of Dead has transformed shameless self-promotion into an art.
"They act like complete rock stars onstage," a friend told me after seeing one of their shows a couple of years ago. "It's great."
So of course I was eager to see such a display. When I heard the band was coming to the otherwise music-deprived town in England I lived in last year, I bought a ticket.
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However, the show was not to happen - the band had apparently destroyed its equipment defending itself from rioting fans in Texas.
Regardless of whether its true, these are the sorts of rumors on which one builds an image.
Image is something this band certainly does not lack - from the matching mod haircuts to the admittedly pompous and cumbersome name, Trail of Dead seems almost to get carried away with its own posturing at the expense of the musical statement being made.
We are all still looking for a rock 'n roll moment of our own, a moment we will be able to point to and say, "I was there when ." This band seems to have dedicated itself to the idea of the rock star, the idea that, within the structure of the stage performance, anything is possible.
Since this is a CD review, let me devote some space to Trail of Dead's new album Source Tags & Codes that, despite myself, I can't help but like. Loud, distorted, yet melodic, the album - the band's first major label release - succeeds in retaining a certain edge present in its earlier efforts.
It maintains a certain conceptual cohesion; it's best listened to as a whole. The quieter harmonies of songs such as "Monsoon" suggest that, somewhere beyond the mop-tops and all the instrument smashing, the band is moving in an interesting direction.
I hesitate to jump on the critical bandwagon and announce .And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead as the saviors of rock 'n roll.
Unwound, for example has been making a similar brand of heavy, melodic music for ten years - a brand that, I would argue, is more interesting and sophisticated than Trail of Dead.
However, we do still apparently need rock stars and, for that reason, I will certainly be at the show.
