When you can wake up Monday morning and find the results of Amy Winehouse's Friday afternoon court-mandated urinalysis, it's pretty much official: that gulf of mystery that once existed between superhuman pop icon and just-regular-human pop fan is either completely gone, or has been so successfully bridged by emerging technology that it might as well be. And that's where we're at. You might have to wait out the bullshit, or dig a little deeper than the initial posts on your favorite Project Celebrity Watch sites and blogs, but if you really want to, you can know more about somebody whose song you like than you know about your parents, your sister, or your lover.

Once upon a time, rock stars could be anything they wanted. Perfectly adjusted womanizers, or stylish, intellectual drug addicts who worshipped a devil that always had ample supplies of hot bodies and blow. Even – if you can believe it – a Starman, a Bat Devil, another Starman Who Was Also A Playing Card, and a Curiously Incurious Cat-Man. And fans ate up the fantasy as easily as they devoured the attendant music.

As a musician and writer, I was let behind the curtain before the computer-literate masses. Not too long before, mind you. But just early enough to be granted a rude awakening with regard to the differences between the ideas and realities of the musicians that so heavily influenced me. I opened for bands I'd waited years to meet, only to find out they were dicks. I interviewed people to whom I couldn't wait to speak, only to find out they were dicks too.

And I began to wonder exactly how much my personal knowledge of the artist influenced my opinion of that artist's work.

One of my old bands played with Seaweed. They booted us out of the backstage area and didn't remember us when we drove to Orlando to see them the next night! But it didn't really affect my love for their music. I did a horrible phone interview with The Melvins' Buzz Osborne, one I swear he timed so he could mutter garbled quotes through the gristle of his dinner, and I never listened to the band the same way again – maybe he made the cagey distinction between “press” and “fan,” but I didn't.  I can't hear Stoner Witch without thinking, “God, Buzz Osborne is a tub of cocks.”

Now every fan knows everything about every artist he or she might be considering for the soundtrack of his or her life. Not only that, but they've got to sift through all manner of half-truths and outright lies – none of which are exactly endearing – on their way to forming a picture of said artist that isn't – um – roughly as accurate as a blind Argentinean’s charcoal sketch of a polar bear in a snowstorm.

So how much does this onslaught of “information” about the human beings who create this music influence our opinion of the music itself?

I'm not sure, but I'd wager it's too much. I've loved The Frames for years, and I'm perfectly willing to admit that the attention attracted by Glen Hansard's recent Oscar win makes me nervous. It might not affect his songwriting at all – it probably won't – but the idea of paparazzi suddenly taking interest in a brilliant and heretofore obscure artist curdles my stool. Not because one of my favorite unknown acts has suddenly been shoved into the spotlight, but because of the ripple effect notoriety has in the pop culture pond.

Twenty years ago, I just thought Tommy Lee was the skinniest, craziest guy in Mötley Crüe. Now I know he's aggressive, pathetic and almost clinically retarded. None of that has much to do with the soundtrack of my life. So let me ask you, was I better off not knowing?

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Dancing About Architecture:Chinese Democracy?
Words:Scott Harrell

Every generation has its great mysteries. Sometimes they're huge and era-defining – what really happened at Dealey Plaza? (Look it up; it's pretty important.) Sometimes they're only vaguely zeitgeist-y in a pop cultural sense, and largely irrelevant – who shot JR? (Don't bother looking it up unless you're a dismal stand-up comic jockeying for a slot on VH-1's I Love The '80s: Part Whatever, We're Out of Ideas Again, And Flavor Flav Is Missing; I think it was Kristin, but really, who gives a fuck?)

But like everything else in our culture, the mysteries are cheapening, becoming more soundbyte-y. If we have to give it more than one cigarette's worth of consideration/conversation every once in a while, well, we won't. We're not going to spend our lives trying to figure out who populated Easter Island with volcanic busts, or even attempt to understand Watergate. We want to know with whom our exes are sleeping, and have forgotten we care four minutes after we've found out. We want to know what's going to happen on Lost next week, and get pissed when somebody tells us. We want to be the first to illegally download an album we'll never listen to all the way through.

About the closest we can come to plumbing the deep unanswered questions of our time is this:

Will Chinese Democracy really ever come out?

Talk of the next Guns N' Roses album is once again making the rounds. This time, several sources close to the record (names omitted for fear of reprisal by various paranoid, litigious, psychic-toting individuals) say the full-length is actually done.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Who cares? But a lot of us do, in a kinda/sorta/not really/but still sorta kinda way. Think about it. Over the last decade and a half, the pop-culture cycle of relevance has sped up immeasurably. If what we anticipate fails to materialize pretty much immediately, we tend to move on to something else, and we rarely go back. In the case of Chinese Democracy, however, pop time seems to stand still, or at least display an uncharacteristic willingness to defy its own fickle nature.

Remember how breathlessly we awaited the arrival of Interpol's second album? Of course we don't. We don't even care that we don't remember being excited about it, and it was only, what, five years ago? Do we really think we'd still be waiting for Interpol's sophomore effort, had it yet to materialize?

Hell no. We would've grudgingly accepted She Wants Revenge instead of gleefully maligning them, and moved on.

(I've seen She Wants Revenge twice, and it was never good, but everybody seems to not care about Interpol and She Wants Revenge equally, so that kind of validates She Wants Revenge, in a way. Or proves my point. Or nullifies it. Whatever.)

In an environment of ravenous consumption and nonexistent hindsight, the “do you think Chinese Democracy will ever come out?” phenomenon has exhibited incredible staying power. Why? Because, politically and economically speaking, the folks who first heard Appetite for Destruction at 16 also turned out to be the first generation to, as adults, get completely fucked by America's policy of deficit spending? (Read: The first time they heard it was the last time they were anywhere in the neighborhood of happy.) Because Velvet Revolver is so terribly banal that we have to repeatedly return our gaze to Axl Rose, even though we know that Slash and Izzy totally made GNR? (Read: We still know that Slash and Izzy totally made GNR.) Because, somewhere deep inside, we hope that Axl Rose might be the misunderstood genius he suspects himself to be? (Read: Not fucking likely. He's good, but nobody's that good.)

Who cares?

Generational mysteries aren't about the answers, they're about the questions. Eventually, Chinese Democracy will come out, and it'll be an uneven effort from a talented guy who loves both Queen and the Sex Pistols, but can't figure out how to make everything fit without the help of some guys with whom he no longer has a successful, if dysfunctional, relationship. And however good it turns out to be, its appearance will mark the loss of a cultural question mark, from a a culture that desperately needs new unknowns.

So, what?

Hey, do you think At The Drive-In will ever do a reunion tour?

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Dancing About Architecture:
Moon, June, Spoon
Words: Scott Harrell

Two and a half decades ago, not long after I'd given up memorizing the proper hand positions for playing Andrés Segovia in favor of strumming the four chords my fingers could actually negotiate, I wrote my first song. It was called “Ban The Bomb.” I was ten, and knew as much about the '60s peace movement as data-compression algorithms, but what the hell. From what I'd heard, rock music was about either sex or politics, and puberty hadn't kicked in yet, so there you go.

The chorus went:

“Ban the bomb, let's keep our hair on our heads/Ban the bomb, why not use guns instead/I don't want my skin turning red…”

Holy fucking wow. 

I've written a lot of shitty lyrics in my time. Anybody who's penned more than three songs has written some shitty lyrics; it just goes with the territory. Some of those things you thought were profound or funny or perfectly indicative of the way you were feeling at the time are inevitably going to sound stupid, embarrassing or just plain wrong somewhere down the line, be it years later or just as soon as the high tapers off. Hell, some of 'em are stillborn out of the gate, and we just don't know or care right that second.

I think that most songwriters get better as they go, that trial and error counts for as much as experience and that talent is a thing that can be honed, refined. I also think that even the best lyricist will occasionally toss off something wince-inducing, no matter how consistently good he or she gets.

But a big part of that is the creator reviewing his or her own work. Musicians often marvel at the stuff their fans consider awesome; the things listeners love can cause the artists to shudder.

So how important are lyrics, really?

Honestly, I don't know. All I know is this: I'm a guy who makes some money putting words together, and makes no money putting words together with music, and I still don't know all the words to some of my favorite songs.

That's one of the great things about music, that you can feel it for a number of different reasons. You can love the lyrics. You can love the melody. You can love the groove. If you're one of those people who are always looking for something new rather than something catchy, you can love the innovative lack of anything that remotely resembles lyrics or melody or groove. (Also, quit being a fucking over-it snob.) If you're one of those people who are always looking for instrumental virtuosity, you can love the way the drummer or the guitarist or the bass player tastefully blends reinforcing the song with total shreddage. (Also, quit pretending you don't listen to anything other than Muse and Dream Theater.)

It doesn't happen very often with other art forms. Not too many people buy a Goya print for its lovely shade of orange-red in spite of the fact that the image of a titan eating a guy's head creeps them out a little.

So, lyrics are just one of several elements that might make a song attractive to the listener. A song doesn't need killer lyrics to be great, and shitty lyrics won't necessarily render a tune inaudible. But that doesn't mean shitty lyrics can’t kill a song; in fact, shitty lyrics are a big reason why so many commercially successful pop, rock and hip-hop tunes suck. When songwriting becomes a purely commercial enterprise, more construction than expression, a sort of emotional Mad Lib, the lyrics are often so one-dimensional and predictably trite in their attempt to resonate with the widest audience possible that they're insulting to the more discerning or passionate fan. Some songwriters have a knack for pushing the right buttons. You might not be a laid-off dock walloper like Tommy, or an overworked diner waitress like Gina; that time you couldn't pay your TiVo bill isn't quite the same as an archetypal couple living on little else than love, but you can totally relate. What you generally get on the radio nowadays is a whole lot of “something something girl/something something world” and not much more.

Of course, that doesn't matter if all you're looking for is a three-minute distraction with a hummable hook. And that's totally cool. Though I can't help but wonder how much more effective, compelling or enduring those songs would be if the lyrics were as good as that catchy-ass melody, because my favorite songs are the ones where it all rises to the next level, and that shit can be powerful indeed. It can be life changing. And even when it's not quite that, it's always enough to inspire me to crank out some more of my own – the occasional shitty lyric be damned!

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