Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Imaginary musical genres, 1

As a sort of thought exercise, I have been trying to come up with a few imaginary genres of music that do not yet exist. The first one is

Greasecore

Car culture has for too long been caught up in the flamejob, hellbilly, Bettie Page bangs thing. As our culture of excess begins to devour itself, it seems natural that automobile enthusiasts must, like their hobby, change or die. I am envisioning a grafting of the motorhead, hotrodder scene with the blazing zealotry of some aspects of the alternative fuel movement. Yes, I run my car on stale fryer grease, but man does it go!

The cheeseball hippy bullshit and defanged world music preferred by the current biodiesel acolytes will most emphatically NOT transfer to the custom car crowd (should it be Kustom Kar Krowd?), whether they are more Big Daddy Roth, or more Lowrider Magazine. What is needed is a fusion of the amphetamine-crazed spirit of the subculture with the utopian vision that is their only hope for salvation. I am envisioning something that combines the perfect aural vistas of classic Kraftwerk with the musique concrete aesthetic of early-period Einsturzende Neubaten, peppered with the sense of danger and abandon of rockabilly (because, really, can you really purge the rockabilly from the hotrod scene?). A sonic dreamscape of a perfect future where the individual can travel wherever they like at breakneck speed, without destroying the world. An epic poetry of automotion, told in the voices of the very machines they love, with the reminder of the grinning face of death (black cat clutching a firecracker on the forehead of a skull with snake-eyes dice in its sockets, skeletal hand wrapped around an 8-ball gearshift wearing a Bettie Page wig) never very far away.

1 comment:

S. Sandrigon said...

This guy plays at the Berkeley open mics - listen to his song "Me & My Mercedes"

http://www.myspace.com/darrindrda