All Hands Against His Own - The Black Keys - Rubber Factory - 2004

As I mentioned in my previous post about The Black Keys, I loved the blues as a teenager, but rejected it in the my 20's only to relatively recently re-embrace it. During the heat of the early mid-90's indie rock movement (which pretty much corresponds with the end of my high school/beginning of my college career) there was sort of a notion that we needed to abandon anything that had to do with the corporate beheometh that modern rock music had become. The blues was sort of a part of that. The blues had been co-opted by ageing boomer Eric Clapton, and was the underpinning for all of that flaccid and slick cock-rock that pop metal had become. It was the denizen of classic rock dinosaurs like Zeppelin and God help us all The Doors, or cheesey clothed revisionists like Stevie Ray Vaughn. It was what your middle aged uncle listened to while still insisting he was "cool".

But there is one thing that the blues gets that 95% of mid-nineties indie rock did not, and that is SEX. Put on any Pavement album, any Superchunk or Built To Spill album, and you will find very few songs about fucking. So much overt sexuality had been forced into the music in the 80's and the rise of MTV...combine this with the stringent PC attitude towards traditional gender roles and a generation of kids raised with the belief that the AIDS crisis would turn the future USA into something sort of like Children of Men and you get the almost prudish music of the Alternative Nation era.

I think this is one of the reasons rock lost so many fans to hip-hop during this time. Kids didn't want to hear about how mad we were at corporate oligarchy, or how low our self esteem was cause we weren't cool in high school. They wanted to hear about bumping uglies.

And that's part of why I've re-discovered the blues...thanks in no small part to bands like The Black Keys who can be smart and original in their sound while still working in a style that is now well over a century old...and they don't shy away from the fact that this is music about the things we do late at night with the lights out, or in the back of your grandfather's van in a K-mart parking lot. Really, it's okay to be a little dirty...it's how we all got here...aside of you test tube freaks.