ISSUE #1            OCTOBER, 2000
 
page 1 of 8

 

BLASTITUDE: your online tip sheet for all blasting underground guh


"Blastitude" is a word coined by Angus MacLise, original drummer of the Velvet Underground and quite possibly the coolest hippie of all time. (cf. track four of his posthumous CD release The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, released by Siltbreeze/Quakebasket. Click HERE for immediate cf'ing.)
 

(or just click on Angus)

The Fine Print. (You can come back to it later.)
Just by way of introduction, this here is a WEB ZINE, focusing on but not limited to underground music. As far as I'm concerned, it's a ROCK 'n' ROLL ZINE, as long as we're all in agreement that rock has already suffered death through overpackaging about 3 times: in 1959, when (but not because) Elvis joined the Army, around oh 1969 as the post-Beatles-and-'San Francisco' (the concept not the city) wave of mass-marketed 'love rock' started faltering, to be put out of its misery about a year later at Altamont, after which rock'n'roll stayed dead for a much longer time, throughout the 70s when disco and funk gave us a rather refreshing 'mass-market popular music' alternative to loud and passive arena rock...okay, that's two deaths....and we all know Death Number Three: when rock's 'bloated corpse' was somewhat revived in the Nineties by the career of Nirvana, which for a brief moment elevated such pockets of the underground as SST Records and the Olympia scene (Melvins, K Records, Bikini Kill, as distinct from the more 'above-ground' Seattle scene with which Nirvana ended up as full-time associates).
           Inherently enough, this resurgence was dead within just a couple years at the hand of -- you guessed it -- the You-Are-Watching-Big-Brother marketing-values steamroller that is MTV. In a sort of unconscious payola, the Most Awful Channel In The History of Channel-Flipping soon had FM radio stations all across America switching from their bland classic rock/smooth oldies/whatever format to a bland carbon-copy 'alternative' or 'modern' rock format featuring an 'edgy' playlist of 'grunge' and 'modern rock' and 'alternative' like the Lincoln/Omaha market's truly disgusting "101.9 The Edge." These stations featured sneering DJ's who put the jock in disc jockey while disgracing the airwaves with cookie-cutter music by the inevitable slew of photogenic imitators, as well as the increasingly dispirited followup singles byNirvana and other forefathers like Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. Treat a person like a rube and they might just start behaving like one, and sure enough American rubes who listen to the radio 'cause they got nuthin' better to do started showing up en masse to concerts by these suddenly reluctant hipster slackers. Unable to live with himself as the inventor of Modern Rock Radio and an "Alternative" culture lorded over by young American jocks, Kurt Cobain killed himself and took rock'n'roll with him for it's third death. (It seems there's always a single decisive blow in the death of rock, a single act of violence like a plane crash or a murder at a festival or an overdose or yeah, a suicide....these blows aren't what actually kills rock each time -- that would be mass marketing tactics -- but they're always there to put a period on things, to seal the metaphorical envelope.)
          And of course, we should all be in agreement that rock has also been ALIVE the whole damn time, straight through, in the 'underground,' it's just that things 'underground' are almost totally invisible, unless you pick a spot and get down there and grub and root along with the ants, grubs, worms, punks, Trout Mask Replica fans, and etc.


Pertinent definitions of "blast" =
"the sound produced by an impulsion of air through a wind instrument or whistle"
"something resembling a gust of wind"
"an explosion or violent detonation"
"SPEED, CAPACITY, OPERATION"
"an enjoyably exciting experience, occasion, or event; esp: PARTY."
"BLARE (music ~ing from the radio)"
"to make a vigorous attack"
"to remove, open, or form as if by an explosive"
"to hit vigorously and effectively"
                   the above excerpted from Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition, 1994)

Some more pertinent and, ahem, less academic uses of the word "blast":

SST Records:
THE BLASTING CONCEPT was the name of a series of various artists LP released by SST Records in the Mid-Eighties. (Volume 2 pictured.) Here the word refers to the vigorous and creative post-punk spirit with which the music on the LP is made. Music as a way to have a blast (i.e. "an enjoyably exciting experience, occasion, or event; esp: PARTY," cf. above) by making a blast (i.e. blasting out some music).


Jack Kerouac, On The Road:
'Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety--leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest--Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie--Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can't feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.'

Terry Southern:
“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish. The world has no grounds for complacency. Where you find something worth blasting, I want to blast it.”
                                                                                                                          click for some fab reporting by Mr. Southern

BLASTITUDE will be published on the 23rd of each month...or every other month. We're not sure yet. If we go monthly, some issues may be kinda slight, but back issues will always remain online. Since the 'fast-paced' web isn't supposed to be for reading, and Blastitude offers lots of reading, it might take you two months to get through all this bullcrap anyhow. Either way, thanks for blasting in. (If this is cyberspace, rather than, um, the cybersea shouldn't we be 'blasting' around the internet, like in rockets or spaceships, instead of 'surfing' the net?)
Letters, recommendations, complaints, submissions: blastitude@hotmail.com
Any music/tapes/books/artifacts/records/documents for consideration should be mailed to Blastitude at 1136 A Street #2, Lincoln, NE 68502

editor, designer, collater, curator, writer: Larry "Fuzz-O" Dolman
"Things To Come, Elephant Boy" by Charles Lieurance
"Inklings and Musings" by Brad Sonder
BLASTITUDE #1 © 2000
Published by Tiny Press

 

 

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