To The Extreme

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Extreme Pop discussion on koganbot's LJ - relevant to here.

Actually when I nominated Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" in the what is Poptimism??? poll I had something like "EXTREME POP" in mind - though I don't know if "POP" is quite the word I want there, but "EXTREME ROCK" means something else, and "EXTREME ROCK N ROLL" surely means something else too, so maybe what I'm talking about is "EXTREME ROCKISM" (ha ha only joking) - that moment in the second (?) verse where Bruce is describing his imagined street scene, the neon signs, the hustling, the kids, and he's willing it to be real so much that it becomes overloaded, absurd, reaching the line -

"kids flash guitars just like switchblades"

- and it's something like cosplay or fan fiction, or Peter Pan urging the audience to believe in fairies, a beautiful desperate wish to bring the dream to life, like the supersaturated Guy Peelaert pics in Rock Dreams. It's the longing that makes me like this and hate, say, PRML SCRM, whose rock litanies are more like catechisms and always tinged with a grubby self-satisfaction that they're Livin' It.

The rest of the song is all post-coital disappointment of course.

Comments

[juror8.livejournal.com]

Springsteen does take a lot of the tropes that pop fans hold as superior over rock fans (ie, youth rebellion rather than youth angst), but then filters them through a rock, umm, filter.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Springsteen is - or was, I only know the Big Famous Ones and Born To Run the album - also pretty good on disappointment, which is the secret unmentionable behind a lot of pop and rock (though is what indie does well)

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Dom, are those constant? I mean, when you say "youth angst" I think of that as rock (and especially indie), but the whole rip my shirt from my breast in self-pity as being something very post-Nirvana. (Isn't emo all about angst?) More traditional "rock" would be youth rebellion, with the angst earlier on being pop (eg., Brian Wilson).