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EDIFYINGMUSIC

                                       April 10, 1992 - May 31, 1992 

                                              Originally an outake 
                                              from letters to Ed Brenner 
                                                                        
                                              TOADKEEPER              

     
     In a letter from the
     Toadkeeper, he was going off
     on a "has everyone just given       A few years later, he 
     up?"  rant, and in passing he       became a fanatic Sleater-
     asked the question:                 Kinney fan, which shows 
                                         he knew the stuff when 
       "Why is there no                  he heard it.           
       good rock n' roll?"               
                           
     This was my response: 


     And as for good rock n' roll: no people haven't
     given up.  There are a lot of people trying            NEOPUNK
     different things... Right now, I like X-Tal and Bad       
     Religion, myself: something like traditional Punk
     Rock by some people who believe in lyrics, in songs
     that are about something.  I also like some
     Industrial Music (roughly, a kind of pounding,         INDUSTRIAL
     noisy, synthesizer created music, that frequently      
     sounds something like some clanking nineteenth    
     century machine), though the lack of decent lyrics
     limits a lot of what's been done with it.
     	        				      
     So, what did you think of the Havering demo tape I
     sent you?  The Havering was a band put together by     HAVERING
     some freinds of mine.  I thought they were really
     good, though they never took it very far, largely
     because they were too busy getting degrees in
     engineering, medicine and english.  They played at
     parties at our house a half dozen times and they
     were always well recieved: this is a difficult
     trick, really, since usually a band that doesn't do
     covers of beach boys songs or something impresses
     people as being too weird to be listenable.  Anyway,
     they've broken up now that Jeff is doing his
     internship up in Seattle and Yusuf is working for
     the European Space Agency in Holland on some sort of
     Gravity Probe project.  But the fact that bands like
     this exist, writing original songs and trying to tap
     into some kind of Dionysian spirit and also make
     some sort of statement about they way the world is,
     when the chances of actually making any money at it
     is so slim... I think it means that people haven't
     quite given up.  There's a lot of energy out there,
     though it seems increasingly that the slick world of
     CD distribution is designed to insulate people from
     it, though I don't quite understand how it is that
     this all works, and maybe that's a topic for another
     time (the central question though: why do CDs cost
     twice what vinly does, when they're production costs
     are the same or lower?).
    
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