Scissor Sisters

So I've been listening to the Scissor Sisters CD a fair amount for the last couple of days, and it's really got me thinking.

This is sort of funny.

I mean, it's not really thinking-man's music, and I don't think it's really intended to induce thought. But I'm inclined that way anyway, so I suppose it's inevitable.

Taken on its own merits, the CD is an absolute cracker. It seems like they themselves aren't exactly sure where they stand, but if it's anywhere, it's in some weird time that overarches the mid '70s and the early '80s. Disco mixes with new wave and '70s classic rock, with forays into electroclash and other, less easily definable categories. The lyrics are straight out of '70s party culture, with a big dose of Soft Cell seediness and for all that are absolutely delightful and unsettling.

All of this provides the perfect context for their most famous recording, their hyper-disco'd "Comfortably Numb." On the face of it, it just seems bold and impudent. I can just see Roger Waters, his face contorted with rage, blood seeping from his ears and from between his clenched eyelids. But in context with the other stuff on the CD, and in its new setting, it takes on new meaning in reference to club culture. It's pretty brilliant, at the same time as being pretty fun.

What I see emerging in music makes me very, very happy. The new bands that are the most exciting are the ones that are all attitude, and not a major label-contrived attitude, either. At the same time as bands like Scissor Sisters, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, etc., etc., etc., are looking to the past for inspiration, they're attacking their music with an attitude and with outside influences that simply wouldn't have been possible in an earlier time. It's a paradigm shift back to being about something.

In some ways it does remind me of the short-lived New Romantic movement that gave the world bands like Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell, Duran Duran, Classix Nouveaux, Ultravox (mk. II), and others. On the face of it, largely, they were simply dance bands, making party music for party people (OK, well, except for Ultravox, but they were around at the same time and using synthesizers, so they get lumped in). But they were borrowing from disco and funk and other styles in ways that wouldn't have been possible before punk came around and before classic rock died. They had the punk obsession with image and attitude, but used it in a completely different way, to escape the humdrum and to make everyone's nights just a little more fabulous.

...

Yeah, I think too much.

But the Scissor Sisters CD kicks ass.