secretwars:
It seemed appropriate, since, of the two tumblrfriends of mine that have recently posted about their beards, one runs a record label and the other has a house that doubles as a music venue. Though I’m not sure how either of you feel about folk music.
There is a clear problem with how “easy” the article’s focus was approached. I don’t get an impression that he really had done, whether before or more recently up to the article, his listening homework. I mean, ¿can some of my material be considered “folk”? Sure, but really only one of my projects toes that line to any remotely direct extent. There is almost no mention of noise or more experimental artists, here (and Wayne’s a nice fellow, but Flaming Lips is not the edge of sonic pioneering, a fact which works just fine for them, but evidences to me that this article is pretty lazily written). While some of my themes do refer to a “return to the natural state,” there is an urgent insistence on moving forward to a post-apocalyptic future that colors my beard sporting into not just a return to a simpler life, but a warning of the primal struggle that is boiling back into the populace (in a theoretical future that pervades my work with or without words), should we not be more careful in our choices.
I like folk music, but there is definitely more to beards than folk music. I mean, I suppose you could take the social psychological implications of folk music and shove the messages and communal communications of my work into that (pretty easily, actually), but it’s just sidestepping the fact that it’s all manners of sonic counterculture that have beard adopters in the ranks, at this point. The metrosexual, who shaves or waxes (or whatever other horrible ideas are removing the blatant exterior signs that the boy being dated is in fact not an android) and cleans every cut, is being spotted as the artificial commercial being that he is, that the sign of less products being used is to let more of the natural state of a man show through. The idea that, for the genuine rough edges of the human psyche to show, the rough edges of the male must be displayed as well, is not not an altogether unreasonable one.
I mean, it doesn’t cease to crack me up that women have hated shaving their legs for so long, yet it didn’t seem to publicly catch on as quickly that men didn’t like shaving their faces, which are even more sensitive (ugh… I assure you of this one) to scraping a blade (or three) across the facialscape.
Basically, there are some fun sentences in the article, but me doing one typewriter set in the presence of the writer would really fuck up his shit near-irrecoverably.
Conveniently, some posts of mine tomorrow will give more evidence on the “noise beard” idea.
