Hollow Earth

"The Jesus and Mary Chain have been on my mind quite a lot since I finally picked up a copy of this their first single a few months back. Thinking about them has teased open a few issues which tend to trouble me a lot in the standard critical thinking about a number of things. The current critical line about JAMC which you'll see repeated verbatim is that they a wrap a 60s Pop sensibility in a layer of noise. I'm a big fan of JAMC and I don't think this "addition" metaphor stands up. I think to explore this a little helps to understand just why JAMC were so significant.

My first hypothesis is essentially that it is meaningless to separate out the content of music in this manner. With music you're not talking about parting the egg from the yolk, but rather taking the egg from the cake. By the same token you should be able to argue that there were artists who were more or less "noisy" - that the "content" of any noise music was in some way subtractable or irrelevant. However in truth it's impossible to make noise music without betraying who you are and there would be no cause to make noise other than assert your own individuality.

The great noise music has never sought to erase the individual. I've commented in the past that the great Avant-Garde music has not arrived at cacophony through some arid intellectual opinion about abstraction, but often in response to ritualistic or experiential concerns. La Monte Young would of course be my favorite example of this, but equally this would apply to Parmegiani."