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Yeah, Real Estate is just awful.
Here's what I think: music needs to have TEETH. Music can be mellow (CAN) or arty and homoerotic (Velvets, Smiths) or arty and seemingly homoerotic, but actually all about girls (The Cure) or even theatrical and exuberant and gawdy as all hell (Flaming Lips) or even downright low key and moody like Real Estate (Low) but as long as the music pushes you, or makes you uncomfortable from time to time, or tackles issues outside the "I'm lonely and love a girl who doesn't love me" pool of subject matter, and refuses to be ordinary, then TEETH will start to grow in.
Real Estate had no fucking Teeth. Nothing sharp. No lyrics from the real heart (which is a fucked up and deeply conflicted place) or from any kind of brain.
Flaming Lips have teeth, despite being a part time full-on billboard pop band, because they're also pulling third shift as acid heads from the deepest depths of the underground, where veins are collapsing and drugs do damage and death happens and life is an exercise in the blackest of humors.
The smiths have teeth because they don't care what you think about anything, they're going to shove their androgyny and bisexuality in your face , and make you sing along to a love song until you realize it's about a man and question everything you know about yourself. They also don't mind talking about murder and love as if the two are perennially linked.
Low has fucking teeth. Just read the lyrics to any song- fuck, pick one out of a hat- they're trying to bite the shit out of you.
Real estate, and so many of their completely personality free post post pavement brethren have no sense of danger in their music whatsoever.
I can't stand that shit. They're generic right down to their god awful name, but watch- they'll land somewhere between #4 and #9 in pitchfork's annual list, and they'll end up having the career that modest mouse should have had, before that band decided to defang themselves, and go the way of the declawed indoor cat (i.e. Sticking to the warmth and comfort of their owners condo, when they should be out slaying birds)
Rap doesn't really exist without teeth. It can't. I'm not saying every rapper has 'em but every rapper wants them. Except for Pharrell who's kind of a pussy.. let's be honest.
I just wish that I knew more people I my day to day life who were appreciators of both punk/underground/avante garde AND hip hop. Because when I'm chatting with someone about Sonic Youth or Nick Cave or Fugazi or Dirty Three or Lou Reed and I mention Ghostface or Kanye or Lil Wayne, they think I'm being ironic.
I fucking hate that. no you morons , can't you see that Lil Wayne was punk as fuck for years, and was a more exciting presence than anyone in the rock world? Don't you see that Kanye is blending soul beats with "Metal Machine Music" and producing some of the most powerful sounds in music? Don't you see that GFK drops a verse like its a mother-fucking brick on some ninjas skull, and that 36 Chambers is like the Raw Power of rap?
Fuck I hate real people.
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