Why the Grateful Dead Well and Truly Suck.

I've recently been unpleasantly surprised by the indie/hipster media's re-assessment of the legacy of the Grateful Dead. At least in the case of Pitchfork, it seems that it is now—shudder "cool" to like the Dead. This is, in my humble opinion, a horrific tragedy. The Grateful Dead were truly and utterly awful, and I say this with no reservations.

There seems to be a few things going on to explain this recent apology for rock's most stunningly useless band. First off, the hipsters of today were largely too young to experience the living Dead, if you'll excuse the pun. Jerry Garcia died in 1995, meaning that if you are 20 years old right now, you were born in 1986, and were 9 years old when Jerry passed on to the great big trip in the sky. Now, it's patently unfair to judge the quality of a band by its fanbase—as I will discuss below—but, the music geeks of today are truly blessed by never having interactions with real Deadheads and/or Dead tours.

Secondly (and this is one reason I kind of despise the hipster/indie scene), there must apparently be a new "re-discovery" every couple of years: the arbiters of culture have to find a new band wagon to hop on. Now, often this is important work and forgotten artists may finally experience some appreciation. But this kind of thing is, at the same, a mania of the indie rock world; one that mirrors the endless search for the Next Best Thing in mainstream pop music which all too often results in a "one album wonder" from a band you will never hear of again. The indie taste-makers seem blissfully unaware of their absolutely horrible track record in predicting the Great Band of the future, and this is one reason I largely lost interest in the indie scene. In my more cynical moods, it just seems like an endless hunt for fresh meat—perhaps even more so than the much more criticized hip-hop subculture. If an average career in hip-hop lasts less than 10 years, I'd bet that the average indie star is nearly forgotten in five years.

Now, a useful example of the re-assessment of legacy concerns the recent attention Bob Marley has been getting. With the box set release of his Studio One recordings, it seems that each review has to express a righteous indignation about the state of Bob Marley fandom in the U.S., and go on to note a variation on the theme of "Hey, he wasn't really that bad." In both respects, I agree. It is unfortunate that a bunch of hemp-necklace wearing frat boys have ruined Marley's credibility in the States. However, "Legacy" is one of the most over-played albums of all time. And so the gut—and unfair—reaction by many is to say "I hate Bob Marley" because of his often idiotic U.S. fanbase, and the overexposure of "Legacy." Of course, there's no accounting for taste, and I'm not going to try to convince anyone who hates Bob Marley not to hate him. However, keep this in mind…. Bob Marley was not only a great R&B-styled singer and a powerful songwriter, but he was about the most anti-establishment, rebellious motherfucker that popular music has ever seen, all "love" aside. He got shot for his beliefs, for god's sake. To quote from Wikipedia, "In 1976, just two days before a scheduled free concert, 'Smile Jamaica', that Marley and Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley had organized in the run up to the general election, Marley, his wife Rita, and manager Don Taylor, were shot inside the Marley home. Marley received minor injuries in the arm and chest. Don Taylor and Rita were seriously injured, but fully recovered. Marley's purpose for 'Smile Jamaica' was to lessen tension between two warring political groups. It is believed that the shooting was politically motivated as the concert was seen as being in support of Michael Manley. Surprisingly, Marley, who was still injured, performed at 'Smile Jamaica'." How punk is that?

Anyway, the point is that we shouldn't judge a musician by his fanbase. If we could judge an artist so, this article about the Dead wouldn't have to written. Deadheads are hopeless, and I have nothing nice to say about them. But it's unfair to blame the band for this.

The last reason, in my estimation, for the press the Dead are getting comes back to one man: Ryan Adams. I have no opinion on Mr. Adams; I don't think I've ever heard anything of his. But even if the indie scene has a love/hate relationship with Adams, they tend to pay attention to him. He has publicly proselytized for the Dead for the past few years, and so rather than just having Phish/Widespread Panic/Blues Traveler fans talking about the Dead, now we have to read smarmy indie kids singing the praises of "American Beauty."

The Dead are guilty of all sorts of transgressions against what have become, and I think for good reason, guidelines for rock music. First of all, they are guilty of the worst kind of song over-length, at least in the live setting where they are supposed to have thrived. Of course we all know that rock songs should only very rarely swing past the 6 minute mark, unless they are "prog." And almost all prog (except extreme metal prog, that is) is generally bad anyway. But the Dead weren't even prog. It's like not they were testing out their jazz chops, or trying to create some kind of bombastic pseudo-classical music. Oh no, they were just noodling. Couldn't even lock the rhythm section in to a good groove to back up their noodling. Blech.

And the singing on Dead tunes is terrible. Off-key lead vocals, strangled harmonies, and a hopeless lack of personality.

But finally, in my opinion, it comes down to this: The Dead saw themselves as interpreters, like it or not, of American roots music—folk, county, blues. This kind of thing was a well-spring for many of the great rock bands of the 60's and 70's, so the Dead were far from alone (or original) with this take. Their treatment, however, of roots music sets them apart.

Much like my complaints about many of the films in PBS's "The Blues" series, the Dead lacked any basic understanding of roots music. Now, I don't mean to say they didn't love the music they drew inspiration from. However they had no sense of what is compelling about it. The power of roots music comes from the expression and emotion which is often as not found in the rough, dangerous edges of the music itself. While there was plenty of roughness (or perhaps sloppiness) in the Dead's music, there was no edge at all. In fact, they took American roots music and sanitized it, de-sexualized it, and made it into hippy chill-out music to "twirl" to.

In his discussion of "postmodern" literature, Fredric Jameson defines "pastiche" as follows: "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs." Jameson here addresses what he sees as the fundamental difference between parody and pastiche in literature—parody keeps an edge, a value beyond just smirking at, say, a reference to TV's "Small Wonder." So, how does this relate to rock/pop?

I argue that instead of a line being drawn between parody and pastiche in pop music we have a line between expressive emotion and the aping of such. The great satiric example of this is the fictional band Blues Hammer in the film "Ghost World." And more so than any other genre, the blues has been subject to the inequity of 40-year-old suburban white dudes singing about "pickin' cotton in the Mississippi sun." Blues Hammer clearly, and for ironic purpose in the film, perform a sort of pastiche of American roots music. And this, of course, is precisely what the Dead did.

The Dead adopted American roots music, and to be fair, played it back in "their own way." So, in this sense they were never just a cover band. But the problem is that "their own way" sucked. It was a pastiche, totally "amputated" of any of what lies at the very heart of American roots music, passion and emotion. This vital and powerful music was reduced to impotence, emptiness, and performativity. It became, in Garcia and Co.'s hands, "a statue with blind eyeballs," utterly devoid of life and power.

I want to be clear that the pastiche/Blues Hammer phenomenon does not necessarily result from all "classicist" enterprises in pop music. You don't have to be black, poor, or from a rural background to play the blues "with feeling." But you DO have to have a feeling for what it is that made roots music powerful. When I think of a band that succeeded at doing nearly the same thing as the Dead tried to do—a synthesis of American roots music—I think of The Band.

"Music from Big Pink" is a prime example of how something like this can be done without the pastiche. The work of the two groups is similar in a lot of ways: shambling, and a bit sloppy. But the passion is evident in "Music from Big Pink." That album just breathes lust, sadness, loneliness. The Dead—on the other hand— just jam, man. Their aesthetic vision was an empty one, lacking simply everything that makes rock'n'roll and roots music great. Screw the Dead, and screw their newfound indie cred. The Dead sucked. Always did, always will.