Saturday of MusicFest NW has the hopeless allure of the Smashing Pumpkins. If you didn’t get tickets (sold out) or a VIP pass (sold out) you have little chance of making it through the line of all the nostalgic fools from the PDX metro area who wants to relive the most depressing points of their teenage years.
But let me suggest a more energetic alternative. Titus Andronicus aren’t exactly cheerful, but they’re not nearly as tragic as their Shakespearean namegiver, and a lot less brutal to watch. Sounding simultaneously punk and emo, they are discontentedly raw, raucous, and reminiscent of The Replacements. Their most recent album, The Monitor, uses speeches and allusions to the Civil War as a unifying theme to their songs of American disenchantment.
I’m also friends with their guitarist, Amy Klein. Check out her fascinating tour diary. She is an upcoming feminist figure in rock and a damn good guitarist no matter what she has between her legs.
Is it so wrong of me to want to believe that the spirit of rock and roll is still alive, and that all those 1950’s teenagers who became infatuated with the Beatles, and that before that, America’s blues and gospel traditions, and after that, Riot Grrrl in the 90’s, all meant something in the sense of a grand historical continuum—that they were leading our country somewhere, and not just entertaining the crowds as the whole damn ship began to sink? What is there left for us to do, and for that old lady at the gas station who has probably lost a son in Iraq, when the economy is failing and our education system sucks, and the media is dying, and we’re all escaping into a parallel universe online—what is there left for us to do but try to right the wrongs that have befallen us. What does some magazine’s airbrushed idea of beauty have to do with that old woman’s life, and what does it have to do with mine?
From “Rock and Roll Is Dead“
Titus Andronicus is playing Saturday, September 11th at Backspace. A small, intimate venue where you won’t have to push over any goths teetering on enormous black boots to get a good view.
With-
BOAT
The Globes
And And And
$13 or with MFNW wristband
115 NW 5th Ave.
503.248.2900
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The Photographers played an interlude on the Woods Stage at Pickathon.
