Philadelphia Weekly

photo credit: HAWK KRALL

One area where you septics* piss all over us hoity-toity, pinkie-cocking, fox-slaughtering, stuck-up, gap-toothed limey queenmotherfuckers is writing. Seriously.

Take super-hard-boiled crime writer Elmore Leonard. He's the go-to guru for any would-be writer of neo noir. And his 10 Rules of Writing ("Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue," he postulates) is generally considered the dog's bollocks sine qua non of writing guides.

But one of Leonard's rules (No. 1: "Never open a book with weather") is bollocks (not to be confused with the dog's bollocks). By way of evidence I present the best opening line ever, from William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel."

Whoa. Way to write "gray." Which brings me to the subject of this week's column--cultural cowardice.

Item one: the recently released album Equiline by Jeffrey Hill. It's gray. The color of blah. And whatever.

Item two: the new album by Radio Massacre International. Now stripe me pink if that's not a great band name. Up there with the Manic Street Preachers. And Lawnmower Deth. And Extreme Noise Terror. And Machine Gun Feedback. But guess what they called their album: rain falls in grey. (All lower case, natch.)

Item three: the just-published book Revolution on Canvas, Volume Two. Cool title. Then the eyes wander down the cover to the subtitle: Poetry From Inside the Indie Music Scene.

One word: fuck. Another: off. Talk about two shit tastes that taste even shitter together. Do you think it's part of a series? Cancer From My Ass: Proctologists Talk About Their Favorite Work Dreams.

What do these three artifacts have in common? Cultural cowardice. Great pop doesn't hide under a gray bushel. It dresses up in a fluorescent Day-Glo pink-and-yellow pimp suit and struts the streets with its tits, cock, vagina and savagely prolapsed ass hanging out screaming at and punching strangers and pissing on their startled dogs.

Indie is the musical equivalent of gray--a sterile monocultural bolthole for sexless, passive-aggressive social inadequates with mouse cocks.

Listen up, musos. Smugster scum Belle and Sebastian are not role models. Unless you're an aspiring librarian. As a wannabe pop star, your idols should be Kiss, Gwar, Alice Cooper, Rammstein and the Sex Pistols. In fact, if your stage show doesn't feature prosthetic tongues, flame-spewing codpieces, chainsaws, a perma-sneering Dickensian hunchback singer with the eyes of an insane satanic ferret and a mock execution or two--get the fuck out of showbiz, ya cowering wee timorous gray beasties.

The point being that while restraint, authenticity, subtlety and minimalism are great in crime writing, in showbiz they suck like a prolapsing dwarf star.

Grrr. I could rip a tissue.

* Rhyming slang: septic tank=Yank.