Barr and Tracy +the Plastics

I know the drummer Kevin Shea well and have for years, he's kind of an enigma to me. I've written about him a couple of times on here. I've never meet anyone with that much skill on the drums. However, for reasons that have to do with money and/or because of pressure from friends he ended up playing in mediocre if not poor bands frequently. As I'm writing this text I'm listening to the album Electric by the Cult. Kevin never made an album that came even remotely close to Electric. A big part of it is that the Cult did not use any effects pedals on Electric and no guitar solos longer then 30 seconds in length, in sharp contrast to the Cult's two prior albums. Kevin's buddies and bands connected to them directly never really had that attitude towards rock at all. They got pretty ridiculous because of that. It's strange. In terms of sales those Williamsburg bands were all being annihilated in sales during the 2000's by two metal bands from Finland, H.I.M and Nightwish. I mentioned them to Kevin recently he didn't even know who they were. Indie rock was getting a fair bit of press during the 2000's, but most of those bands remained small club bands. There was more general interest from the public during the 2000's in Nightwish. The Williamsburg bands were probably in a sense out of touch. I'm not clear why all that Williamsburg fecal matter existed at all in retrospective. The worst band Kevin played in by far was Barr, who may also be the worst band I've ever heard. Barr is hideously unlistenable. This guy Brendan Fowler was the editor, I think still is, of this leftist hipster publication called ANP Quarterly. Fowler would do spoken word poetry about things like getting treatment for his OCD with indie rock in the background. He would sing about how he just wanted to hold someone. It's some fairly infantile excrement. I There's this other band that Brendan Fowler cited as an important influence from those same years that's even possibly more unholy. That band is called Tracy + the Plastics. When you get down to trying to discern which is worse Barr or Tracy + The Plastics, it gets to be like arguing what shade of brown fecal matter is. Tracy + and the Plastics consisted of a performance artist named Wynne Greenwood who used the word "like" excessively talking to pre-recorded videos of herself about things like what it's like to be like a radical lesbian, and then they would break into song. Not only was that a real "band", but Grenwood wrote lengthy "artist statements" about what this was all supposed to mean. Reading such artist statements is like watching flies fornicate. Brendan Fowler and Wynne Greenwood seem to think they're doing something intensely interesting. I think they were in the right place at the right time to get in an art magazine or two, that's about it. They never crossed over into mainstream audiences because no one really cares. Hipsters are an odd, insular, little pocket of the population, generally politically far to the left of the rest of the United States, anomalous in many ways. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that either Greenwood or Fowler are involved in the Occupy movement, which is not a populist movement but rather a smallish fringe of leftists, many of whom came out of the liberal arts colleges. More than 99% of Americans have never taken assaulted a police officers as part of a political protest or burned an American flag, I assure you. However, even given that margin is the context, I'm not even sure how much respect Fowler or Greenwood had within that context. I think there can be a tendency to overestimate the impact and influence someone like Fowler has. I assure you in Vegas it would take a while to find someone who even knows who he is. I think I've seen that ANP magazine around in New York, but Barr aren't even on Spotify, for example. The last issue of ANP Quarterly was Autumn 2010, over year ago. Again though, trying to discern such things is like arguing what shade of brown fecal matter is.