Popular Demand on Wire

They've had it coming for a long time, and for lots of different reasons.

I know it's incredibly stupid of me to say this, but sometimes I figure that if there are a not of women involving themselves in something I don't like, it must be because they are generally more intelligent. There are a million problems with that logic, of course, the most important being that the problem is usually that women are underrepresented for things they actually do, which is discriminatory, as opposed to perhaps not doing that thing as often as men, which, if they are not dissuaded from doing such things (which they are in many cases), is at least a choice. The trap one can fall into when looking for parity is that the critique of whether the thing is worth doing in the first place vanishes.

But still. Whenever I go to a show and I see somebody with guitar pedals and no guitar I pray that I have a lot of money for alcohol. Does that make me conventional? Only if you believe that Wire music is not a genre at this point, a convention. What boundaries are being broken again? Western tonality? Conventions of song structure? Pre-WW1 bollocks. Ok I'm being too nasty. Certainly a few people born in the 1930s contributed, too. Also synthesizers and sampling. But whatever.

I generally think that whole point of rule-breaking in music is always missed. Go back to Coltrane, certainly a good, if obvious, reference for your average Wire reader. Why did Coltrane do away with so many conventions in Jazz in the 1960s? From what I can tell, as a listener, it is because those conventions did not allow him to fully communicate what he had to say. His records, regardless of what techniques or instrumentation is used, are fucking emotional, and unapologetic about it. I don't hear his records and imagine that he wants credit merely for not using a blues scale or kudos for having two drummers. It's all for a reason. And even if you don't like his music, his intentions are difficult to misinterpret.

Anyways, nowadays, since nobody has anything to say, they all just want credit for the lineage they attach themselves to. The references Wire music makes are more obscure and therefore the readers are more snobby. Fuck it. At least Pitchfork bands like Velocity Girl and Phil Collins and have choons.

Actually what am I saying? The Wire is AWESOME. I have 100 back issues here, dating back as far as the year 2000. Purely out of generosity, so that the clever insights contained within them can be shared widely, I will sell them all at $10/piece. You need education. If you don't own them, you are an idiot with reactionary taste in music. $20/piece. I am not worthy of them. I will be using the proceeds to replace scratched Lisa Lisa records.