Elevator Punk: Going Down

Punk purists everywhere, take arms: Here comes Gob. The Canadian revival punk quartet’s most recent venture, The World According to Gob, is, without question, a far cry from the irreverent disharmony of the Stooges or the Sex Pistols. It seems as though Gob took the Descendents’ ironic 1983 plea:

“I wanna be stereotyped, I wanna be classified” at face value. Compare, if you will, the biting social criticism of Milo Auckerman with Gob’s wet-napkin approach to punk: “How I long to see your eyes / Your eyes fill me up I breathe them inside / I have your image deep inside of me / I hold your picture it’s a part of me.”

What Gob—and most punk revival bands of any commercial note—fail to realize, is that punk exists in words and not notes (that in fact punk is about a devaluing of musicianship), and that love songs in the guise of punk chord progressions just don’t cut it. This, though, isn’t yet a complete value judgment: We’ve said only that Gob fails as a punk band, not as a band at large.

The Context

Before we flesh out this distinction, some background information might be in order. Roughly speaking, punk comes in two very similar flavors: British and American. British punk developed in the late 70’s as sort of disillusioned political outgrowth from lower-class neighborhoods, influenced by old-school rock n’ roll as well as reggae. Offshoots included ska, and later oi, music. American punk, taking its cue almost directly from the British punk sound and attitude, was formulated as a direct affront to the overly commercial arena rock scene of the preceding decade. Since that time, on either side of the Atlantic, punk has been an institution more than a musical genre—it’s a way of thinking and a way of living, a wholly integrated worldview. At heart, any and all punk rockers live by a few basic mantras: 1) Offend the establishment, 2) Dispense with anything that smacks of conformity 3) De-prioritize talent and musicianship, as they reflect the very sort of ostentation and self-commodification from which the entire movement seeks to distance itself. Musically, this plays itself out in a total lack of polish and shine—counterpoint melodies, precise articulation and attention to structure or harmonic detail are rare commodities in the corpus of punk rock.

This trivialization of musicality sharpens the focus on the lyrical content of the songs, which is in turn supposed to be biting and irreverent social criticism. The point here is to revolt, to exact change and progress from a stubborn status quo and from an unwitting and unthinking society that abides by that status quo. And from this it follows that any attempts to popularize one’s music are to be avoided at all costs. The Descendents rather acutely capture the geist that we’re working towards here: “We never did a popular thing / Don’t even know how to sing / Couldn’t sell out a telephone booth / What I’m telling ya is the truth.” These words define—albeit in grossly generalized form—what it means to be a punk.

Or, more accurately, this is the conservative punk perspective. Of course, it’s almost absurd to mention conservatism and punk music in the same breath, but that’s the very point we hope to make. In order to battle a stubborn social and commercial hierarchy, the punks are forced to adopt their own equally stubborn and doctrinaire ethic about what should and should not be done. Within the punk culture, the political spectrum is inverted, but equally rigid: The hard-nosed right of the punk movement, the purists, hold all of the principles we’ve just mentioned to be self-evident truths, and would sooner stop listening to music altogether than listen to music that has breached this contract.

What, then, about the punk as musician? Clearly, the situation of the punk musician is somewhat untenable, since he has an allegiance both to the decidedly anti-commerical punk ethic and to the musician’s ideal of sharing and disseminating music. This is the conflict at the root of most punk “sellouts.”

The Police, Offspring, Greenday, Rancid and Blink 182 all decided that the spreading of the musical word is more important than a rigid code of conduct—they are the classic punk sellouts.

And it is here, well to the left of the punk political center, that we find the subjects of our current inquiry, Gob.

The Band

When Gob first formed in 1993 in Vancouver, their counter-cultural, disgruntled demeanor would have satisfied any punk purist’s criteria. Plenty of classic punk themes and characteristics are found, for example, in Gob’s first full-length album, Too Late...No Friends.

To take a case in point, the album’s first track, “Extra, Extra” expresses in no uncertain terms the bands frustration with media and commercialism. Lead vocalist Theo exclaims, “Extra, extra! Read all about it! Everyone in every state thinks everyone is free / I don’t know / I have a feeling every form of media is fucking with our heads / And filling us full of shit.” Throughout the album, there is a clear and unequivocal antipathy expressed—almost always in highly confrontational and profane terms—to various sorts of authority and repression. In “Censorshit” the band complains about—you guessed it-censorship: “Everyone has heard the bullshit lines / You hear all the rest of the fucking lies / And they keep on covering it up / All the time / But wait, what’s this? / What exactly is happening to us? / Our world? / Don’t you think it’s sort of fucked?” It’s safe to say that in its early days Gob was true to its self-proclaimed punk identity in almost every respect.

Time, though, wore down the rough-hewn edges of Gob’s political and social outlook. Their next album—the 1998 release How Far Shallow Takes You—is, in its insouciance, vastly different from Too Late. The song titles alone reveal as much: The list of tracks list is conspicuously devoid of such titles as “Fuck them” and “Asshole,” two tracks from Too Late. Lyrically, the songs are much tamer, and indicate a shift in focus towards some of punk music’s more marketable themes, like unrequited love, at the expense of the less saleable “fuck you” motif. As it turned out, the band’s new, more marketable sound paid off, as they were able to get How Far (originally released on the relatively small Fearless Records label) rereleased by the larger, California-based Nettwerk Records label.

Also by 1998, Gob was working with the big-budget motion picture industry. They covered The Rolling Stones’ standard, “Paint It Black” for the soundtrack of Artisan Pictures’ feature film Stir of Echoes. Starring Kevin Bacon, the film was released internationally and viewed by millions—about as mainstream as it gets.

It is difficult to envision the early Gob—the Gob that so unflinchingly berated conformity—releasing a cover on a big-budget feature film. And that brings us to Gob’s most recent album, The World According to Gob.

The New Album

The World According to Gob, is, by their own admission, Gob’s most commercial effort to date. There is an extra “merchandise” insert in the sleeve of the CD—an appropriate visual preface to the cushy listening experience that one is about to abide. The album’s opening gesture, “For the Moment” reflects languishingly on past and unrequited love affairs: “But I cling to you for survival / And I know that you are my Bible.” Moderately distorted, muted, heavily punctuated guitar work embraces a delayed lead guitar line; double kick drumming outlines a simple but conspicuously slow tempo, and the crash symbol weaves the disparate strands together. These are all acceptable punk ingredients—or, in the wrong hands, a recipe for nausea. Unfortunately, the latter is the case here. Our first reaction (the gag reflex): Isn’t Blink 182 a bit young to have a tribute band on its coattails? Our second reaction (the cogitative reaction): This is elevator punk—I’m not being challenged as a listener, either musically or lyrically. Our third reaction (put into perspective): Are these really the same guys who put out Too Late…No Friends only five years ago? Unfortunately, the answer is yes.

Then Again

Gob are bad punks, and make no bones about it. So where does that leave those who criticize them in terms of their punk violations? Nursing their own straw men. While their commercial efforts are, in the eyes of most punk rockers, ignoble, even criminal, it is hard to argue with any band who have chosen to share their music with a greater number, to spread whatever message they have (or pretend to have), rather than stroking the angsty egos of a highly insular—and an increasingly elitist and hierarchical—punk culture. They are, in a sense, punks within (or relative to) the punk culture itself—and that’s about as punk as one can get.