The Generators
Tyranny (TKO)
by Marc Hirsh
The Generators
Tyranny (TKO)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
Whither punk? Quo vadimus? I ask mainly because I was watching with bemused admiration at the punk kids who hang out at the entrance of the Harvard Square T stop when it suddenly occurred to me that they were reenacting a cultural moment that is 25 years past its heyday. Imagine that it's 1980 and there's an active subculture trying their damnedest to look like Elvis and listening to nothing recorded after Buddy Holly went down in Iowa and you've got the same idea, not to mention the Stray Cats.
I wouldn't be thinking about this if Tyranny were any better. The Generators show up on our doorstep with an appealingly muscular sound and then sneak away, hoping we won't notice that there's no baby in the basket. The album seems to think it's political, but I'll be damned if I can tell what they're against ("tyranny," sure, but from whom, or where?) or for (probably freedom, but against what or to do what, and where?). Most of the great bands from the first wave of British punk (and it is to London, not New York or their native Los Angeles, that the Generators look) had some sort of ideological standpoint: Gang of Four were Marxists, the Buzzcocks were ultramodernists, the Sex Pistols were nihilists whose manager neglected to tell them that they wanted to be Situationists, the Clash were liberal humanists pushed to the brink. Hell, even Elvis Costello was anti-fascist. The Generators, who seem or want to be stuck in the same era, use the language of ideology but, not bothering to actually have one, lack a similar focus, or even a specific target, in their maddeningly vague anthems.
But honestly, the copy of Lipstick Traces on my bookshelf notwithstanding, I couldn't give a damn about punk ideology; my capitalist bent doesn't keep Gang of Four out of my CD player, and I was one of the countless many who'd been listening to The Clash for years before I had the slightest clue what they were even saying, let alone talking about. What ideology provides to those who might need it, on the other hand, is a schtick (for lack of a better word), and if the Generators are going to reenact the past rather than point to the future, they're going to need something concrete to give them character. Tyranny has all the right surface ingredients, but nothing quite adds up. The result is more "Sixty-Eight Guns" than "Janie Jones" (which nonetheless provides the backbone of "Dead at 16"), suggesting that the influence of the Alarm is far greater than I (or they) could have possibly imagined.