Mekons - Rock N Roll

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Free Music Notes for Rock N Roll

Free Music Review: World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band
Hit: 5 Stars

In the early Eighties, Langford and the Mekons began to develop carefully crafted but ramshackle live signature sound, and devoted cult of followers formed on the basis their rowdy and often drunken live performances. The Mekons made the unlikely decision to relocate from England to Chicago Illinois and to embrace American roots music, most notably country and western. The Mekons introduced new and highly engaging performers, like vocalist Sally Timms and fiddler Suzie Honeyman, into their freewheeling collective which added definition and musical muscle to their sound. At the time when this album, "Rock and Roll" was released the Mekons were 10 years old which probably be around the age of 40 calculated in rockstar years, given the 2 year life expectancy of most rock and roll bands.

The Mekons, at ten years, were still so hopelessly obscure that I had to "special order" this album in 1989 when it was a new release. I didn't live in Podunk either, this was in Boston Massachusetts, folks! The only notoriety the Mekons has achieved in ten years was that they were the darlings of a handful of New York music critics, which is frequently the kiss of death, rather than the springboard to a successful career. The Mekons should have been dead and buried by 1989, according to conventional wisdom....but the Mekons have always defied conventional wisdom and have become the rare rock and roll band that has refused to; either, crash and burn, or, age into a irrelevant, laughable parody of themselves. For this reason the Mekons are arguably the world's greatest rock and roll band and "Rock and Roll" may well be their most artistic album.

"Rock and Roll" is interesting because we see the Mekons at a juncture in their career that defines their musical direction for the next 15 years. No band that is ten years old is supposed to make an album this good. "Empire of the Senseless" is an angry anthem aimed at the apathy of the Reagan/Elder Bush years. The Mekons steadfastly refused to amend their passionate anti-capitalist stance, even as leftist politics had long been declared DOA by a generation of cynics who viewed political engagement as just another target for fashionably ironic humor. "Amnesia" with it's "I forgot to forget to remember" chorus, uses irony to attack irony, that is, if you forget historical context, you are simply a vacuous apologist for all the misdeeds that you are cynical about. The Mekons are almost too clever for their own good, because few listeners fully connect all the dots to appreciate the sophistication of Jon Langford's political/cultural musings. Sally Timms' plaintive vocal on "Club Mekon" makes it appear, at first, to be a lament about the growing decadence of music club culture, but a closer listening reveals "Club Mekon" to be, not only a thinly veiled attack on consumerism, but on a deeper level, "Club Mekon" is a meditation on America's refusal to "grow-up" and accept the fact that aging is inevitable and no one can stay young forever. "Darkness Has The Power" celebrates William Blake's path of excess to wisdom, but Langford takes it one step further: maybe darkness and light are the same thing, because light does not exist without darkness. Perhaps the Faustian deal with the devil, is actually a transaction with an angel that will save your soul instead of dooming it.

"Rock and Roll" with all of it's musical and philosophical nuances remains, song per song, the Mekon's most cohesive statement as a band. The Mekons still remain well below the radar of the musical mainstream after 25 years of brilliance. I stopped proselytizing and trying to convince my friends to listen to the Mekons, about 10 years ago. Clearly the message of Mekons is lost to most people. I will say it here, where it's most likely that I'm preaching to the choir.....The Mekons are the world's greatest rock and roll band and if you don't "get it" by now, you probably never will.

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