IED and underground music

[hsu%uicsrd.CSRD.UIUC.EDU@a.cs.uiuc.edu (William Tsun-Yuk Hsu)]

At the risk of reviving the old American music does/does not suck debate
(let's keep it short this time, ok?):

IED (you know what machine he's on by now) writes:
>The problem IED has with most of the "underground" music so
>ardently discussed by a few of the Love-Hounds in this forum
>is that precious little of it is done with real care -- so little of
					    ^^^^^^^^^
>it shows the kind of attention to every detail that Kate's music
		      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>shows. Of course, he realizes that most such recordings are done
>on a shoestring budget, and he is quite willing to admit that this is
>just a matter of personal taste, anyway. He can only answer that
>he simply has insufficient patience for messy body work,
>however powerful the engine under the hood may be.

IED should qualify that statement: most of the underground music *IED* 
has heard is done with little attention to detail. So how much 
underground music is IED familiar with?

A lot of my favorite underground bands show obvious attention to detail.
Listen to Sonic Youth for an obvious example. Or Controlled Bleeding.
Or John Zorn's the Big Gundown. There is so much going on in the complex 
textures that Lemos (of Controlled Bleeding) weaves, and certainly the
vocal control and range of color of Diamanda Galas show attention to
detail that few people can miss. And when No Trend thrashes in 5/4 time,
Fear rolls into a tight jam in 7/4 time, or D. Boon of the Minutemen
sings his compressed, Burroughsian lyrics over twisted guitar lines,
it's obvious that this music has been carefully thought out and worked
over. Maybe the underground music IED is familiar with is mostly slipshod,
but many of my favorites sure aren't. We must listen to different
undergrounds or something.

The most elaborate packaging also comes from underground bands. You
thought Sigue Sigue Sputnik had sophisticated packaging? Big deal. 
Many underground cassette releases come with booklets of collages
and graphics. I've seen cassette holders made of handprinted canvas sacks
(Boy Dirt Car), bags of woven human hair (Jarboe), multi-cassette
sets with really slick printed cardboard cases (Gargoyle Mechanique
and Nurse with Wound) etc. Soviet France has elaborate packages of
carved wood, tin foil or crepe paper. (Oops, Soviet France and Nurse
with Wound are not American, but NwW's cassette box is distributed
by Cause and Effect in Indianapolis, who also designed the box.)
Granted, packaging is only a small (non-essential) part of the product.
But these people don't sound like they don't pay attention to detail,
right?

>The other side of the coin -- the mainstream American popular
>music of our time -- tends to be horribly conventional, emotionally
>empty or (worse) false, and enslaved by rigid conventions of genre.

Agreed, but that's not where the most interesting American music is
these days.

Somehow this is strangely reminiscent of the Mike Krantz affair last
year, which introduced the infamous argument "I've only heard a small
amount of non-mainstream music but I think it sucks so it does". Maybe
IED has a better basis for his sweeping generalizations of American
music (other than "Kate Bush defines attention to detail so no American
music shows similar attention to detail because it's not by Kate Bush"
type arguments). I (we?) wait with baited breath.

Bill