So here we are in the 21st Century and we still don't have personal jet packs, we still don't fly around in supercars made entirely of chrome, drugs ( the good ones) are still illegal and we still haven't gone back to the Moon, not even to pick up the garbage we left there last time. 

"Oh. "you say,"but we're living in the best of times! There are technological breakthroughs the likes of which you can't imagine! Look at the Internet! Virtual Reality! Sega Genesis! Nintendo! We are the shining, brave new world, the soul of the new machine!" Well, I hate to be the type to p*** in yer punchbowl, America, but the Internet is a machine without a soul, a machine that thinks it's a family, and the six or seven White guys who own it are spilling ungodly amounts of money convincing us all that we can't live without their infernal machines, and yes I'm writing this on one of them now and my only defense is that I'm a slave to convenience, too, try as I may to tear down the wall and scream and kick impotently at a world that just doesn't get it. I mean, Virtual Reality? Say it slowly, Virtual ........ Reality. It's gonna get to the point where we'll run scared and sweating back into the safety of our computers, back into the cold digital arms of our VR mistresses / cowboys, back to our chat rooms where the only words of love or solace that will attend to our most fundamental needs will stream in 12 point Avant Garde from strangers who lie to us from their names on out, anytime things get a little too real. 

Virtual Reality, my Aunt Fanny, we spend and spend time, money and especially thought on building the lovely electronic lie that tell us that the one thing which counts, that what separates us from the animals (and why is that supposed to be such a good idea, anyway?) is our ability to deny our humanity. Burn down the Internet. It's a trap, people. It's the Shadow Government's way of putting tracking devices into each of our skulls without the mess or expense of surgery. The digitization of every aspect of our day has sucked the life out of our art, our commerce, our very being. We are the Entertainment Tonight generation... all of us logging on when we should still be tuning out the noise of a power structure that brings not caring to an entirely new level. Once we're all online and have registered with the Great Web master, the Shadow Government’s gonna alert all their point men, now employed in all those fast food restaurants up and down the highways, that the game is on and we're gonna be facing automatic weapons with our Egg McMuffins, dust being blown in our faces by the Black Helicopter backwash as we're herded en masse into all those Super Wal-Marts that have been quietly emptied to accommodate we the people as they are revealed to be what they've always been...prisons. 

But until that day comes, and it will, it must, we have built it, deserve it and let it happen, until that day I will take comfort in the fact that there is still a small place in modern America for a band like the Afghan Whigs. Remember when rock and roll was a refuge? Had some power other than making old men richer? Was more than just your best entertainment value? I do, and I bet Greg Dulli does too. For over a decade now, Dulli and his band the Afghan Whigs have recorded rock and roll music that is so relentlessly real, so willing to speak of and to the dark places we all have, hide and hide from that almost no one buys their records. Now I know that still calling them "records " pegs me as an out- of- touch, cranky old man who misses the Sixties and maybe so, but, be that as it may, I’m still saddened and more than a little appalled at a world that can let so magnificent a rock and roll band as the Afghan Whigs slip through their fingers and disappear through the cracks while MTV and VH1 and their ilk celebrate the pornographic banality of a Britney Spears; the pale blue mewing of a Backstreet Boys/N'Sync/98 Degrees triumvirate of treacle; the whining obsolescence of the Stone Temple of the Alice in the Pearl Bush Seattle angst axis. 

Kurt Cobain did not die for this. Or maybe he did, maybe he shot himself 'cause he saw what was coming.It would be as great a shame if we were to lose the Whigs, and I don't mean anything as drastic as Dulli putting a bullet in his head (I'd like to think that Dulli would shoot with the gun pointing AWAY from himself), but lose them due to our own disinterest in one of rock and roll's last remaining artists, and by that I mean the whole band, although it is tempting to single out Dulli, his cinematic vision of life as the s***storm it usually is being the band's calling card. But Dulli's trailer trash Raymond Chandler/Sonny Corleone persona wouldn't approach the heights it customarily hits without the funky cacophony of Rick McCollum, John Curley, Harold Chichester and the Spinal Taplike caravan of  drummers the band has employed. 

I mean, imagine Dulli fronting, say, Led Zeppelin. Apart from the sheer perversity of it, that band's "Black Love" (let alone "Gentlemen") would be worthless.Which brings us to the records themselves. I'll leave the history and early work to the real rock critics, one of whom will undoubtedly write a band biography in ten or fifteen years, stressing how important the band was (and I continue to predict that the Whigs will go down as the Velvet Underground of the 1990's; prophets without honor in their own time and all that.), and focus on one of the best, if not the best, records of the late 20th Century: 1993's 'Gentlemen""Gentlemen" is the sound of two lovers swimming in a river of vomit, the product of the sickness of being a messed up human being, and I'm slowly starting to realize that there is no other kind, that be it alcohol or drugs or religion or sports or television or rock and roll or bigotry or gambling or sex or love or death or politics or whatever we are all victims of some kind of substance abuse and in the case of the lovers on "Gentlemen", the substance being abused is each lover by the other, and each lover by themselves. 

Dulli has not only the wisdom to see people for what we really are, that is frightened, self serving vessels of rage and guilt, willing to lie to ourselves, our loved ones and the world at large about the importance of doing right always, creatures who are smart enough to know which impulses to suppress (violence, carnality, greed and hatred etc.) so as to continue to coast mildly and blindly in a  peaceful co-existence with every other fool who stole this world from God, but he has the fearlessness to admit these things, the style to channel these so called anti-social leanings into great rock and roll songs and a great rock and roll band to pull them off. 

All they need now is an audience. It's pitiful, though not surprising that conventional wisdom (you know, that pencil neck, spineless, amorphous blob of sleepy eyed compliance Jabba the Public) has it that the reason the Whigs aren't moving Whitney Houston size units is that they deal in "disturbing" subject matter. Well excuse the bejeebers out of me, but I think we could all use a little "disturbing", especially in this day and age. We live in a world, and I live in a state, where two high school kids get so ground down, discounted,  humiliated and just all around f***ked with by their comfortably entertained, self important white boy jack ass jock power structure that they took up weapons and took out twelve of his classmates and a teacher (the authority figure who should have been protecting his charges a little more closely, eh?) before turning their guns on themselves and getting out the only way they (thought they) could. 

And you know what? I not so secretly applauded them. No, murder is never right, I guess, but at least they did something. Perhaps we've crawled so far into our techno-isolationism that the only two choices left are to become the sedated or kill the sedated. I don't know. I do know how sickened I became when, in the aftermath of the Columbine tragedy, rather than take a cold hard look at the conditions that drove Eric and Dylan to drawing first blood in this war, the community of Littleton, Colorado decided to blame Marilyn Manson, Eric and Dylan's parents, the Littleton Police Department and just about everybody else except themselves and their little prick kids who started all this in the first place. Disturbing? I got yer disturbing right here! 

We have a President says he didn't inhale and we let it go by. We have a President who says he never had sex with that woman. And then says he did and we let it go by. We have a Pope that has books only he gets to read. We know this and we let it go by. Some of the most successful movies of the last ten years have storylines that revolve around our planet being destroyed. Not only do we let that go by, we pay good money for it again and again. The well known fact that our government has been lying to us since 1947 about the existence of extraterrestrial life has become one of our greatest sources of entertainment! We let all this and more go by when we should be storming the Vatican and the White House and all those white houses with pitchforks and torches, if not automatic weapons. 

People, we are being lied to left, right and center and we've been rolling over and taking it and smiling and saying thank you for it for so long that I'm starting to believe that maybe we are allergic to the truth. No, sorry, no time to think about unpleasantness in general, thank you, no, I've got this great new computer game.............Where was I? Oh, yes, the Afghan Whigs. We are a surprisingly comfortable society. Surprising because we are probably closer to ancient Rome in our mindless decadence, our cultural rot and our WWF/FOX bread and circuses mentality than any model of the great technological "society of the future" than we'd like to think. (And how great would it be if we actually liked to think, huh?). 

Here at the dawn of the 21st Century we have all the hardware without heart, all the trimmings without the tree. It seems to me that rage and guilt are the only logical responses to the mess we've created if only by the act of not acting and letting it all happen. But bring this up in the context of a record like "Gentlemen", or an article like this one and you can expect to, at best, be considered a drag of major proportions or, at worst, be ignored. The lesson of the Afghan Whigs is this: If you care enough about humanity to take the time and create a work of real, honest feeling; if you are willing to strip away the niceties of polite society and call your fellow man on his lameness, his sickness, the beauty of his horror and the horror of his beauty; if you have the balls to hold a mirror up to a world gone terribly wrong you will be considered "disturbing" and most likely be asked to leave. 

Tim Byrnes 5/10/200 (Since writing the above the Afghan Whigs threw in the towel and two of our airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center.)

You can read more from Tim at Punk Rock Blues. Be sure to check out the articles on Johnny Rotten and Lester Bangs and take a listen to his new CD and even read excerpts from his novel. The guy never sleeps!

Your turn. 

Fan Speak:

Posted by Jax:
Always challenging to the intellect (what so little we are able to muster up anymore)! Thanks for having enough guts to shock our desensitized brains about things that yes, we are completely complacent with. You have always been one of my favorite gurus to keep my mind from being seized by the tyrannical flood of "normalcy". And for those that jump to conclusions upon reading your work, I'm sure you would have something pleasant to say, lol but I say look deeper people into your soul than the words on the page. It is there and if you look deep enough it will connect and you will be amazed how truthful the statements are. And thanks Tim for uncovering these artists for me. I look forward to your own status as a legendary forgotten artist yourself (compliment). To me you are the greatest guitar player of my time as well as my favorite writer. Keep it coming! And Good Luck!