Monday, June 20, 2005

Richard Hell: "Spurts"

According to rollingstone.com, there is a new Richard Hell retrospective coming out:

Rhino Records will release Spurts: The Richard Hell Story on August 2nd, a twenty-one-track overview of Hell's career in pioneering New York bands Television, the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids. "I've wanted to compile these songs for a long time," says Hell. "Now I can walk away and not look back." The set features remastered versions of all released material, the unreleased tracks "Blank Generation (Live)" and 2004's "She'll Be Coming (For Dennis Cooper)," as well as Hell's own remixes of his songs.

...with Spurts, Hell has had the opportunity to revisit the renegade sounds that made his name. "The way we sounded together in the Seventies, as well as on Destiny Street -- I never thought of it as being influential, because it was too eccentric," Hell told Rolling Stone. "But now for the first time, I'm hearing things that sound like they were influenced by those records: the new wave of garage rock and 'art rock.' I'm way into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, for instance . . . I can hear us in many of these bands."
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I can't decide if that is an Overt or Advanced thing to say. On the one hand, it would seem beneath him to glom on to a band like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But on the other, it's Advanced to say you like bands of the moment, especially ones that sound like your earlier work. I think I'm torn because there is a trace of feigned humility. Advanced artists usually just say something like "I was great and influential and the only good bands these days are the ones who sound like I did when I was young." Or they say something like "I wish I had been as good as the Strokes," and they are totally serious. Richard Hell seems to be straddling the line of Advancement and Overtness. But then again, if he's truly Advanced, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

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