The Post-Rockist

The Southgate House
Newport, KY: July 28, 2006 

Do you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?  Yeah, me too.  Fancy that.  And so have the organizers behind the third annual Lite Brite Indie Pop & Film Test in Newport, Kentucky.  The festival, if it can be called that since it didn’t even sell three-day passes, was confined to filling three floors of the historic Southgate House with, well, independent film projections and live musical performances, often at the same time, in a collusion of the senses that my younger self would have earnestly characterized as somewhat “psychedelic.”

I was running late to the premiere of Brothers of the Head, a fake rockumentary about two tragically conjoined twins who were plucked from a life of farming on the east coast of England to be groomed into becoming a gritty, two-chord freak show rock band at the start of the country’s emerging mid-’70s punk scene.  Thankfully, the event was running late too, as I was informed by the bartenders that this place runs on “Rock & Roll time” and that they’ll start “anytime we damn well feel like it.”  (Which, curious readers, if you’re interested, is the same time plane the Post-Rockist functions on; hence the lateness of this post.)  After Brothers of the Head’s exploration of the exploitation of image and the homoerotic inclusivity of rock & roll, a chilling and ultimately somber note with which to start the festival, this reporter found himself lurching from screen to screen, cheap PBR can in hand, seeking entertainment.  There were comedic shorts about abortion, montages of color set to music in tribute to Philip Glass, documentaries apparently about social issues, music videos, and even one lone post-rock (no -ist) band creating a “cinematic soundscape” set to images of landscapes and war scenes taken from educational film reels.  All this was fine and good, although some could have stood for improvement, but nothing would have prepared the unsuspecting listener for the nightmarish jubilance of the uniformed group from Philadelphia, Man Man.

The “anti-fashion” statement made by the all-white clad Man Man wasn’t fooling anyone.  Their carefully crafted non-image was an apparent farce the moment you laid eyes on the cocksure posse before they went on stage: swaggering about with ironic hipster mustaches, ironic hipster mullets, ironic hipster trucker caps jauntily askew on their ironic hipster ‘fros.  The manly clan rendezvoused in the little boys room to relieve themselves prior to laying down the gauntlet.  The bassist/xylophonist/tin clanger/falsettist with the ironic hipster Amish beard left without even rinsing his hands, allegedly because his prick was manufacted by Dial.  The keyboardist/saxophonist/throat hollerer with the beard and the headband was kind enough to demonstrate that at least he was not raised in a barn.

No, the real reason Man Man dresses in white?  Virgins.  The whole lot of ‘em.  Yup, god’s honest truth.  Besides, if it was published online it must be a fact. 

But can you fault them for trying? Yes, we can.  If you’re still a virgin clad in all white when you’re pushing 30, you have one of two options to get that sexless monkey off your back: One, become a cable guy, because Lord only knows what sorts of sordid escapades they encounter on a daily basis fixing old ladies’ TiVos so they can digitally record The Bold & The Beautiful marathons while the cable guy is on all fours for them.  And Lord knows I’ve the videos to prove it.  Two, if you intend to woo a respectable woman with music, stick with the tried and true path of the grit’n'honey vocals of someone like Otis Redding or Sam Cooke.  Don’t get on stage and start blasting jumbled free jazz in the hopes that some loving mama might care for you for the night.  Yet that is exactly what Man Man chose to do.  Sure, some ladies started moving in what might appear to the casual observer as dancing, but to my medically attuned eyes they were no doubt seizures, epileptically induced by blasts of cacophonous noise and the swirling images of cartoon tigers and jack rabbits on the giant screen behind Man Man.

(Continued)