Real Life Rock Top 10: August 9, 2024

A fifteen-year-old makes her mark, how not to think, Rod vs. Rotten, a great hip-hop movie, and the French Revolution

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1. & 2. Fastbacks, “Come On” (YouTube) and For WHAT Reason! (No Threes LP or bandcamp, August 28).  I’ve loved this group since a friend brought their first album

back from Seattle. That was 1987 Always airborne songwriter-guitarist dynamo Kurt Bloch, bassist and everyday talking singer Kim Warnick, and guitarist and chorus singer Lulu Gargiulo came together in 1979. They were all about twenty. They looked old nearly forty years ago and as if looking old when you’re young was just a natural state that implied no ending. In their video today, for a song from their first album in twenty-five years, with Mike Musburger, the drummer since 1994, Warnick and Gargiulo look the same; Bloch has gained a lot of weight and lost a lot of hair. The punk clatter, with a lot of melody inside it, that has always defined their sound—the absolute thrill of finding out that when you play these instruments and put voices in the air it actually works, it happens, something like music, even a real song, is there—embodies a self-belief that is so infectious, and so tough, that it carries over into a belief in the future, whether that means this year, ten years from now, or five minutes from now, whenever the news breaks next. Is this childish? “I want to believe in something / Want to believe it right now / Want to cross the ocean / I want to leave and I want to leave now”—with now coming out

            ow

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Not when you’re in your sixties and life hasn’t beaten your smile off your face.