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Originally Posted by demonrail666
Although I think it's just about possible to overstate the crapness of the Scream, I think it's a little OTT to think of them in this kind of zeitgeistian manner. Screamedelica did, to be fair, pick up on emerging currents (albeit in a far less interesting fashion than, say, the Happy Mondays). But what of the dreadful follow up? Or Riot City Blues? These hardly seemed to resonate with any general alt-guitar trajectory that I recall. If anything, they're the archetypical catch up kids - enlisting the likes of Mani and Kevin Shields when, in footballing terms, they were firmly residing on indie rock's equiv. of the free transfer list. With the exception of recruiting Andy Weatherall for Screamedelica, as well as a couple of Can references on albums like Xterminator, they've never shown any real interest in what's going on at the cutting edge of anything (as if Can could ever possibly be considered cutting edge so long after the event anyway). Their failure is that they seem to judge all music against an approved list of 'greats', culled primarily from the years 1968-1973. As such, whole areas of interest are completely missing from their work. They supposedly embrace dance culture, but when we look at that claim, what we find is that actually this is just an excuse for them to plow the usual Coltrane-Sly Stone-Krautrock-Parliament axis, with seemingly no regard for genuinely groundbreaking later developments in the field, provided by the likes of Detroit and European Techno, Hardcore, Jungle/Drum and Bass, Happy Hardcore, Garage, Grime, Trance, et al.
Madonna has always struck me as being somewhat omnivorous in her quest for the 'new', leading to some absolute duds, but equally some utterly vital music that a band like the Scream, with their overly defined sense of 'correctness', could never possibly hope to reach.
The fact that any self-respecting band in the year 2008 can still cite Arthur bloody Lee as a main point of reference says everything about their ever decreasing cultural validity. And until they feel able to throw their Lester Bangs paperbacks into the bin and sign someone like Dougal, Dillinja, Ferry Corsten or Wiley to man the decks, they'll continue to be so.
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