Review Summary: ROCK AND ROLL, ONETWOTHREEFOUR
If Lars Von Trier is ultimately an odious shit, he’s also an unparalleled provocateur. The Idiots, a film in which a loose community of people publicly pretend to be mentally handicapped for the sake of the “liberation” it provides them, is a shocking and grotesque dive into the world of consummate provocation, relentless transgression of social boundaries under the cloak of impairment, all for the sake of an idiotic thrill. Moral? No. Cautionary? Maybe. Enjoyable? Ultimately, only for the so-called Idiots, who are the only ones in on the joke.
Someone might accuse the Gerogerigegege of much the same sort of approach to their art. The flouting of all standards of taste, decency or musicality might just be read as an obnoxious literal public wank, a confrontation rooted in pissy misanthropy and mean-spiritedness, akin to G.G. Allin’s grotesque dive into nihilism. And there is a nihilism to the Geros, a dive into fecal excess and a flouting of social boundaries, violently giving the lie to the hollow pretense of decency. But much more than that, more than Allin’s depravity paired with his basic, infantile approach to rock and roll, what the Gerogerigegege managed to do on
Instruments Disorder was to elevate, rather than debase their approach to pure, idiot rock and roll by making the music itself the final atom blast, the frenzied tearing to pieces of Rock itself.
It’s a pure, distilled and beautiful iteration of rock, noise, noise-rock, etc., an album that poses an answer to the question, “What if rock music was exactly what suburban 50s dad’s feared it was?” And rock music being what it is, the Gerogerigegege were able to derive three releases’ worth of material around this theme, and hell, could have made it their entire career of it if their performance-art transgression-fetishist sensibilities hadn’t kept them on the straight and narrow path of an unrelenting orgy of artistic originality for the rest of their career. You listen to a grand 15 seconds of
Instruments Disorder and you know exactly what to expect for the rest of it. Juntaro shrieks the song’s title in the most broken English possible before launching into a 4 count atop a mountain of feedback bolstered by the absolute stupidest sounding snare drum of all time, a series of spastic blasts directly to the back of the head, the experience of the proverbial frog in the blender. And that’s it. That’s the entire album, with precious little variation beyond the song titles and the occasional half-tempo drumbeat.
It was tough to let this work its idiot seduction on me at first; there’s a fear that diving into this with a barefaced appreciation is going to wind you up in the pretentious fart sniffer camp for life. Ironic, because Instruments Disorder is possibly the farthest you could possibly get from an actual pretentious work. But to paraphrase Kurt Cobain: “I don’t think Jandek’s music is pretentious, but I think pretentious people listen to Jandek". Fuckin' A though, if you’re diving into this because of some elitist tendency to dig up ultra-extreme underground music for street cred, or some irony-poisoned meme reason or other, you’re doing it precisely wrong and wasting your life on the emptiest sort of posturing one can engage in. If you go into this because you have the urge to howl like a lunatic into the staid face of structure for a bit, because you just want to hear a snare drum repeatedly exploding for 40 minutes, because you deep down in your soul love rock and roll and just want
that at its absolute sensory maximum, then God bless. At the end of this thing, I’m borderline exhausted and nearly giddy with the endless thrill of it all. Far from being the obnoxious misanthropes of the Lars Von Trier film, the Gerogerigegege is more than happy to let us in on their antics, to make us complicit in their desire to push art to its limits. I’m just happy that I can have so much fun doing it.
