Release Date: 3/99
Album: THE SCAPEGOAT FACTORY
Writer: ADAM MARSLAND
Audio:
Video:
Lyrics:
Lately I've felt a creeping obsolescence
And strangely I really couldnít care less
I think we're in a hole
Lately I think the point has been pretty well demolished
Every beat too recycled and polished
With not a particle of soul
I hate rock and roll
I hate rock and roll
I hate rock and roll
Hear them
Listen to the critical pundits
With words too fawning and redundant
Its virtues to extol
Fear them
Bow down to the attitude rulers
Shoot heroin -- it makes you cooler!
And if thatís your only goal...
I hate rock and roll
Long ago there was a beautiful thing called music
Much too powerful to let you choose it
But now it's well under control
I hate rock and roll
Adam sez:
This song, like a lot of the songs on THE SCAPEGOAT FACTORY, was originally written for a side band I had going in the mid '90s with two Japanese women called Manic 5-0 (Ineko Saito, the bassist in Manic 5/0 is on this track). Neither of the girls could play very well so the challenge for me was to come up with something compelling that was also simple enough for them to play. Since my writing tends to get a little too convoluted, that's a good thing. It actually posed a huge problem when they were cutting the demo because they couldn't pronounce it understandably. Steve Refling came up with the solution by asking them to sing "I Hay Truck and Roll." It worked. Ineko eventually returned the favor by writing Japanese lyrics for the Japanese release of the song, and I believe this song got some airplay there. That version has a completely different bridge section, btw.
I know now there's another song with the same title (was it Jesus & Mary Chain? I forgot), but I hadn't heard it then. I think this title came from a Brian Wilson studio track sheet. It was the working title for "California Girls," IIRC.
James Hazley (drummer on the first two Cockeyed Ghost albums) loved this song, and after he left the band, and I had to keep going on my own, that gave me a bit of confidence. I rewrote some of the lyrics, and the line about the heroin thing was partly inspired by my anger at some of the influences around him that contributed to his problems. It was a fresh wound then.
The band that recorded The Scapegoat Factory was kind of thrown together -- Kurt had been away from the drums for two years at that point -- and I wound up playing a lot of the instruments on the album. I wanted a rawer sound, somewhat inspired by Apples In Stereo and the other SpinArt bands I was into at the time, so what better way to achieve it than having me incompetently playing multiple instruments. Plus, on a lot of the Manic 5/0 material, it had been written around my drum patterns, so it was just simpler to play the drums myself than to teach it to someone else. If you listen carefully, there are two drum tracks on this recording: mine and Kurt's. The big fill at the end of the song is actually two separate fills that sound like one.