On Bloc Party

This is not about intention. This is about reading and mapping.

The Bloc Party album Weekend in the City looks pale and pasty when compared with their previous album Silent Alarm. Where Silent Alarm sounds exciting and urgent. Not so silent but oh so alarming. Like going through the motions; like walking, not running; if half-assed didn't sound as bad as it does.

What can be read as a reference to the Bret Easton Ellis book Less Than Zero, the first track, "Song For Clay (Disappear Here)" may be just that, a song for Less Than Zero's main character Clay. Or, "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)" may confront what LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy describes as "borrowed nostalgia from the unremembered eighties". Walking down Hollywood Boulevard, the year is 2007, this year, I see, these two Hollywood rock kids, circa 1987. Leather pants, big black boots with bandanas wrapped at the ankle. This was the 1980s. It wasn't Pylon. It wasn't Gang of Four. It was Guns N Roses and Poison.

I see Bloc Party confronting the anxiety of influence of invoking 80s nostalgia and at the same time moving away from it. Using the appropriate reference of Less Than Zero drawing on Ellis's vapid characters described as vampires; hollow, soulless, void of emotion empty in excess, works because it's saying there's nothing to remember, in a way it's a referent that's not really there. The image of the 80s reflected in Song for Clay is the image of a vampire in the mirror; it has disappeared. In the first verse, Bloc Party singer, Kele, confronts his ability to say something. He references modernity and history as discourses to live up to. Up against this, he brings Clay to the table, it seems to say in a sense that he has nothing to bring, or that there is nothing to bring.

In the chorus the line, "live the dream like the 80s never happened." Sounds like the charade currently posed by the indie/punk bands Murphy describes in his song "Losing My Edge", the ones borrowing nostalgia from an unremembered eighties. This unremembered 80s never really happened. The early new wave bands that everyone brings up to describe what the 80s sounded like describes a moment created after the 80s were over. That's the way nostalgia works; as creating a present as really a future's past. This is not to say the Pylon and Gang of Four were not someone's nostalgia or didn't really exist, this is to say that the 80s as a decade did not exist the way we remember it. And this seems to be what Bloc Party are responding to in "Song For Clay". I could write this song off as just an inspiration or dedication to Clay if it weren't for the last verse in the song.

When Bloc Party brings the images and references of Less Than Zero to the context of East London, it becomes more than homage. This song draws parallels. And for Less Than Zero to be real and close to the band, it would seem to be about the anxiety of influence; what they feel in debt to and what the want to transgress from. The musical landscape becomes the freeway everyone in Less Than Zero is so afraid to merge onto. And what is that billboard that Clay reads as he enters the freeway on ramp? Disappear Here. To participate, to merge, is something that Clay is afraid to do. Bloc Party is acknowledging the loss that is associated with being a band and putting something out there. To be afraid of saying something that has already been said or not saying anything at all; to be aware of the repetition without referent, the empty referent of Clay, this is what I see in "Song For Clay".