Ten mellow artists whose music will kick your ass.

You don't need volume or force to be POWERFUL. But if you play rock music, you should listen to these people before you go out there and get smoked by someone with an acoustic guitar or a piano.

Dec 05, 2024

I went out to a see a band play recently, and the lack of fervor in the playing was so pronounced that I found it physically painful to be in the same room. With my body going into shutdown mode, I found an empty booth off to the side of the stage and positioned myself so I was sitting up with my legs stretched out across my side of the booth. It seriously took all the energy I had to fight-off the urge to go to sleep. It’s not that I was especially tired, it’s that my system just couldn’t handle such an unrelenting pummeling of blandness. To make matters worse, this band’s set dragged on for upwards of an hour and a half.

I was happy and relieved to finally get the fuck out of there. I don’t usually like to be discouraging towards anyone who gets the nerve up to get onstage. As the late Philip Toshio Sudo wrote in his indispensable 1997 book Zen Guitar — a book I’d highly recommend whether you play guitar or not — it’s important when attending any performance to foster a sense of encouragement and appreciation. I completely concur with Toshio Sudo on this. Cultivating mutual support is crucial to not only the health of any musical-social ecosystem, but the inner health of the person who’s feeling critical.

If you’re projecting a vibe of negativity outwards towards musicians onstage, then it’s likely that your own internal monologue hews towards a withering tone that damages you more than anyone else. In these situations, we should keep the phrase If you think you can do better, then go ahead in our back pockets. Repeat the phrase over and over to yourself and you’ll eventually hit on the practical wisdom it contains: if you’re taking care of what you need to be doing, it doesn’t matter what anyone else is up to. And if you’re content with your own progress, you won’t need to cut down others’ efforts.

There’s also the pragmatic component: that band you’re hating-on might consist of people you’re going to be friends with — or work with — someday. Or you may already be friends (or family, or in a relationship, or in a band) with them.

Okay, fair enough. But, by the same token, it’s also important to recognize that if we care enough to aspire to do something well, then we have every reason to chafe when we see other people doing that thing without full conviction. And my issue isn’t so much with the individual band I tried to watch, but with what I see as a more widespread generational malady…

For reference, I was born in ‘72, which means I was a teenager in the ‘80s and was in my twenties throughout most of the ‘90s. It’s not that my generation didn’t bring its own brand of superficiality and half-assedness — or its own share of lame bands — to the table when it came to music. In fact, I think it was my generation whose music first suffered from a real lack of effort. Affordable recording gear, the decline in viable income from playing live music, and the proliferation of CD burners all eroded at the incentive structure for bands to hone their act. As a result, the late ‘90s/early 2000s saw an infinite number of musicians across the USA fell prey to weekend-warrior syndrome.

Since that time, I’ve come across so many people who give off the sense that they love the act of being in a band rather than actually being a band as a creative organism. I get the sense from musicians like this that they’re in love with posturing as a band — almost like real-life action figures making a fashion statement — more than they’re in love with creation itself. Moreover, at a certain point along the way, I started noticing that the musicians around me had jumped straight into adopting their parents’ musical tastes.

Of course, my observation is a purely anecdotal — I don’t have statistical data to back it up — but if you scan the pop-culture landscape over the last quarter century, I think there’s something to be said for how post-Gen X youth expession reflects a desire for parental approval. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of these people who insists that music was sooooo much better in my day, but I would argue that there’s been a significant shift in intention.

I mean, I’ll ask you: do you think that people who’ve grown up in the 2000s, 2010s, and now the 2020s have shown as much of a desire to stake-out their own claim to art in opposition to their parents? Or do you suspect that more people from those generations would rather find some kind of alignment or harmony with their parents’ tastes? As a case in point: my mom has absolutely loved The Beatles since her adolescence. I started to explore The Beatles in 10th grade, but I didn’t really dive in until I was in college — which is to say: after I’d had some time to carve-out my own path through music.

And even to this day, my mom and I don’t like The Beatles for the same reasons. I’m gracious and affirming when she expresses her love for their music — or Crosby, Stills & Nash or anyone else I’ve come to love of my own accord — but we’re not actually sharing the experience. And I prefer it that way. Even though I would now happily go through her record collection, I would do it on my own.

Not that I wouldn’t be overjoyed to get my mother tickets to a show that I know she’s going to enjoy, but I don’t need for us to see eye-to-eye with me on music. (It’s also important to me that my daughter stand on her own, regardless of what I think of her tastes. Her music is hers, not mine!) The fact is, I’m good with where I stand when it comes to music, and that sense of standing on my own two feet doesn’t require parental approval. All around me, though, I feel like that vibration has shifted. And I think that shift played has a major role in the overall temperament of what our culture produces.

Music, for so many people, is a way of reviving aesthetics from the past. There’s a certain point to which this is both inevitable and completely healthy. I mentioned Crosby, Stills & Nash — it would be utterly foolish to try and resist influences from previous time periods. But when one’s entire musical act consists of exhuming fashion statements from the past and the music lacks personality and it lacks conviction in the delivery, then that’s when you’ll find me squirming in a booth wishing I’d stayed the fuck home.

Watching that band the other night, I was cursing the ghost of Gram Parsons for giving rise to wave after wave of fake-ass country-rock cowboys who wouldn’t know how to rock if Parsons himself rose from the grave and plugged-in to the amp next to theirs. It’s not even that the execution itself was lacking, it’s just that these people didn’t give off any sense that they had a reason to be there — or that they had to be there. I couldn’t perceive the fire, drive, hunger, zest for life, or a strong feeling of any kind that motivated them to put their feelings into sound. Even when playing “hard,” they may as well have been wax statues up there, yikes!

This particular band played a particular strain of country-rock that sounds particularly lifeless when played without passion, but this applies to “heavy” bands playing rock, metal, and punk too. We shouldn’t confuse mellowness with timidity, nor should we make the mistake of equating volume with power. But ff you're going to play rock music, my advice to you would be to do it with fervor or don't do it at all. So, to help you find your bearings, here’s a list of artists who manage to be intense without resorting to force.

These artists are/were able to be gripping because they weren’t hiding behind affectations. For those about to rock, I salute you but you’ll need to mean it in order to pull it off. Remember that before you go out there — or you’ll find yourself getting smoked by someone who brings nothing more than an acoustic guitar or a piano. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?

With intensity, goddamnit! 😂