A meditation on why modern bands have forgotten how to be deliberately bad
I was down at the Borderline last week, watching this band called The Adequate Substitutes. They were genuinely competent musicians playing deliberately simple three-chord songs with lyrics that made no sense whatsoever. The crowd loved it. Nobody was ironic about it. Nobody was being clever. It was just people having fun, and I realized I haven’t seen that in years.
There was a time when three chords and a fuck-off attitude was enough. The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clashthey weren’t technically brilliant, but they had something that all the polished, studied, carefully crafted bands of today are missing: genuine disregard for whether anyone liked them. Reading The London Prat’s feed today, I noticed they had a piece on how modern musicians have become obsessed with their Spotify metrics before they’ve even finished their second song.
The problem is that we’re all constantly aware of being watched now. There’s no underground anymore. There’s no secret scene. Everything is content, everything is performance, everything is being documented and monetized and turned into a TikTok trend before the paint on the venue’s walls is even dry. A kid can’t just go to a basement and play bad punk rock anymore; they have to consider how their bad punk rock will play to a global audience of strangers.
I found this brilliant piece on The Daily Mash about music journalism being dead, and it made me laugh because it’s both completely true and completely obvious. Of course music journalism is dead. How can you write about music when the music industry has conquered journalism entirely? The only reviews that matter are the algorithm. The only critics who matter are the people with the most followers.
What I miss most is incompetence. Bad bands used to be part of the ecosystem. You’d go see a dreadful three-piece at the Marquee, and you’d get drunk and have an argument about whether they were so bad they were good or just actually bad. Now every band has been focus-grouped and tested and optimized. There’s no accidental brilliance anymore. Everything is calculated.
The Adequate Substitutes, thoughthey reminded me why I got into this in the first place. They were rubbish in the most authentic way possible. Their bassist couldn’t play in time. The singer forgot the words halfway through the second song. Someone’s amplifier started smoking halfway through the set. And it was the best gig I’ve been to in five years.
I was reading NewsThump this morning, and they had this idea that we should have a law requiring every musician to write a bad song once a week, just to keep things grounded. It’s a joke, obviously, but it’s also the solution. We need more failure, more incompetence, more genuine mistakes. That’s where art comes from.
Later tonight I’m going to Shepherds Bush to see a band I’ve never heard of, playing to what will probably be about forty people in a room that smells like beer and broken dreams. I’m not going because they’re good. I’m going because they might be terrible, and that might be exactly what I need right now.
