ZZ Top's Antenna @ 30

Also, some thoughts on Pitchfork

Wow, we’ve got a lot of new readers this week. Almost 100 new subscribers just in the last seven days, and a bunch more since the beginning of the year. Welcome! A brief introduction, then:

I’m Phil Freeman. I write regularly for Stereogum, DownBeat, The Wire, and a few other places more intermittently (Bandcamp Daily, the Shfl, We Jazz magazine). I’ve got a book, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, coming out later this year. And I’ve been running Burning Ambulance, a mini-media empire which currently consists of this newsletter, a website, a podcast, and a record label, since 2010. If you want to become a paid subscriber to support what I do, that would be greatly appreciated. But I’m gonna keep doing it regardless. As Heinrich von Kleist famously put it, “I write only because I cannot stop.”

I have never written for Pitchfork. I used to pitch them once in a while, but none of my emails were ever answered, so I stopped. I once appeared on the radio with site founder Ryan Schreiber, debating the merits of Metallica’s Death Magnetic. Other than that, I was just a reader, and an intermittent one at that. I’d visit the site every day, but rarely find anything aligned with my interests. But unlike some of the assholes currently celebrating Pitchfork’s de facto destruction by parent company Condé Nast, I don’t view that as a failure of the site. It was vast, and my interests are relatively narrow.

The thing you need to realize and remember about Pitchfork, as it collapses (almost all of the staff have been let go, including people who spent close to two decades shaping it), is that it was never one thing. Indeed, all this past week, as people griped about the site on social media, you could tell when their impression of it was fixed. Some of them still thought of it as a place where white dudes offered snarky judgments of indie rock albums, as it was in the early 2000s. Some thought it had sold out its indie rock purity in order to cover pop music for girls, which is what people were saying in the 2010s. Still others thought it was a bunch of earnest kids filtering music criticism through “woke” identity politics, which was a common complaint a few years ago.

Pitchfork was all those things and more at one point or another. Its editors and contributors threw a lot of ideas at the wall, and they balanced coverage of “indie” “rock” with coverage of “mainstream” “pop” and hip-hop and metal and country and jazz and modern classical and noise and just about everything you can imagine. They even reviewed one of the albums on my label (though it was on more than 40 other labels too, and they credited it to Phantom Limb). Sometimes they could be dilettantish — for a while it seemed like Vijay Iyer was the only jazz artist they’d heard of — and they’d develop enthusiasms (we’re gonna cover metal now!) that would be abandoned after a while as though they’d never occurred at all.

Like I said, Pitchfork was vast. It was the hub of popular music criticism of the last 20 years, in terms of size, in terms of audience passion, in terms of real-world impact (from how its reviews could buoy or sink an album or even a band, to the Pitchfork Festival), in terms of how it shaped the way writers wrote about music. If it wasn’t all good, well, what is? And who cares? It was important. It was necessary. And it sucks that it’s going away. Yes, the brand name still exists. Yes, some staffers remain. Yes, it will continue to publish. But don’t kid yourself, Pitchfork as it was is dead.

What does that say about music journalism as a whole, though? I’m gonna be optimistic (or at least stoic) and say, Nothing. There are as many people interested in reading intelligent writing about music today as there were yesterday. Condé Nast doesn’t see enough profit in that audience to continue giving them what they want. That’s all. The question “is this a thing worth doing?” and “is this a thing I can get paid to do?” are not the same question. So yeah, someone else will have to start rolling the rock back up the hill, doing the work to establish the next big must-read spot. And in the meantime, a million niche blogs and newsletters (like the one you’re reading) will keep on keepin’ on.

ZZ Top were one of America’s greatest bands. (They’re still around, touring every year, but the chemistry between guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons, bassist/vocalist Dusty Hill, who died in July 2021, and drummer Frank Beard was alchemical and irreplaceable, and the band’s current bassist, whose name I can’t even remember and don’t care to look up, is a literal placeholder — he was Hill’s tech, and plays the dead man’s old equipment. So I think of ZZ Top in the past tense now.)

I was born at the tail end of 1971, so I learned about ZZ Top when they reinvented themselves in 1983 with the release of Eliminator and its massive hit singles “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs.” I loved those songs as a 12-year-old boy, and I still love them today. The follow-up album, Afterburner, not so much. But gradually, in fits and starts, I discovered their incredible back catalog, first via the misbegotten ZZ Top Sixpack, on which they ’80s-ized their earliest work (stay away, it’s a travesty), then later via the real versions of those albums. If you’ve never heard ZZ Top’s 1970s work, particularly the overdriven Tres Hombres, the psychedelic country rock of their often-overlooked masterpiece Tejas, and the bluesy street funk of Degüello, you’re missing out on some of the best music of that decade.

In the ’90s, though, ZZ Top were in a weird position. Their 1990 album Recycler was a hybrid of the electronic pop sound they’d pursued on Afterburner and the grimier blues-rock of Eliminator and Degüello, but it didn’t sell as well as its predecessors (it went platinum, but Afterburner had sold five times that, and Eliminator ten), and it didn’t have any pop hits. And yet, they were still enough of a commercial force that when their Warner Bros. contract expired, their manager Bill Ham convinced RCA to pay them $35 million to join that label’s roster.

Antenna was released on January 18, 1994. It reached #14 on the Billboard album chart (Recycler had reached #6) and was ultimately certified platinum. There were four singles: “Pincushion,” “Breakaway,” “PCH,” and “Fuzzbox Voodoo.” None were pop hits, but they got rock radio airplay. The industry was still willing to push ZZ Top.

Antenna is a good album. It’s grimier than Recycler; its electronic sounds (programmed beats, sequencers, and even discreet samples) owe more to hip-hop or even industrial than to synth-pop. (Gibbons has big ears, as musicians say; some of the drum machine beats on Eliminator were borrowed from Ministry records, and he later sampled Autechre on “Dreadmonboogaloo,” from 1999’s XXX.) But the guitars often have real bite, and the songs cover a pretty broad range, as ZZ Top songs go. In addition to the funky “Pincushion,” there are heartfelt blues weepers like “Breakaway” and “Cover Your Rig,” big stompers like “Fuzzbox Voodoo” and “Cherry Red,” and songs that don’t seem to be about anything at all like “World of Swirl” and “Antenna Head” (it’s worth noting that these goofier tracks are both sung by Dusty Hill — that was often his role). A couple of tracks, “Lizard Life” and “Girl in a T-shirt,” seem even more assembled than their previous material; they’re basically vocal and guitar laid over programmed backing tracks. It’s not a record made by a band on creative autopilot. But there wasn’t really a place in the pop landscape for ZZ Top in 1994, and they were stuck playing to fans who remembered their ’80s heyday, if not their ’70s boogie era.

The band would make three more albums for RCA — 1996’s Rhythmeen, 1999’s XXX, and 2003’s Mescalero. Each of these records has something to offer, but none is a total success. Rhythmeen ups the grit on Gibbons’ guitar and gives Frank Beard the sharp, ringing snare drum sound common to rock records from the mid ’90s to the early ’00s. XXX is even noisier, but the more electronic tracks are weird (cf. “Dreadmonboogaloo” and “Beatbox,” which almost sounds like Rob Zombie) and the last four tracks are new songs recorded live, a trick they’d previously pulled on 1975’s Fandango! Their only studio album of the 2000s, Mescalero, is an extremely mixed bag, combining their 21st century “industrial blues” sound with the psychedelic country heard on Tejas; there are marimbas, accordion, pedal steel guitar, and harmonica. Unfortunately, it’s far too long, delivering 17 tracks over 66 minutes. Pared back to its 10 best tracks, it could have been a career high point. They came back strong on 2012’s La Futura, and there are rumors that they had another record nearly finished when Hill died. Maybe we’ll hear it someday.

I finally saw ZZ Top live in 2007. Gibbons looked skeletally thin (as can be seen on the DVD Live from Texas, recorded about a month after the NYC show I went to), but the band was locked in, and the music was wall-shakingly loud; it was a fucking great show. Almost the entire set was drawn from their ’70s and ’80s albums, of course. There were a few surprises — they covered Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” and dragged out “Tube Snake Boogie” and “Pearl Necklace,” from 1981’s relatively overlooked El Loco. But the newest song they played was… “Pincushion,” from Antenna.

A few links, before I go:

• My latest Stereogum column features a profile of Ethan Iverson and reviews of new albums by Mary Halvorson, Keyon Harrold, Aaron Parks, Muriel Grossmann, and others.

• This interview with Heung-Heung Chin, album designer for John Zorn’s Tzadik label, is fantastic.

• Buy some CDs from Burning Ambulance Music, please. Funds raised will go toward the recording of a new album that’s gonna kick ass.

That’s it for now. See you next week!