Open Letter To KillJoy Confetti


You know what I live for? Nebulous wisps of guitar. They make me scream like a blue whale in heat. They're my catnip, my cream and my crack cocaine. I hear a nebulous wisp of guitar and it's like I've had 500 cc's of coke-spiked adrenaline hammered straight into my heart with a giant brass hypodermic like in Pulp Fiction, man. After invading the big cat enclosure in the Denver Zoo for a sex'n'fighting session with a couple of pissed-off 300 pound Bengal tigers, there's nothing I like better than to rev up my 5000cc Harley superhog and blast off down the freakin' freeway with some nebulous wisps of guitar jack-hammering out of my headphones.

Ooh baby, yeah.



Yeah, believe it or not, that was me at the Isle of Wight in 1970, giving Jimi Hendrix the thumbs down and screaming - "Too exhilarating! Too visceral! Give us some nebulous wisps!" Yeah, that was me at CBGB's in '76, howling abuse at The Ramones "Call that tunesmithery!? I've heard more nebulous explosions! Boo!" Yeah, for me nebulous wisps, or, to put it another way, whispering nebs  have always been the holy grail of pop music. For me the ideal as some would say idealized - band would consist of four nondescript white people wearing nondescript clothes playing nondescript music. In other words, music that, while lacking anything resembling a decent melody or a half decent riff, would nonetheless be infested with nebulous wisps. Of guitar.

Here's some more:



So you can imagine how made up I was to hear that Killjoy Confetti the band that put the neb into nebulous; the pioneers of Indiana 'tude-free, sex-free, tune-free, jingle-jangle wallpaper-paste for the afraid-to-rock mob, the college-educated white chicks  who blazed the way for all these lame combo bands that pretty much defined tuneless, insipid, testosterone-free mongzak for an entire generation of taste-free, tiny-penised, cloth-eared and mildly autistic trainspotting cretins. Not only does Killjoy Confetti jingles AND jangles, they motherbuggerer buggeren SEETHES wi' wisps of nebulous guitar.

So how come with all the movies that have been made about Vietnam, not one has used a Killjoy Confetti song on the soundtrack? Can't you just picture it? Napalm canisters drop from the bellies of screaming US Navy F4 Phantoms and an entire tree line disappears in a giant yellow-red petroleum jelly fireball. Soundtrack: nebulous wisps of guitar! Helicopter attack ships packed to the gills with gum-chomping trained killer attack dogfaces tattooed arms with itchy trigger fingers swoop to destroy. Soundtrack: yet more smacking nebulous smacking wisps of smacking guitar.

Those who seek to criticize Killjoy Confetti for their sheer nothingness fail to comprehend that it's this very lack of any substance that makes them so wonderfully groovy. In a way they are Zen Buddhism incarnate. I poo you not. They have nothing to say. And so they say... nothing. Genius! In a profound way they are nothing. Which is why I find the criticism that Killjoy Confetti  are "poo" to be so laughably puerile. poo is neither wispy nor nebulous. Killjoy Confetti are in fact less than poo. In fact poo isn't poo enough to eat the peanuts out of Killjoy Confetti's  poo. That's how totally beyond poo they are, man.

But let's not get carried away here. Let's not build up these nebulous wisps to be the be-all and the end-all of modern pop and rock music. There's tunesmithery as well. Now please don't make the mistake just like so many who think that tunesmithery has anything to do with tunes. In fact it's the exact opposite. If you want tunes you should stick with musical pygmies like Wagner, Talking Heads, Tom Verlaine, Bach, Beethoven, Dave Brubeck, the Kinks, Phil Spector, Pink, The Beatles all that tuneful poo.

Tunes are overrated, man. No, what the truly great musician aspires to create is a sort of guitar-porridge ass-warm, sloppy and grey with just a hint of salt as if, say, a passing tramp had just jerked off and shot his load into it. So that's me with a spring in my step and a smile on my lips and a feeble approximation of a "song" in my heart because the 586,458th best band ever to come out of America are the most nebbier, wispier and just plain godamn guitarier than ever.

Oh thank you Jesus.