Down the old mainstream

On a day in which the imminent terror status at home was elevated to high, anything short of blood on the stage was going to seem irrelevant. That was precisely the presence of The Nicotones on the night of their release party for their newest EP, You Got It Raw. Though hardly a beacon of the populous, Saturday night at Rhino's was not a symbol of the new disenfranchised youth, it was of the blinded, non-involved and conservative suburbanites. \nFormerly Abercrombie Skins, The Nicotones looked the part of their former name. To focus on the Nicotones' look is necessary because of the incredible triteness they exuded. The bass player was a rather androgynous looking fellow, like a cross between David Bowie circa the Hunky Dory album and Gram Parsons. He had the look of a true rock star and was gorgeous in a manner usually reserved for that elite group. He towed the line of his clean-cut brethren in the band who were dirty only because of their thrift store clothes. \nThe lead singer and rhythm guitarist Dave Parker, who had an "Eraserhead" style haircut with red tips, shifted his eyes coyly, in that cute manner learned from sellout punks like Green Day or Blink-182. Parker's compatriot guitarist to his left looked sharp in his gray and black Sunday clothes and black tie. \nLooking like an expose from VH1, the crowd hopped along with the jolly sounds of pop-punk. Moody meant a minor chord tossed in amongst the barrage of power chord riffs, which could have been stolen from any one of the hundreds of similar bands on the radio, kiddy-scene and basement circuit around the Midwest. Exhausting their limitations, they sunk to lows of meandering merriment by playing tongue-in-cheek covers of Lita Ford's "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Daydream Believer." \nAs Robert Christgau always says, rock and roll is essentially an art of becoming, so what are the Nicotones becoming? Garage workers? People who quote rock critics? Liberal arts students? Journalists? Criminals? Probably somewhere in between these ghastly futures. Of course, it really isn't fair to hold this relatively immaterial group of Bloomington residents responsible for the outcome of their generation, but from a critical point of view it is polemical to hold so-called artists to higher standards of practices.\nAs young boys prepare to go off to be cannon fodder in strange nations for strange reasons, they may never fully understand that politics are an absolute necessity, or at least a display of raw emotion is. The Nicotones provided a contrived sense of reality on this night. Perhaps it was the best night of their lives, when they had their fifteen minutes and got the girl, but perhaps there is a little more to life then your friends and neighbors.