ALTERNATIVELY AGORAPHOBIC!
/20.11.2011

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After a week preparing ourselves unnecessarily well for a concert that had the organisational commonsense of an Eskimo attempting to build his igloo in downtown Riyadh, I’ve started to realise that the one great problem that we have as a band is that we’re not alternative enough to be truly popular amongst certain pseudo-intellectuals present on the Polish music scene. Polish music is currently suffering from the “underground” syndrome, a deadly form of virus mainly afflicting charlatans such as songwriters who are unable to write coherent melodies, or guitarists who cannot play a guitar part that actually helps the song’s development. However, once the said charlatan realises that by defining these shortfalls and shortcomings as “alternative music” he or she will gain immense credibility amongst some critics who are constantly on the look-out for the next charlatan to promote. Alternative music (which unfortunately some web portals still categorise us under) is a euphemism for “Can’t Write a Song” music or “Tone-deaf Music”, and many “alternative” fans are in reality the equivalent to a visitor of modern-art museums who, upon seeing a messy scribble hanging on the wall, eulogises about the artist’s inner-struggle and search for his ‘inner-child’. In other words, charlatan musicians provide music to charlatan listeners (an unfortunately sizeable group at the moment in Warsaw). I remember being told that in most other countries, we would be classified as pop, but in Poland – a country where the genre of pop is seemingly confined to busty blond girls singing about partying – we’ve had to invent our own genre, “neo-retro” as nothing else really quite fits. After hearing a lot of “Alternative” noise at the farcical Agora-sponsored festival we’ve just played, I’m also starting to think that we certainly don’t fit in with any other genre offered by the vast majority of Polish bands.