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| Puffy - Boom Boom Beat |
| Say
what you will about Puffy, but one thing they aren’t is
pretentious. I don’t mean they’re lacking pretension in that
annoying, ultra slick, pre packaged, “who gives a crap about music just
get me on the radio” kind of way (which, it should hardly need
mentioning, is often just pretentiousness in hipster clothing.) I mean
they have no hang-ups about simply being rock stars. No “roots”
moves, no forthcoming grand opus, no protests about how they’re a
“real” group coupled with demands for artistic control, nothing. They’re simply, unironically, rock stars. They work with a rotating bag of producers, tend to rely on outside songwriters, and the only “wink” in their music is the wink of hot women flirting with the audience, like it has been since time immemorial (and shall be again, dear reader, if there’s anything still worth saving in the World.) When you think about it, it’s difficult to overstate how unusual this makes them. Nobody just makes music anymore: EVERYBODY has an angle, and even bands that play three chord, dumb ass pop punk feel the need to make a “statement” now and then. There is, so far as I can tell, no “angle” to current Puffy, not even a “we don’t have an angle” kind of angle. Take “Boom Boom Beat.” Kicking off with a “yeah yeah yeah” that pushes you face first into a three chord glam stomp, complete with cowbell, it’s…well, about a beat. There is no deeper meaning. No pushed envelopes. No new frontier. It’s just a rock song about walking to the beat. Even the video mocks "serious" rock, featuring a multitude of long haired, faceless, and identical musicians moping their way through the song. It’s a damn good song, too, and that’s the thing that makes Puffy more than the first (or even second, third, or fourth) glance might suggest. All kinds of bands might babble about rocking out, but unintentionally or not, there are invariably quotes around it: telegraphed Beatles rips, “doom” riffs writ large in Black Sabbath font, etc. Not so here. The second track ("お江戸流れ星IV," or "Edo Shooting Stars IV,") despite taking the normally unrecoverable step of using a ska beat, is another great song. The chorus? “Ba ba ba ba-ba-ba ba-ba.” A playful keyboard solo comes in with all the unselfconscious sugar pop glory of The Monkees at their peak. It fades out with handclaps and that “ba ba ba” thing. Perfect. "きみがすき" ("I Like You") has an acoustic guitar/xylophone driven chorus that is about as shimmering and pristine as any Summertime AM radio hit you could think of. And this is the SECOND B side to this single. The fact that I can barely make out what they’re singing is about as much of a problem as it was when I first heard John going on about being the walrus: i.e. none at all. Listening to “Boom Boom Beat” for the fourth time in a row, I’m simultaneously uplifted and depressed. Depressed because it makes the soul sucking self-awareness of current music all the more glaring. Uplifted because it’s a great song. In a music landscape so buried in its multi facetedness, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And this…this is a good cigar. |