“I don’t see what anyone can see in anybody else.” Reflections on the Moldy Peaches 15 years after
The Moldy Peaches released their ramshackle self-titled LP in 2001 and followed with a tour supporting The Strokes whose fame was skyrocketing at the time. My friends Simon and Amy went to see them and people were pointing at Amy and crowding round when she started saying she was there to see the Moldy Peaches and not so much The Strokes. They were saying “she’s crazy” and making screwy gestures. Within three years, The Moldy Peaches had disbanded and The Strokes were still going. But the legacy of the Moldy Peaches has left a mark on the subculture in the way The Strokes meteoric rise influenced more mainstream indie bands.
Cassablancas et al of the latter band need little introduction, having made a firm mark on the music scene the other side of the last decade. Is This It? Was heralded on release as vital and exciting music, reaching number 2 in the UK albums chart and being listed in all manner of end of year reviews and two different books with titles to the effect of 1000 odd things to hear before you die. Needless to say, the tour prior to release had generated oodles of hype. The Moldy peaches on the other hand were of only marginal appeal and were seen by giggoers as something between a novelty act and a joke.
Of course, in one context, the Moldy Peaches was a joke of Adam Green and Kimya Dawson’s, but not in the way the punters thought. “Me and my friends are so smart, we invented a new kind of art, Post modernist throwing darts, smoking crack and cutting crack” the druggy excess was not the normal rock and roll abandon, but an art school type of excess. The guitarist Aaron Wilkinson’s appearance on WMFU Record Fair show in a tutu and buffalo boots was redolent of Evan Dando’s nineties flirtations with punk rock cross dressing. Who’s got the crack is shameless, irreverent and brilliant in it’s simplicity and courted the interest of Pete Doherty and Carl Barrat who would play it live, sometimes with Adam Green singing with them. The lyrics are plucked out of the air, or coughed up in a skunk haze. There is no discernable songcraft. The melodies and chords are basic as a cash generator strat copy. Their carefree, cracked DIY delivery is redolent of the “just good enough” aesthetic that characterises a thread of avant garde output. Antifoik isn’t the same as punk folk. It’s not aggressive per se, just chaotic. But just as anti-art is still art, and anti-fashion still fashion, anti-folk is located in relation to the genre it puts itself in opposition to. It is anti-traditional, a rupture in the narrative of folk music, a break with the perpetuation of the canon, a Catherine wheel spinning and spitting fire.
The Moldy Peaches didn’t gain major mainstream recognition really until their inclusion on the soundtrack of Juno in 2007, a film about teenage pregnancy set in a twee Indie-lite mise en scene of flannel shirts and hamburger phones. A die hard fan somewhere might have said they’d sold out, if any Moldy Peaches fans cared about commodification, which Adorno readers will understand is a necessary and inherently inevitable result of any activity that critiques capitalism (see: the history of Punk). And the songs selected were the cuter, more well-crafted, less confrontationally deliberately shit ones. Downloading porn with Dave-o wasn’t on there. It was the sing song girl boy anthem Anyone Else But You that got the spotlight, with a cover by Ellen Page and Michael Cera at the end. But this wasn’t what made the band great; it was the thuggishly intellectual elevation of squatbound musical jokes into high art via it’s acceptance as part of the musical milieu of the early noughties. And it spurred a hundred imitators to half learn the guitar and play clever-stupid songs at open mic nights.
For me, the Moldy Peaches are the epitome of musical anti-art rebellion, in all it’s contradiction, pretention and whimsy. And the statement they made is much more interesting than the catchy and competent Strokes ever were.
