The frontman Dave Grohl called his polar opposite: “Absolutely not”
I’m not the songwriter of one of Britain’s best bands, nor do I have a thick, confident Mancunian accent. I don’t even wear sunglasses indoors, and so I don’t feel as though I can confidently say this forthcoming phrase with my own voice. But, this is a quote that I wholeheartedly agree with and think summarises exactly the differences between art and commercialism.
“The consumer didn’t fucking want Jimi Hendrix, but they got him, and it changed the world, and the consumer didn’t want Sgt Pepper’s, but they got it, and they didn’t want the Sex Pistols. The customer doesn’t know what he wants, you fucking give it to him.”
That wasn’t Aristotle or Socrates but Noel Gallagher who said it, the man who proudly possesses all three traits that I so clearly outlined, I will never possess. The point is, I could never say it with that gusto, despite feeling the meaning of it with the same passion as Gallagher himself.
Because it’s true they aren’t supposed to be fed like hungry customers at a fast food restaurant, baselessly picking items in a need for short-term satisfaction. Their music should guide us into a state of unfamiliarity, leading us into the trends we don’t yet realise exist.
Well, that’s what great artists do, as Gallagher points out. Dave Grohl would stand right beside him in that camp also, a purist of rock and roll who has learned that authenticity exists in a feeling, not a product.
So it made him equally as bemused as Gallagher, albeit a lot politer, when Weezer’s Dave Cuomo came to him asking about how he wrote his greatest hits. Grohl recalled, “[Cuomo] goes, ‘Hey, so when you write songs, how do you do it?’ I started explaining how we do it, which is pretty simple. I make some demos. I show them to the guys. And then we get together and play them. He says, ‘Do you listen to top 40 radio?’ I said, ‘Now? Not really. I mean, unless I’m in the car with my kids, I guess.’”
The inquiry into Grohl’s radio listening habits wasn’t small talk so much as a chance to gauge how relative his music is to chart success. Because after learning that Grohl listens to pop music flippantly, Cuomo began to wonder exactly where he got his inspiration from.
Grohl continued, “He said, ‘So you don’t write songs to try to get on top 40 radio?’ And I said, ‘No. I don’t think we’re allowed there!’ Do I expect to knock Cardi B off the fucking charts? Absolutely not. I said, ‘No, I kind of write songs for the stage or a setlist, and I write them for Foo Fighters fans’. And he said, ‘Wow. So you write for the show?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, don’t you?’ And I don’t think that he does. I think that we’re sort of on opposite ends of that spectrum. Which is funny.”
It’s lucky Cuomo didn’t say that to Grohl’s British mate, for he would have received an appropriately scathing response. But surely a chin scratch from Grohl would have been enough to make him realise that he is entirely missing the point when it comes to songwriting, for chasing the tail of commercial earworms is by no means the way to finding artistic innovation.
