RIFF MARKET

Eyeball Skeleton
Cake Shop
July 30

Download: "Eyeball Skeleton"

Last night me and all the big kids showed up at Cake Shop a/k/a Pleasure Island to see two elementary schoolers and their puppetmaster dad play Pixies songs with bad singing, shoddy basswork, and Cute Kids Lyrics about "bouncing apes" and "sharks on fire" and, ahoy, the "eyeball skeleton" which are so fucking cloying no elementary schooler in the age of Mortal Kombat 21 and the Zidane headbutt could have written them. Half the time I wondered, who's doing who the favor here? Is the dad taking the kids on tour, or vice versa? The other half I thought about the light-skinned black kid who used to play drums around the Harvard T-stop and the kid's "manager." The kid would drum, then switch to piano, then to saxophone, then to keyboard, whatever the people want, whatever Papa said the people want, I'm tired papa, please, I'm hungry and tired and cold and my drumsticks are giving me splinters.

But Eyeball Skeleton are just young kids! Didn't you read their website? Didn't you read this sentence?

"EYEBALL SKELETON is the name of our band.It started when I was in Kindergarten and Charlie was in the 1st grade. We thought of the name cause Charlie thought of the name eyeball & I thought of skeleton."

They're just having fun--it's "honest and, most of all, FUN!" So why would anyone say something that might possibly dissuade them from making music? What's the beef? Sure there's something kitschy and gimmicky in that primal rock&roll& sorta way to have two untrained kids trucked around merely as believable visuals, and the whole "you're just trained to think that their singing's not in tune, you got to free your ear from Western music inhibitions dude, get down with the future!" is the same crockstock noise kids gorge themselves on between visits to that record store near me where bands actually bag up their own shit, call it LIMITED EDITION and people actually buy the shit.

BUT: The kids totally love it so what's the big deal! They get to stay up past their bedtime and drink coffee so they can stay awake! And isn't that what this world needs anyway--less bloggers, more music? They're just kids, leave them alone!

Well those people over there are just black people, that guy taking it up the butt is just a homo, and that lady covered in her own shit and piss and vomit is just a singer-songwriter-rapevictim isn't she! Let's just leave everybody alone, god forbid they read something you write and dedicate half a newspaper profile talking about how much they hate you.

Meanwhile, Ripitup Reynolds blames, among other things, the music, the overspecialization that requires needless jargon and a cool, calm head, the shorter inches. Which is true but he's merely listing symptoms for a scarier prospect. Critics--ostensibly music's biggest fans--don't listen, they just consume, categorize, top-ten and onto the next year. There's no room for love or hate, no room for writhing in anger or ecstasy or both, when the big question is Listen or Don't Listen, three stars or four. It's no longer a genre, it's a trade, and there's no trade in the world that will let me speculate what Eyeball's mother thinks of Eyeball, whether Eyeball is (as J thinks) just an elaborate way for Eyeball's dad to get back at Eyeball's mom, whether these kids get drunk on a night-to-night basis or only when they play sell-outs. Apparently that stuff's not important.

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