Clay Reed (Subsonics)
SPB: It seems that the hyphenated genre "garage-punk" keeps popping up more and more. What do you think of the term?
Reed: The term garage-punk...is as meaningless and subjective as all genre labels are. Kierkegaard said: "When you label,me you negate me"...but he was maybe kinda extremist. Maybe when you label me you negate the label. The genesis of genre labels is usually blamed on journalists, but record labels and bands are usually complicit...conscious of the 2-seconds scan anyone is gonna give anything.
And that gets down to the real problem, if you think it's a problem: no one has the time or attention to sort out the particulars or context,or nuances of anything anymore. That's nothing new, but it just gets more and more exaggerated and extreme all the time. Garage-punk is a label that gives little actual information about what it may be applied to because it's used so broadly. It provides about as much insight as a word like: “bread” But no one's added much to the garage-punk vocabulary in the way there are more nuanced sub-definitions for “bread” (like-rye, English muffin, crusty, stale, biscuit, etc). But now I'm really getting bogged down in a bog-down of dissecting a dissection...for a label I, myself, would never use anyway.
