Rock ‘n’ roll, of course, is all about The Kids. No matter what the makeup of its actual audience — and evidence suggests that it varies widely — there’s an assumption that pop music fans skew overwhelmingly young, and the more commercial the act the younger the presumptive audience. That assumption is sometimes trotted out as a preemptive defense against criticism: This music isn’t made for you, Mr. Critic Man — we’re doin’ it for The Kids!
Now, some of that is just bullshit face-saving — a cynical conflation of the ideas of “broad appeal” and “lowest common denominator” that’s frankly insulting to any audience, no matter how young — but there’s a kernel of truth in it. Youth is a time when, perhaps because our own lives are so small and proscribed, pop culture seems so terribly huge and important; it is life on an epic scale, in which we participate by proxy. In adolescence, especially, our skins are at their thinnest, our nerve endings so close to the surface that the joys and pains of art, of music, can touch us in a way that they never really will again.
And so it’s a good thing, I think, to spend time around young people, to revisit that perspective. The kids at The Rock Star Stories have been disseminating that view since 2001, when the Rich siblings — a quartet of showbiz kids from South Florida — started producing their cheapjack cable access-style weekly half-hour. The production values were strictly Wayne’s World level, but the Riches and their scrappy cohort of Boca Raton high-schoolers were soon landing interviews with national acts. From that grew a nonprofit youth media training organization, a show that airs in nearly 70 national markets, and now a new book. Off the Bus and On the Record transcribes 22 interviews from The Rock Star Stories, along with behind-the-scenes tidbits from the show’s on-air talent and production staff. (more…)
So I had a great idea. An entire post about fake rock bands — groups made up for your cinematic pleasure that, in spite of not actually being real bands, managed to put out a couple decent tunes for the soundtrack. The definitions of real and fake in this super-sub-category are wishy-washy. Some of these actors actually play their music, others don’t and are lip-synching to studio performers. Some of the groups represented are meant as serious depictions, while others are strictly satirical. Some aren’t getting represented at all here (inferring that if the key member of the band is named something like 
, your crappy movie didn’t make the cut.) Yes, a great idea, and an original idea! No one on the Internet has dared to do anything like this, not even my colleague 
If we’re starting with the obvious, then we’re obviously starting with Spinal Tap, the metal band consisting of David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean,) Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer.) In the now ubiquitous mockumentary, the actors actually recorded their own tunes, which is a rarity. Then again, the songs weren’t meant to be taken all that seriously, but to be the foil for generational musical satire. Ranging from hippy-dippy psyche-folk with “Listen to the Flower People,” to Yardbirdsian skiffle rock with “
was meant to be a joke. (A point of irony — “Gimme Some Money” was actually used in an American Express commercial, before the credit market was revealed to be as bogus as some of these bands…)
. Sure, there was plenty of help from special guest musicians like Dweezil Zappa, Joe Satriani and Slash, but it was still Tap at its core, and still satirical. It would be hard to hear “