$5 //
Edition of 150 //
https://richgirls1.bandcamp.com/album/love-is-the-dealer //
"Love is the dealer
Love is the drug
Love is the needle
Love is the loaded gun"
Throughout the history of music and art in general, there has been one and only one creative force which has fueled it all: love. In my youth, when I was more interested in such things, I remember reading this interview with Chuck Palahniuk (or maybe it was the forward to the book) where he said "Fight Club" had been called many things by many people but it was rarely referred to as a love story, which he saw it as being. Everything really does come back to love somehow. It's crazy but even the heaviest of bands who seem just pissed off at the world only do so out of love (They wouldn't be so mad if they didn't care so much)
Reviewing music is an act of love. For those who are not me and actually write about artists they do not like, they still love them somehow deep inside. That's why it always struck me as funny for those who wrote negative reviews. Type four paragraphs, pull out lyrics you don't like, take eight pictures, post it to social media... It takes time and effort. Why go through all of that just to essentially say "Hey, don't listen to this album because I don't like it and here's why". Why I like something doesn't matter. I'm not about trying to convince you to dislike the same music as me. I'm trying to sway you into enjoying the same music as I do, even if not for the same reasons.
Rich Girls are a perfect example of an artist who should be on cassette. Somewhere between those modern sounds of Metric and the older days sounds of Blondie and Concrete Blonde, these are songs I would have felt were ahead of their time had I found them on cassette back in 1986 and yet I still feel like they are ahead of their time in 2018. They are mellow in their delivery, you know that fast paced rock but it feels like it's moving in slow motion but the art doesn't suffer for it because it still doesn't drag on and make you feel like it's taking forever to listen to one song. How can something be fast and slow at the same time? How can you love what you hate?
For some reason I've seen a lot of tweets lately about Fleetwood Mac. First they were part of this dance routine (their song was) and then a band member left and, well, someone retweeted someone else saying "[name omitted] is the best band ever" and when I listened to them on Bandcamp I thought "Haven't you ever heard of Fleetwood Mac before?" But Fleetwood Mac and even Blondie, Heart, 10,000 Maniacs they all had this power to make fast paced music feel like it's slowing down time. One of the first songs that comes to mind when I think of that idea is the Smashing Pumpkins' "1979". Rich Girls doesn't just master this concept, they seem to have perfected it.
The only thing which I can think compares to the idea of love in this world is music. It's one of the only other things which can either tie a people together or divide them. Music is something you don't ever tend to feel indifferent about- at least not most people. You either like something or you don't. If you don't like Rich Girls that's fine, you probably have your reasons. If you're unsure about them though I think it's because you just don't quite understand them yet. Because to know the music of Rich Girls, to understand it, is to love it.
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