Grand Unified Theory of Band Suckage

I've been listening to Pandora, the funky Music Genome Project radio station (I have no better name for it), and have enjoyed occasionally coming across good new songs that I didn't know. I have my Terry Riley playlist, my Steve Reich playlist, and today, for the hell of it, I put in Radiohead. Sure sure, a few songs of Radiohead, Beck, Coldplay (ack! skip that), as well as Muse, Modest Mouse, and a few others.

This brings me to my Grand Unified Theory of Band Suckage. Good bands go bad when their drummers go boring. Imagine a band with a creative drummer, a fabulously interesting rhythm section, a drummer who dances over the beat, a drummer who cares to stay off the typical rock 2-4 rhythm (boom-CHACK-boom-boom- CHACK, every damn measure). This is an interesting band. Think of historical examples, the Police (Stewart Copeland) or Radiohead (who only got interesting to me when Phil Selway stopped being an indie rock formula drummer). Ah, but it's the Police who make my point. By the time the Police made it huge, they weren't as interesting. Honestly, go back and listen to Synchronicity. It's not as interesting as Ghost in the Machine or Regatta de Blanc, and it certainly doesn't have the musically creative desperation of Zenyatta Mondatta (which I find a brilliant album, by the way). And that travesty, Don't Stand So Close to Me '86, well hell, that's just shit. And one reason it's shit is because of the stupid 2-and-4-beat drumming. What was Copeland thinking? (For those who care, the excellent New Yorker writer and author Alex Ross actually answered an email from little old me, not at all related to this topic, and pointed out that Phil Selway's drumming on the last Radiohead album was the actual strength of the recording. Huh. Proof of my Grand Theory? or just a chance to name Alex Ross in a blog post?)

So here I am, back in the present day, listening to Modest Mouse. And it's that song that was kinda popular (forget the name, don't care to remember it), the one where they sound like the Talking Heads. High voice like David Byrne, a certain kind of guitar, blah blah blah. But the reason it's NOT the Talking Heads is that ... the drums suck. I mean, maybe they don't suck, but they sure are boring. There's no there there. They don't do anything at all for me. It ain't Chris Frantz playing, let's put it that way.

So. If ever a band you've loved suddenly isn't as interesting as before, listen to the drums. If they're boring, it's a sure sign that the songwriter has taken over in the studio and the band itself is kinda dead. And, usually, this means that the band is no longer interesting to listen to.

PS: Lesser known variant of theory: bassist suddenly stops doing interesting things. Overarching theme of theory: rhythm section matters.

PPS: Further applications of this theory are the Cure, when you look at their albums up to Pornography and compare them to the albums since, oh, say Mixed Up (which reworked old rhythms, good choice!), Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists, Liz Phair, and Einstürzende Neubauten. I wouldn't call it a Grand Unified Theory if it only applied to a few genres of indie rock. It's an across the board kind of thing... at least in my present mood.

UPDATE 20081216: Talking to my brother-in-law, he mentioned a band I'd meant to write about but hadn't. When REM's drummer left, what happened? That's right: years of suckage. They seem to have grown closer to their present drummer over the years, which helped their last album be quite good in comparison to the dreary years.