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By then I’d played with a couple of college bands, doing clumsy covers ofrock staples. There were other bands that would produce note-perfect imitationsof songs by Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd and drive audiences wild. If a bandcould play something exactly as it was on tape, the consensus was that they mustbe good. But after a period of proving themselves this way, most bands became alittle more ambitious, and a day would come when they’d go up on stage duringa college festival and introduce a song with the dreaded words, ‘This is anoriginal composition.’ Almost always, these originals were listless pastiches ofthe covers the band played, the lyrics apparently not about anything at all. Thesewere skilled musicians, but their chosen form seemed to preclude any realengagement with their own lives or the lives of their audience. This was mostevident in the Death Metal bands, where you might have a good Hindu boygrowling menacingly about his affinity for Satan. This was a cargo-cult, amimicking of someone else’s rebellion.
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