Placebo
You ever have those days when you re-alphabetise your music collection, listen to every single Half-Man Half-Biscuit song in chronological order and plough through ancient issues of the NME in search of half-completed crosswords? Days when you do all this and still feel bored? Well, here's a solution: Take a dictionary and look up band names. You'll be surprised what you find.
Take 'Placebo', for example. I always thought it was funny how the word came from the Latin 'I aim to please'. Black Market Music, however, made me realise it's just plain spooky. For the dance freaks, they've rewritten Block Rockin Beats as Taste In Men. For the indie kids, they've incorporated a Pavement sample to 'Slave to the Wage'. For the Placebo fans, they've made an album that sounds, looks and feels exactly the same as the last one. And for the masses, well, there's always some electro drum sound beneath the terribly rhymed, banal and often meaningless lyrics. Hell, in 'Blue American' Brian Molko's even written a song for his mommy.
And, as much as I'd love to hate it, the whole thing is rather pleasing, so difficult to dislike. Cold, cynical, unintelligent and unintentionally mainstream, yes, but for the most part entertaining, successful where so many other corporate indie bands fail.
On this form, Placebo will do nothing to cure the disease of modern music. At the same time, however, they do nothing to make it worse. Their work's no precious ointment, then, but it's by no means worthless, illustrating just how good a name (in the symbiotic sense at least) they really do have.
12th Oct 2000