In the wake of the overwhelming success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, major labels in the early/mid-’90s began signing any and every cool indie band they could in hopes of a similar payoff. One such outfit was Jawbox, a Washington, D.C., post-punk quartet that had issued two promising albums on the indier-than-thou Dischord label. The band—guitarist/vocalist J. Robbins, guitarist Bill Barbot, bassist Kim Coletta and drummer Zachary Barocas—signed to Atlantic and released the excellent For Your Own Special Sweetheart in 1994. (Though MAGNET named it the fifth-best album that year, Sweetheart was far from a commercial hit.) In 1996, Jawbox issued a slicker self-titled LP, which also failed to catch on beyond the indie-rock crowd, and the band broke up the following year. Dischord has just reissued For Your Own Special Sweetheart with three bonus tracks, and to celebrate, Jawbox reunited for a one-off performance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday. Barbot is also guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Barbot: Is there anything that this man can’t paint? I fell in love with Gerhard Richter first through his awesome abstracts, particularly the Abstraktes Bild (which, abstractly enough, means “abstract picture” in English) series from the ’80s and early ’90s. It was as if he dumped 100 gallons of paint on a canvas and moved it around with a squeegee and a mortar trowel. The weight of the color was palpable, simultaneously bright, light and ponderous. I was hooked, then, by the time I dug deeper into his back catalog and began to appreciate that his skill goes beyond simple (ha!) paint-moving. His photo-realistic works were even more shocking, less because of the fact that they looked like photos, but more because of the fact that they looked like photos. Let me explain. Show a kid a photo of a dog and ask him what it is. Most likely, unless he’s a smartass, he’ll say, “It’s a dog.” Of course, he’s right in a sense, but if you’re an art critic or also a smartass (or a smartass art critic), you have to tell him he’s utterly wrong: It’s a photo of a dog. Richter paints photos, not things photographed. The distortion of the lens, focus, aperture, film and paper appear in his paintings in ways that are unsettling and profoundly beautiful. Lassie, come home. Video after the jump.
