Listening to Rebecca DGD 5’s new single Feels Like Rock’n Roll reminded me of the following quote, from Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys: “For me, making music has always been a very spiritual thing, and I think anybody who produces records has to feel that, at least a little bit. Producing a record, the idea of taking a song, envisioning the overall sound in my head and then bringing the arrangement to life in the studio, well that gives me satisfaction like nothing else.” I sensed that same, kinetic energy in the realization of Feels Like Rock’n Roll, something feeling like it’s as much a piece of pop art as it is a piece of contemporary, alternative music.
The song is deliberately cacophonous at parts, messy in terms of certain production value, the aforementioned dichotomies only added to by Rebecca DGD 5’s soothing, reverberated vocals seeming to radiate a sort of personalized psalm at the opening. It was all so oddly perfect, the song as it is and as a whole permeating a window into the realm of a most delightful, anarchistic madness I haven’t seen in a musical release for some time.
To quote another master of popular music, Jim Morrison of The Doors: “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos-especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom… Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical.” The song really embodies those aforementioned qualities. It’s not so much about a perfectly realized sonic experience as the emphasis is on things and qualities that make one think and feel intrinsically. There’s this kind of engaging dissonance, evocatively an endless odyssey into something strange and foreign.
SHAZAM: https://www.shazam.com/song/1819364373/feels-like-rockn-roll-feat-chago-williams
As original as Rebecca DGD 5 is on her own terms, she does owe a great debt to the kind of aforementioned forefathers in alternative music and media before her. The music pays tribute directly to the kind of experimental forays of Pink Floyd, Rebecca DGD 5 simultaneously working in timeless effects with a kind of respectful reverence that doesn’t take away from her own musical identity. The ideal music video director for this kind of act would be Residents filmmaker Graeme Whifler.
The music conjures up that kind of underground, dirty quality, flicking earlobes at fears of being tuneless in exchange for something that is musically, narratively, and aesthetically free. “Hit by a spark, Lordy it left a mark/God gave me the capacity, For some serious audacity,” Rebecca DGD 5 chants at the beginning. “I’m overjoyed by Mr. Pink Floyd/Biding my time with seventies classic rock-n-roll strolling.”
It’s the latent weirdness in the track I personally enjoyed the most. The kind of completely independent quality a modern-day label wouldn’t get. Most songs today aspiring to capture some of the magic of old fail for just that reason. They play it too safe, too sanguine. Not Rebecca DGD 5. I’ll look forward to continuing to track her work for this reason, it’s a welcome relief to the kind of staid quality of modern-day songs in the popular echelon.
Chadwick Easton