The latest configuration of the Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu has a new album out, Why I Hate Women, and here’s frontman David Thomas in this month’s The Wire on the real avant garde:

“In the early 70s,” he says, “the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn’t one thing. It was stuido techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was supposed to be, to make use of this powefull, relatively new narrative voice. That’s why I’ve always said that we are in the mainstream. It’s people like Eminem or Britney Spears who are the weird experimentalists. They are avant garde. They are dealing with weird alternative worlds. If you put our view of the human condition alongside Britney Spears’s, one of them is extremely experimental and weird, and it’s Ms Spears’.”

Thanks to The Existence Machine for the quote.