I caught it from a girl I barely knew. I gave it to my editor, and now his wife's got it. The Hives: the new rock-and-roll disease. I wandered into the emergency room: Saturday night, packed to the gills, the catatonic masses slumped three to a chair. I signed in with the nurse, a plump waxy-complexioned hag who was a dead ringer for Ann Powers and who was fitting some poor drooling fever-brained simp with a horse bit and a straitjacket. "What's his problem?" I asked. "Strokes," groaned the nurse, "He won't shut up about it. See that one over there?" She pointed to a pale, thin, elderly man who looked suspiciously like Robert Christgau. He had soiled himself and was sitting shivering in the corner. "White Stripes," the nurse whispered. "He's so batty he thinks Bob Dylan made the album of the year." She wiped the drool of the bound-and-gagged Strokes victim from his chin and fixed me with a withering stare. "So," she said. "What's your story?"

"Hives," I yawned, scratching absent-mindedly at my face.

Her face darkened and a barely concealed panic broke over her forehead. I saw her reach under the desk. Two large men in lab coats strode through swinging doors. I put my hands up as if to say, stupidly, "How's it going?", and they brought out their stun guns, and there was white light and white heat, and as an inferno of nothingness swallowed me up, I thought I heard a faraway voice say, "Hives are law, you are crime."

A WHITE ROOM with black curtains. In a chair, a scruffy barrel-shaped character in a "Britney Rules" T-shirt. Is that -- no, it couldn't be. Lester Bangs? "Oh, fer chrissakes," he bawled, tearing at his hair. "Not another brain-dead hack with a gimmick. First that patronizing pimp Cameron Crowe, then that sycophantic turd DeRogatis, now you. Lissen, you can take your expository dream sequence and suck my Dick Manitoba, got me?" He got up and left. A minute later he was back. "Fucking St. Peter -- 'Patron saint of shitty rock criticism' my ass. Sez I gotta help you. Let's see what you got." He ripped the page out of my hands. "Terrible," he winced. "Oh, this is godawful. Been done before: by a former Phoenix intern, if I remember correctly. Self-indulgent, contrived, a mess. I don't even SOUND like me: it takes more than all-caps, y'know. Say, you got any Klonopin? No? Oh hell, this is a lousy device, but it's YOUR funeral. Fire away."

"Well, Lester," I said, "the Hives are a glorious garage-punk band from Sweden. They look like your typical Makers wanna-bes: matching black suits, white shoes, vintage guitars, goofy sunglasses. But they're on some next-level shit: they've brokered the use of the genre's symbolic conservatism and stylistic economy as a kind of catch-all for discarded punk theory, and they've put that theory into practice with deceptively simple-sounding songs possessed of wild melodic and lyrical invention. They've released two albums and an EP on Burning Heart, the label that brought us International Noise Conspiracy and Refused. In America, their debut, Barely Legal, and the EP a.k.a. I-D-I-O-T have finally been released on Gearhead; their newest disc, Veni Vidi Vicious, has been out on Epitaph for more than a year. Barely Legal and the I-D-I-O-T EP contain trace amounts of the bracing speed and denial of Dischord-era hardcore. You don't intuit the speed of the world from these records; you feel it in a whoosh of atmosphere as the songs whizz past you kicking and screaming.

"VVV, though also clearly the product of dazed young men in an itchy amphetamine stupor, is a broader work of great menace and celebration. On the first song they declare nuclear war, though against whom isn't quite clear. Their fuzz guitars emit a burnt-transistor crackle that sounds like a stereo beast trying to fight its way out of a mono world. The next tune, 'Die, All Right!,' is on you like another swarm of bees, all needling fury, and the one after that, 'A Get Together To Tear It Apart,' is on you like a rash. 'Knock Knock' borrows its tune from a Teengenerate song and its particular belligerence from Sam the Sham's 'Ain't Gonna Move' (the flipside to 'Woolly Bully,' remember?). It's Little Richard's 'Keep a-Knockin' from the other side of the door -- by the end, they're a band pounding on the threshold, the wood is splintering, and they're about to come charging through.

"The final song, 'Supply and Demand,' is either a dyslexic rant against gainful employment ('Learned a lot about the company dough/Learned less about it receiving it, though') or the weirdest break-up song ever -- when the singer asks his girl who she's leaving him for, her answer is 'shiny hair,' 'a new omission,' and 'the rizzle-razzle kitsch of a paranoid city.' That singer, Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, has a raw rasp-throated yawlp that is prone to cracking sexily, in which trait he recalls the guy from the Make-Up. But where the Make-Up demanded that rock and roll function as a shared secret, the Hives declare their demands as garishly as possible. This comes naturally to the band, who are their own biggest fans. (On their 'Fever,' no relation to the Little Willie John/Peggy Lee number, they get all hot and bothered by 'Speeding up the pace on the machine/Calling radio and magazines.') Their audacity has served them well. Late last year, they released an album in England called Your New Favourite Band; featuring songs from both albums and the EP, it amounted to a greatest-hits album by a band with no proper hits. Yet this disc promptly went gold -- a marvel of self-fulfilling self-promotion. As a result, the Hives are threatening to burst through the confines of the regressive punk underground and into progressive mainstream consciousness."

"Couldn't care less," said Lester. "Off you go."

I REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS in a hospital bed in a plain room with a two-headed doctor. "I'm Dr. Marcus," he said. "And so am I," he said, through the other head. "Tell me," he said in unison, "have you ever had anything like the Hives before?"

"Oh yeah," I said, "I've had 'em all: Hellacopters, Gluecifer, Backyard Babies, Puffball, a particularly bad case of Turbonegro a couple years back."

The doctor frowned, both of him. "Having the Hives," he said, "is different altogether. Cosmetic similarities to these other diseases are misleading; the Hives have assimilated all of these and moved on. The Hives' command of English is fleeting, but as with so much English-as-a-second-language punk, its linguistic liability is among its primary assets. Its broken language has a slogan-like simplicity; freed from the confines of proper grammatical context, such exclamations as 'Oh, Lord! When? How?,' from Barely Legal, evince a blunt-force exhilaration for its own sake. On 'Well, Well, Well,' which is less than a minute long, Pelle's feral declamations dramatize the terror of an eternally shrinking present, the weight of an ungraspable future that seems always to lurk just beyond his fingertips."

"Sure, fine," I said, "but what about me?"

The other head took over. "The Hives claim to have been formulated by a mysterious svengali named Randy Fitzsimmons, who they say put the group's five members together and writes all their songs. The UK rock press -- still reeling from the rumors that Jack and Meg White are not, as they maintain, brother and sister -- have been exceedingly skeptical of this claim while remaining outlandish in their praise of the band's output. Just last month, the NME 'revealed' the Randy Fitzsimmons story to be an elaborate ruse: after checking publishing records, the paper claimed Fitzsimmons was merely an alias of guitarist Nicholaus Arson. The band responded by vehemently sticking to their story -- which may be the first time in rock-and-roll history that a band have argued they're not the author of their songs, instead of the other way around."

"But that's senseless," I said. "Why would they cling so desperately to such a cheap and transparent ruse?"

Both heads agreed, "By insinuating itself into a rock-and-roll culture that still defines itself, to a great degree, on its precious so-called authenticity, the Hives are attempting to debunk a fortified façade of artistic purity, to untangle the twin strands of virtue and autonomy, to drag the decaying corpse of rock and roll into the present era -- an era of liberating artifice, an era in which all claims of authorship are increasingly unverifiable and therefore suspect, an era in which no voice is credible. 'Tell me something and I'll be gone,' Pelle howls, 'twisting facts, and surely I'll pass 'em on.'

"You see, the Hives' cure for the age of information is disinformation, a chorus of lies. Listen to Barely Legal's 'Uptempo Venomous Poison,' where Pelle promises he's got 'things to say, the latest news about this and that' but withholds the information and leaves only the promise. 'I pass the word, I set it free,' he says -- he's a liberator of the word, not its creator. 'And every word you'll ever hear has at some point been through me.' A liberator of words! In the video for 'Main Offender' -- which is available on a digitally enhanced CD single from the Initech Entertainment Conglomerate and may soon turn up on MTV -- the song's lyrics come to life, as in some Lettrist fantasia, and are seen to smash through walls of concrete: a musical language set free at last, let loose from the leash of its creators to run amok, to be spoken from many mouths, or to be spoken by no mouths at all."

"Look," I said, "that's great. But you got a prognosis here, or what?"

The doctor had grown another head. "The Hives are a media virus," he said, "They're an itch you can't scratch. The Hives infiltrate the establishment by projecting the critic's duplicity back at himself. 'We wanna be seen!,' Pelle shouts on the secret-agent hardcore tune 'Theme From . . . ,' and then, just as vehemently, he proclaims, 'We wanna disappear!' But whose mouth is speaking? And whose voice is it speaking in?"

Issue Date: March 15 - 21, 2002