Wednesday, June 25, 2008
I can be heard in this week's edition of the BBC show
Songlines, which is about "Halellujah."
Go here and scroll down to "Monday." The version about the football player is pretty awesome. My riff around the 21 minute mark will hopefully become a post here shortly.
(Only available for a week--I'll try and upload a copy later.)
Labels: covers, hallelujah, notes
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Lots of great stuff coming up in reaction to the previous post, two of which are elsewhere. It got a link from
Songs About Buildings And Food, a blog so good that it makes me wish I liked
The Hills so I could better understand what he's talking about. (And I mean that sincerely!)
Laguna Beach and all its offshoots are a pretty perfect example of what I'm talking about--MTV has built a whole programming bloc out of televising reenactments of the gossip-worthy moments in a particular real-world social group, and people love it. That's no accident. As stupid as MTV's programming can look to adults, it's generally ahead of the curve on these things.
Also, for those of your that are uncomfortable applying this theory to "lightweights" like Miley and Britney,
Alex Rawls sees a connection between my model and Bob Dylan's construction of character. I think that's true, but only insofar as Dylan is a singularly iconic character. There's a difference between the obsessive information completism of fandom and the social capital of gossip, which relies on widely shared knowledge.
Labels: bob dylan, hannah montana, narrative, notes, the hills
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Adults are confused by Hannah Montana. Why were her concert tickets going for hundreds of dollars? Why does she have a 3-D movie? Who is this Miley person? Is she really the daughter of the "Achey Breaky Heart" guy? And he's her dad on the show? How does that all work, exactly?
It is true that the Hannah Montana
gestalt encompasses an odd number of identity issues. On a normal TV show, there would be the character, Hannah, and the actress, Miley Cyus. The character would not appear outside the show, and the actress' real life would not be reflected on the show itself. But from the beginning, that line was blurred. The character named Hannah Montana is the secret identity of a character named Miley Stewart. Miley Stewart's dad, who knows her secret, is a character named Robbie. Robbie is played by former country star Billy Ray Cyrus, and his daughter on the show is played by his daughter in real life, Miley Cyrus. (Who isn't actually named Miley, but let's not even get into that.)
So far, so good; it's really just one step removed from Jerry Seinfeld playing a character named Jerry Seinfeld, right? What makes it confusing is that there are also albums associated with this particular
gestalt. The first album,
Hannah Montana, was credited to the character Hannah but one song was sung by Miley Cyrus as herself and her dad as Billy Ray Cyrus. The second album,
Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus is a double album, with the first disc being credited to Hannah and referring to the show's world and the second disc being credited to Miley and referring to the actress as a real person. There is then a concert movie, in which Miley performs songs as herself and as Hannah Montana.
To sum up: the character Hannah Montana has released an album and toured. The actress who plays Hannah has also released an album and toured, but always in combination with the character she plays. She has also sung a song as herself with the actor who plays her dad on the show, who is actually her dad. And who also sang "Achey Breaky Heart."
The reason I go through all this rigamarole is to show that, when you try and lay it all out, it is a fairly tangled web of connections that can be confusing if you're not immersed in it. And yet, for all its structural complexities (!!!), children have no trouble grasping how the Hannah Montana universe works. There's a good reason for this: for all that Hannah Montana might seem like a fantastically complicated postmodern art experiment (think
Nikki S. Lee), she fits seamlessly into the current media/entertainment environment. And this is especially true for children. Adults are too tied to their formative experiences with straightforward entertainment television to really grasp what's going on. But for those people growing up in the reality show era, Hannah Montana makes total intuitive sense.
John Ellis' essay "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon" is a useful touchpoint for explaining all of this, though I don't want to get totally behind its occasionally overwrought "OMG postmodernism" tendencies. His take, basically, is that an individual performer had a a "star image" made up partially of their actual performances and partially through entering into "subsidiary forms of circulation" (see?), which is his way of saying "publicity." By giving interviews and being written about in the press and having your picture taken, a performer creates an image (tough, sexy, stoner, slutty, whatever) that then works as a way of informing the public's understanding and anticipation of their performances in films. To simplify: Brad breaks up with Jen and starts dating Angelina, so let's go see
Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
That may be true from the perspective of, say, a film studio interested in making money. But from the perspective of everyone else, the really interesting thing about all this, the thing we followed and remembered, wasn't the movie. It was the actual story of Brad breaking up with Jen and dating Angelina, and why, and what would happen next. Ellis would consider this to be a failure--that the system has failed in its intended purpose if the movie in question is less memorable than the story surrounding it. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone that would speak kindly of our "obsession with celebrity," as it is generally put. But that, to me, seems unproductive. This system that has evolved is intensely fascinating--that's why, after all, we're all "obsessed" with it. And that's interesting. So rather than (just) criticizing this, we should recognize it as a new form of entertainment. Or, rather, a new incarnation of a very old form.
Mass media did not invent entertainment, though previous forms of entertainment might not seem very, er, entertaining to a modern audience. The Reign of Terror, for instance, was a form of popular entertainment. So were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which is why they lasted for three hours. (More bang for the buck!) These are momentous events that represent practices (public executions, public speaking) that reach far back into human history. Perhaps we should think of another ancient human behavior as entertainment: gossip. I'm
not alone in suggesting this by any means, but I have a slightly different take on it. Whereas others think of it in terms of its effect on the people doing the gossiping (display of social status, strengthening bonds, enforcing norms, etc.), I'd like to discuss the things that gossip collectively creates. In other words, I'd like to talk about gossip as narrative.
Humans seem to have an inherent tendency toward narrative. We form stories out of the bits and pieces of our lives in order to make some sense of them--to figure out what caused us to get where we are, or to at least feel like we know what made us get here. This urge extends to other people. We get pleasure out of learning other people's stories because to have a glimpse into others' lives helps us make further sense of the world. This is clear in our consumption of pop culture,
especially TV, but is also clear in longstanding traditions of oral history and folk stories and even, arguably, news reporting. These are all stories about lives lived.
The great advantage of gossip is that it structures true stories about others in a way most advantageous to pleasure. Because bits of gossip are things we're not supposed to know, they give us the thrill of the illicit as well as the clarity of a secret revealed. Moreover, because the story is being revealed in pieces, we get the sort of tension and release dynamic that structures most great narrative works. At first, we don't really know what's going on. A problem is introduced. Then, we get more information. Tension builds. What is going on? What is she going to do? Is he going to find out? And then, finally, there's a break and things are resolved--or, they're not, and we get to speculate endlessly about what happened in the perpetual glow of limitless possibility. The slow drip of information keeps us coming back for more, keeps us interested in these stories, keeps us engaged with those around us. I can't wait to see you again, we say to our informant, and our informant can't wait to see us, either.
This is precisely what's going on with modern-day celebrities. For all that paying attention to news about Britney feels illicit and wrong, we are ultimately doing nothing more than following someone's story, doled out teasingly in daily doses. Rather than sitting and passively having a story told to us, we are expected to figure it out for ourselves from fragments of news, from photos we have to decipher, from actions the main character didn't want us to know about. We process these and judge these and try and decide what kind of character we're dealing with. The phrase "soap opera" is intended as a kind of pejorative when applied to such cases, but it's entirely accurate. The fact that the story is about a non-fictional person ultimately matters little to the end-of-the line consumer who's following the gossip. All it does is make the whole thing less predictable, since real people don't always follow stock storylines, and give the events an extra charge of verisimilitude. And let's not moralize around the bush here about people being exploited. If you are a celebrity and don't want to be the subject of gossip, there is a simple solution: move out of LA. There aren't paparazzi in Ohio. Britney in particular is an interesting test case for this, since for all her problems, she seems to have a
collaborative relationship with the media.
All reality shows did was serve as a factory floor for generating these sorts of stories about people's lives. The thing that makes something like
America's Next Top Model a reality show, of course, isn't the competition aspect of it--that's just any old talent show. What makes it a reality show is the
Real World element. By putting all the girls into a house and filming their interactions under the always-fraught conditions of communal living, producers are able to generate stories that they can then edit skillfully into compact narrative chunks. The gossip that would normally have to come from a secondary source is here related directly by the cameras that film the offending behavior. And each week, good reality shows are able to edit their material in order to make clear in viewers' minds what kind of character each contestant is.
But from the beginning, reality shows never limited themselves to the show itself. The first American reality show of the post-MTV era,
Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, was successful in no small part because of the "controversy" that erupted in the media after the show aired. The idea of the program (on Fox, natch) is that a bunch of women would compete to marry, sight unseen, a multi-millionaire who was watching on monitors in a hidden room. At the end of the show, he would pick one, and they would get married then and there. This is indeed what happened, but because of the setup, we ended up with very little information about the multi-millionaire in question, Rick Rockwell (whose name makes him sound like a character in a Marvel comic). Afterwards, however, we found out a number of things about Rockwell that were textbook examples of gossip, because they complicated the
simplistic public image he'd tried to construct for himself. He had multiple restraining orders placed on him, and was probably an abuser. He was not actually a multi-millionaire, but just some guy that dabbled in real estate. And theirs was not a fairy-tale marriage, but one that was quickly annulled.
At the time, this seemed like a disaster for Fox, and commentators predicted that this would be the end of reality shows. In hindsight, we can see that it demonstrated just how potent reality shows can be. By promoting an unknown into the public eye, we're able to find out their story from scratch. Reality show participants are, in essence, each their own little novel (or maybe just short story), a new character whose life story we now get to hear. They might not be very
good novels, but the best selling ones rarely are.
This, then, became the model for reality shows. Bad ones stayed self-contained, because no one cared enough about them to unearth dirt on the contestants. But good ones generated coverage simply as a result of being interesting. Since what was happening on the shows was essentially gossip to begin with, these external pieces of information just became part of the overall narrative. Again, this is a violation of Ellis' idea of the star system. The gossip wasn't working as contextual information to enhance our viewing of major motion pictures, but creating its own
gestalt, its own story told in bits and pieces. But this is what the modern media is built on. Political campaigns work this way as surely as
American Idol does. And, to be honest, I think it's pretty awesome. If we were more willing to be honest about what we found entertaining and to embrace this as a source of pleasure rather than a source of shame, we might be willing to endorse strategies that took pleasure as a positive force rather than a debased one.
Anyway, point being, if this is all second nature to you--if the construction of character through multiple streams that duplicate and build on existing information just seems like the way the media works--then
Hannah Montana fits right in. Taking the show on its own, we have essentially a superhero narrative; taken in context with the identity issued detailed above, it's basically
Keeping Up With the Kardashians, except less soul-destroying. There's a family on a show that's like a family in real life, and sometimes the family on the show/in real life does stuff like make albums or release, uh, movies. This isn't confusing, but elevating. Instead of sealing all these things off from each other behind characters and fourth walls, they're able to mix and mingle as they would in real life. This is ultimately the real power of gossip-based narrative: it tells a story like we would get it in real life. Each episode is a phone conversation, the gossip is what you hear from other people or see at the grocery store. We rarely find out life stories all in one gulp (except when we're drinking with strangers), but slowly, as they're lived. We have to get through a lot of banality to reach the dramatic high points. Not coincidentally, this is how the best
fictional shows on TV construct their narratives as well (think
Ugly Betty, or even more appropriately,
Gossip Girl).
Hannah Montana's real strength is that it does all this without ever calling attention to its constructedness or to its radical collapsing of information streams. It comes off as easy as breathing, as the most natural thing in the world, and to its young audience, it most assuredly is.
ADDENDUM: Two related things that I couldn't figure out how to work into the actual entry:
this quote from Rebecca West, via
Marc, and of course the whole
microfame thing. There's more to be said about YouTube as a medium, but that's another post.
Labels: britney, gossip girl, hannah montana, narrative, reality tv, theory, TV
“I think we live our lives the best we can,” Kevin said. “We’ve grown up with the idea that even when you’re at the top, act like you’re at the bottom. We’re growing and learning together, and it is important for us to stay true to the family that we are.”- Kevin JonasThis quote, from one of the Jonas Brothers (a pop-rock band that's been shot to success by the Disney machine), would seem to be fodder for people who want to dismiss commercial pop music, especially that music that can be accurately described as the product of a machine. It's a horrifying combination of banal and cliché, so inconsequential that your eyes can pass over it multiple times without really catching the meaning. It would seem to reveal its speaker as someone who does not think very deeply about things and who is terminally lacking in personality. Compare it to a quote from Dylan or Lennon and it's like a rice puff. Whoever said this does not match up with our idea of what a musician is supposed to be.
On the other hand, if an athlete said it, it would sound perfectly normal. In fact, it falls right in line with Kevin Costner's advice to Tim Robbins in
Bull Durham:
Costner: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time."
Robbins: Got to play... it's pretty boring.
Costner: 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.
Say nothing, in other words, and it doesn't hurt you. Say something interesting and it's only going to cause trouble.
The difficult thing for critics dealing with commercial pop stars is precisely this kind of advice. Underground musicians get publicity for saying crazy things to the underground press; commercial pop artists, especially those with a young audience, can only lose sales from saying interesting things. So they're media-trained into oblivion, and come out with the kind of meaningless quotes you see above. For an athlete, that would be fine. Ultimately, we get our ideas of their personalities from their performances; the things that create meaning are their actions on the field. But for a musician, it's a hard thing to get around.
Musicians are not athletes because they are not creatures of action. Words and voices are a big part of their chosen profession. And so, when we're trying to make sense of musicians, we tend to regard speaking in interviews as a kind of extension of singing in songs. When we create our impressions of a musician's personality from their performances, this involves listening to what comes out of their mouths. If what they say in interviews is part of this, and what they say in interviews is boring, then they themselves must be shallow.
This causes a few problems. First, as various folks have pointed out, it leads to critics overvaluing "eccentric" pop stars. We might not pay attention to someone with a bucketful of hits until they give a wacky interview or take on an unhinged public persona. Objectively, regular mainstream pop music is no less worthy of our attention than any other genre, so we shouldn't require pop stars to act like eccentric geniuses before we pay attention to them.
There's a bigger issue, too. As much as I like the star system, as much as I think it's valuable and sit is awe of its ability to create meaning, it's just one way that meaning is created. There's no reason that we can't judge musicians in the same way that we judge athletes: look at their performances alone and marvel. Musicians don't have to create a persona, and they don't have to embody a social force. We can appreciate them as machines of grace, admiring the ease with which they produce beauty. It's certainly not the way I always want to approach music. But if a musician seems off-putting, it's one way to be able to appreciate the music they make regardless.
Labels: jonas brothers, pop, theory
Friday, June 6, 2008
I've got a
piece up on Idolator about a recent kerfuffle on a certain other site, and anti-intellectualism. Enjoy.
Labels: blogtalk, idolator, notes
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Scott over at Pretty Goes With Pretty has a
couple of
reactions to my No Age post that are worth reading; he's much more positive about local scenes, and negative about the internet, than I am.
Labels: blogtalk, no age, notes
If you're interested in music, you owe it to yourself to read
Alex Ross'
article in the New Yorker about composer John Luther Adams. You should also listen to the sound file at the bottom, a recording of his piece "Dark Waves." Regular readers will know (or will have gotten the sense) that I have little patience for hippies, and so the fact that I am endorsing a guy who writes pieces about "the land" should tell you just how good this is.
It's unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to "good music" are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra's image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are
really fucking loud. The three loudest experiences of my life are standing directly in front of Luke Jenner's amp at a Rapture show, taking my earplugs out for a second while performing Glenn Branca's "100 guitars" symphony, and playing in the back of the violin section for a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus. Sure, none of the instruments in an orchestra are electronically amplified, but there are 100 people all playing at the same time. Even if they were all paying harmonicas, that would be pretty loud. Once you start putting trumpets and cymbals and violins in there--lots and lots of violins--you can make a hell of a racket. That we think of orchestras as quiet has something to do, of course, with the fact that the audience is supposed to be quiet at performances; the noise of the music is not being amplified by the reaction of the crowd. And orchestras certainly have a much broader dynamic range than do rock bands. Somehow, we've come to think of these giant collections of musicians as restrained and quiet.
Rock bands, on the other hand, had to become seen as loud. Jonathan Richman had it right in "Fender Stratocaster" when he described the sound of that most iconic of rock instruments as "so thin it's barely there." We think of Jimmy Page and John Bonham as having these massive, gigantic sounds, but listen to "Black Dog" after you've played the John Luther Adams piece for a while. The guitar sounds tinny now, the drums thin. Partially, of course, this is just a technical issue. Guitars occupy a fairly narrow sonic range, and even with a pitch shifter they can't reach the robust heights that a violin can. The drums fill in some of that spectrum, especially with the cymbals taking over the upper register, but they're recorded we have to perform technical tricks to make it sound as rich as an orchestra does. And we still have to make sacrifices. The kick drum is simply smaller than a full bass drum or timpani, and so we can boost its low end, but then we give up some of the thump. Thump or whoomp: each serves an important purpose for rock, but it's hard to have both. Rock bands have tried to imitate the feel of an orchestra, even going so far as to add orchestral instruments, but ultimately, orchestras make a noise that rock bands simply can't, and you hear that noise in "Dark Waves."
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I may lament the absence of orchestras from our musical life, but in terms of classical music, my alligiences ultimately lie with string quartets. This should come as no surprise; after all, quartets are structurally almost identical to rock bands, sans drummer. Four people, working without a conductor, have to listen to each other to follow along, and play off what everyone else is doing. They're lean but versitile. Even the parts are similar: the first violin is the lead singer, the second violin is the lead guitar, the viola is the rhythm guitar, and the cello is the bass. Not everyone writes for quartets this way, but you certainly could.
It's interesting, then, that Adams' work echoes many of the values associated with rock. Certainly "music you can live with" is pop's economic motor, and his emphasis on texture is key to rock's appeal, too. In the piece Ross focuses on, "The Place," you find classically rockist ideas, and I'm using that in a neutral way here:
“The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound. “The Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season...
“Actually, my original conception for ‘The Place’ was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea—tuning the whole world—stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth.”
This emphasis on place speaks strongly to rock's standards. The idea of localism and of community play a strong part in rock's mythos, of course, from local scenes to regional music. But in placing the piece not only within a particular environment but within a particular room, Adams echoes rock's strange obsession with "hearing the space." On a good rock album, supposedly, you can hear the room it's recorded in, and the particular venues bands play have meaning. Even live recordings are as much about the particular place of the performance as the performance itself.
So maybe "loud" is the wrong word to use here. Maybe what I'm really talking about is
hugeness. Ross describes "Dark Waves," in a lovely turn of phrase, as suggesting "a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes." You can mass enough Marshall stacks to produce more decibels than an orchestra, but you never quite get that sense of hugeness. Again, this is partially a technical issue. With 100 people, you can get a much higher variety of sounds, and these can then build up to sound occupied, dense and rich. Because you have so many different instruments, you have all these different tambres. And because you have all these violin, viola, cello, and bass players playing the same part at the same time, the minute variations in each individual person's performance combine into this slightly fuzzy yet coordinated recitation of the part. Rock, again, tries to get this effect by technological manipulation; that's what chorus pedals are for. (Chorus, for those who are unfamiliar, is the effect that,
when applied to a guitar, makes you think of 80s hair metal bands.) But it never quite sounds right.
Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Listen to "Dark Waves." Surely that's a sound worth producing; hell, it almost sounds like metal. The feeling I get from the piece is essentially the same one I get from watching a thunderstorm: an ineffable physical reaction to some immense externality. I feel isolated from other people but wrapped up entirely in this phenomenon. I get that feeling from other classical music, too. If I get it from other places, it would probably be Carla Bozulich's
Red Headed Stranger album, which used similarly indistinct sonorities and dynamic shifts. But I liked the smallness of that; for all its virtues (it's certainly in my top ten for the current decade), it ultimately evokes a distant storm more than one passing over you.
I'm not just saying that there's something to be gained from reconsidering the orchestra. I think Adams has a lot to say to non-classical composers in the way he approaches familiar problems and issues in unfamiliar ways. And art music in general has something to say to lots of other styles; it always has, and as much as we might consider it to be a remote thing, it always will.
Labels: alex ross, classical, john luther adams, musicology
Thursday, May 8, 2008
I didn't say much about No Age's actual music in the post yesterday, but if you're curious, I think
Matthew pretty much covered it.
Labels: no age, notes
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
We are all afraid of turning into our parents. It may be a short-lived fear, and it may turn out that we like turning into our parents, but there's an inevitable anxiety there. It's a way of transmuting the unavoidable change of aging into something we can control. Time marches on, but we can remain cavalier about certain social
niceties, keep our sense of adventure paramount over our sense of safety, and avoid wearing slacks. These aspects of personality seem like something we have control over. The biggest thing, maybe, is that we don't want to lose touch with that art that was important to us as youths. We want to stay
relevant, up-to-date, and so forth and so on, but at the same time our tastes are mostly fixed somewhere in the past. The music that mattered to us as youths dictates what matters to us as adults, but because music keeps changing, our efforts to keep up inevitably result in us being out-of-date.
The problem with my generation, the generation that grew up with grunge and became indie, embraces a somewhat different consideration. It's not the
anxiety of influence so much as it is anxiety
about influence. When we were growing up, the biggest thing we had to fight against musically was the influence of our parents' generation. The idea that the music of the 60s is the only music that matters is pervasive and incredibly powerful to a general audience. Worse, kids like me tended to approach adult music through boomer bands like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Marley. Thus attempts to come into our own understanding of music inevitably demanded a rejection of that whole canon, while at the same time, again, our tastes were formed in that context, and so those standards never really go away. The music that resulted rejected certain tenets--social
relevance, poetic lyrics, melody, careful production--while keeping others, like authenticity, sincerity, and an emphasis on guitars. What resulted certainly sounded, at times, like boomer music, and even had some explicit connections; most notably, Sonic Youth's Lee
Ranaldo was (0r is, perhaps) a Deadhead.
In the end, it's probably safe to say that we failed. Most younger listeners in the indie-rock demographic still come to adult music through boomer staples, and many stay there. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and countless artists
derived thereof dominate musical tastes across all ages. The question, then, is whether we should try and shape the tastes of the younger generation(s) in the same way the boomers did. Surely kids need to get out from under this myth of the 60s just as much as we did, and the music of the 90s offers a viable, yet complementary, alternative. There already is a myth of the 90s, that has been muted somewhat, but is still going strong, at least if sales of Nirvana t-shirts are anything to go by. But if we do that--if we impress our tastes on the young--does that make us as bad as the boomers?
Which brings us, of course, to No Age.
No Age is a two-man band from Los Angeles who have just released their second record,
Nouns, on Sub Pop, the Seattle label that was responsible for much of the grunge boom. Though their name is a reference to the hardcore punk label SST, they sound like an amalgam of noisy indie bands like Built to Spill and Sonic Youth (who, in fairness, did release an album on SST). More importantly, at least for the sake of this post, they emerged from a scene centered around a club called The Smell, an all-ages venue that serves vegan snacks and offers $5 haircuts; a picture of the club serves as the cover of No Age's first album. Its communitarian spirit recalls the hardcore ethos of the 90s, and it has spawned various other noisy bands like the Wives and
Mika Miko. Sasha
Frere-Jones wrote
an article for the New Yorker that spelled out the club's
mythos explicitly, making sure to mention that it lends out books and zines. Though the band's connection to the club is interesting, it's not a necessary factor for embracing their music, which works within an established genre and would make sense to fans of similar bands.
It's interesting, then, to read the band's two Pitchfork reviews, one for the
new album and one for their
first album,
Weirdo Rippers. The first review, by Brandon
Stousy, places the band precisely within this genre, throwing out references to Harry Pussy,
Lync, and Kicking Giant, none of which I've ever heard of before. (Nor do I feel particularly bad about this.) It pinpoints their appeal more broadly, however: "No Age bring back the
DIY energy of Kicking Giant and
Lync and '90s zines and, importantly, a life away from computer screens." There's a clear broadening of scope there: few can relate to Kicking Giant and
Lync, but the appeal of "'90s zines" has only increased since we no longer have to read them, and we can all feel a certain longing for the
pre-
internet days, I guess. (Can we?)
In contrast to the first
review's focus on sounds and influences, the second review frames the band entirely in terms of their scene, mentioning The Smell in the first sentence and through the two opening paragraphs before returning to it again in the final paragraph. Only two paragraphs of the review deal exclusively with the band. Despite having a different author, the second review (written by Amanda
Petrusich) echoes the appeal the first review invoked: "regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the
internet,"
Petrusich writes, and though "being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008," she still finds it "thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands."
Thus, it's not only that the band's success beyond the noise/ex-hardcore community is being explained in these terms of being a throwback to a 90s social context, but that the case for its continued success is being made in these terms as well. The reviewing inducting the band into Pitchfork's "Best New Music" category begins and ends with a discussion of The Smell and the way it resembles the lost utopia of zines, community centers, and vegans.
I'm not sure if this is necessarily a good thing. For one thing, the best and more enduring American indie bands of the 90s, if they were part of a scene at all, existed on the outskirts of that scene: Nirvana, Yo La
Tengo,
Slint, Pavement,
GBV. You wouldn't put any of these at the center of an artistic community like you would No Age, and it's hard to see how any of them would have been diminished by having the
internet exist. The two exceptions would be
Sleater-Kinney and Neutral Milk Hotel, neither of whom I like, so maybe this is just a matter of taste.
Then again, maybe it's not. Unless we're going to make an argument that there was something unique about that social environment that made bands different--a charge it would seem hard to sustain given that most of this decade's successful indie bands have sounded like variations on indie bands from the previous two decades--then the reason to hail a return of hardcore flair would be that the experience itself is worth preserving. Moreover, at least in the case of No Age, a band's association with that experience would have to say something about their artistic worth. There's a weird dance going on in that last part of the equation: the extrinsic narrative is being brought in as part of the artistic experience, and while I think that's a good thing to do--it's why I love pop, in part--I'm not sure how it squares with the expectation of authenticity that goes hand-in-hand with the valuation of this sort of music. Once we start valuing process over product, I'm not sure that we've having an artistic discussion anymore. Sure, I wish music now was more aware of, say, sexism, but would a return of "community-sponsored, community-supported art space[s]" really make that happen?
The first part of the equation, though, is where this whole thing gets tricky, and where the problem of anxiety about influence comes in. If we think that this was a valuable experience to have, and if we think opportunities to have this experience no longer abound, it should follow that we want to encourage what few there are so that kids these days can be fortunate enough to have the same kind of adolescences we did. Putting it that way is stacking the deck a bit, so I don't want to lean on this too heavily. Certainly the present decade has all sorts of problems, and there are many aspects of "the 90s" that I wouldn't mind seeing return. If there's anything that argues against merely accepting the social environment as it is, it's that it changes every seven years or so.
But ultimately, the things I want changed aren't specifics, but generalities. I would like to see more awareness of sexism, but I don't necessarily think that it needs to come via take back the night marches. Requiring that a new generation deal with the same issues in the same ways seems like
Boomeritis. "Political problems? Well then, by gum, you need protest singers and protest marches! If you're not doing that, well then, you're not really dealing with the problem, and you don't really care! Unlike us! We
cared, man!" Replace "protest singers and protest marches" with "hardcore music and community centers" and you have the critical discourse surrounding No Age.
What exactly is so bad about the
internet, though? I no longer live in the kind of major urban area where community centers allowed great bands to flourish; I'm back where I grew up, in upstate New York, where there are no great bands (though there are community centers). The
internet is now doing what it did for me as a teenager: allowing me access to this wider world and informing me about what's going on. For kids in Baltimore or LA, that information was available within driving distance, or from their friends; I had--and have--to go out and find it. You know what the big bands play in my current town, people?
Ska. If I don't have the
internet, that's what I'm into.
And it goes beyond that. If you want to see what it looks like when we become our parents, check out the idea that the
internet is getting in the way of kids these days having an authentic indie-rock experience. That's only true if the
internet is somehow inauthentic, e.g. not a culture of its own, and I think refusing to acknowledge that is much more evidence of being out-of-touch than not liking
emo. Lord knows I'm no
internet utopian, but it seems strange to deny that there are real communities online. They may not be able to give each other haircuts or provide venues for bands to play, but none of that is necessary for vital art to happen. There can still be the kind of encouragement, critique, and one-
upmanship that we associate with productive artistic communities. When
CSS first emerged, they made a good case for being a product of
internet music culture, having gotten many of their influences from MP3blogs like Matthew's (if I'm remembering correctly). I think because the idea of online music is so debased for critics and musicians, bands may be reluctant to acknowledge these sorts of influences. But they're undeniably there.
I'm not sure indie is going to do itself any favors, ultimately, by clinging to the processes of the past. Certainly a longing for paradise lost is fine, and there's nothing wrong with reverence for the past. But indie was birthed out of the idea that new technologies (like 4-tracks, cassettes, and photocopying) could change the way music is made. Once new technology comes, that should change it again, at least if it wants to remain a vital form. Ultimately, we may end up no different from previous generations, soft and happy at middle age, listening to the music of our youth and thinking it the pinnacle of human
achievement. That's fine, and good; no one's going to stand up for the music of an era except those who lived through it. But that doesn't mean we have to impose an arrested development on those who come after us in the same way the baby boomers tried to, and continue to try to. Let's not become exactly like our parents.
Labels: baby boomers, indie rock, no age, pop
