Fifteen hours ago two hundred friends and acquaintances and three thousand eight hundred strangers sat in sweltering (which is a cliched adjective to place before the word) heat in a stadium generally reserved for football games I never watched, and listened to an MSNBC correspondent dispense Graduation-type aphorisms I will never hear, because I was sleeping off all sorts of unfortunate mental vibes in a room filled with brown boxes that don’t belong to me. Woke up and walked around in a daze watching dads in wifebeaters load the beds belonging to girls I never talked to onto trucks I couldn’t drive, because I don’t know how to drive, because I am at heart a small boy and wish I was not.
So there’s this weird generational window that you never really hear anyone talking about, kids birthed between say ‘88 and ‘92 whose first shits and steps and birthdays exist not on some cloud or hard-drive but rather in the attics and closets of their childhood homes or maybe some early retirement community, preserved on the decidedly analog mediums of videotape and film that this particular cohort (of which of course I am a member) are constantly accused of fetishizing through like Instagram and that whole curated Tumblr aesthetic that you don’t really need me to describe. And right around the time that these kids first started maybe gaining some sense of life’s complexity/difficulty—via say early romantic rejection, or genitalia grown too large or not large enough, or all that talk on the news about candy-colored threats to our safety—is when digital photography and its dutiful, unsentimental glare really took off, consumer-wise, so that filmic or photographic documentation of this cohort’s youth starts to, around age 11, 12, 13, look a whole lot more prosaic and mundane, the colors accurate and well-balanced but lifeless, unlike those grainy/impressionistic documents of simpler times, and so maybe this is a reason for all of that fetishizing, I don’t know.
I am not a genius, and probably neither are you. You might work hard to obtain a medical degree and then spend your professional years administering life-saving vaccines to small (and large!) children, but you wont invent the life-saving vaccine; your vegetarian burger chain might come to dominate the vegetarian burger market of a large city and its outlying suburbs, but you probably just weren’t born with the innate business savvy necessary to make your brand name synonymous with vegetarian burgers nation- or worldwide, and so you wont end up a case study in some pop-economics book sold at airports and newsstands and will have to instead glean that necessary life-affirming satisfaction from visiting one of your ten or twelve outlets and watching (covertly, so as not to alarm the customers) your small but loyal and personally significant clientele chow down on some meatless patties. And anyway earlier today, in a surprisingly lucid and articulate interview with Pitchfork (surprising because most indie rock interviews read like they’re being conducted with reticent foreign exchange students hired by the actual musicians to talk with whatever third-rate link aggregator needs the pageviews/American Apparel ad money) Brian King, singer/guitarist for Japandroids, which is a rock band, basically came out and, in a couple of frank, direct sentences, addressed one of the major questions hanging above 2010s indie rock.
The question requires some unpacking, and I guess if I wanted to be a concise/trenchant/on-point writer-type I’d do the unpacking on my own time and then present you with the well-defined contents of said package afterwards, but this is after all a sporadically updated Tumblr blog so I figure I might as well just let you watch me pry at the duct tape with a butter knife; let’s let the packing peanuts fly, here. So: D.I.Y., right, you might not be a musical prodigy or have a marketable look but you can, if you want, make some songs in your bedroom or best friend’s studio that might sound like tinnier derivations of your more talented idols’ best work but that still ideally will bear your own personal stamp (because even the most ‘boring’ dude in the room still has a three-dimensional interior life and a distinctive fingerprint, and also don’t like 95% of indie rock reviews that aren’t of Established Innovators like Animal Collective feature some variant of the line “a fresh take on a familiar sound,” and also jesus sorry for the stumblingly incoherent nature of this blog post, I started seeing a girl I like a couple of months ago and that coupled w/ looming graduation anxiety and your average laziness (and also fear!!) has been why I haven’t really updated this cobweb-ridden blog in some time, and my logic now is like ‘if you ever want to start this thing back up then you’re gonna have to just DIIV back into it headlong’) and so yes, anyway, you have your vaccine-inventors and your vegetarian burger chain magnates, your Noah Lennoxes and your Phil Elverums, but for the most part you have this great mass of bands that really are a lot like us: Passionate non-geniuses, men and women carving out a niche for themselves many rungs below whatever rung the New York Times Arts critics pay attention to but still changing lives, and in this way the gorgeously uninteresting ’90s indie rock band Seam and my mother are basically the same person.
The subtitle to Michael Azzerad’s epoch-explicating book ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’ is ‘Scenes From the American Indie Underground,’ but really it should be ‘If You Are a Genre-Defining Visionary, Otherwise Enjoy Your Passing Mention As One of Dinosaur Jr.’s Touring Partners in the Mid-’80s.’ The bands that have traditionally tended to end up as chapter titles in critical surveys or as eternal top one-hundred entries in decade-end ‘Best-Of’ lists are the ones that did something new (I think—I sometimes feel silly writing about music in this overheated way when I have not listened to all or really even a significant portion of Music). BUT as certain contested books have argued and as any familiarity with the two or three or (if we’re being honest) one website(s) that dictate how a certain segment of the population fills the disc space Steve Jobs allotted them proves, there is nothing particularly (or conventionally) ‘exciting’ happening in the indie rock sphere right now and most serious guitar-rock fans seem ready and (almost too) eager to concede that most of what’s interesting is happening in mainstream pop and hip-hop. So now those in the thriving Indie Rock Canonization business have to try and stuff these functional & potent, er, canonballs into a canon historically accustomed to holding canonballs of a(n ostensibly) higher quality, and so I guess the question is: Why is a band like Japandroids getting such positive critical (and fan!) attention for music that could’ve been made twenty years ago?
So: In the Pitchfork interview King links his band to the Replacements, saying that they weren’t “born great,” were not destined to directly save the nation’s youth from polio or whatever, but instead fought passionately with what little ‘innate’ talent they had to do what they loved. And, of course, he’s wrong: They’re both geniuses. Paul Westerberg was so good at being your average charming corner-store fuck up that he transcended all of that and ended up defining (or refining) an archetype—he’s the uber-everyman. And Japandroids are the ultimate D.I.Y. success story, so good at being not that great that they ended up making what might be this year’s best album, even if it took them three years and only has eight songs, one of which is a cover and another of which came out two years ago and another two of which are basically the same song played at different speeds: These dudes never thought they’d become (moderately successful indie) rock stars; they just wanted to make music that sounded like the music they loved, hoping their friends might give a shit.
Realizing, ten seconds into hearing “Age of Consent” for the first time since ‘09, that I’ve spent the last three years chasing inferior/sometimes comparable imitations of a sound that was invented and perfected six years before I was born, and being totally okay with that, because joy and innovation/credibility are different things.
I am so angry. You can’t see me right now, but if you could, you’d notice the warm washcloth I wear on my forehead whenever I am furious. You’ve all, to a greater or lesser extent, expressed your opinions on this outrage that I’d need another warm washcloth just to work up the courage to name, and unfortunately I only own one. I myself was going to remain silent on the issue that, since becoming known to me twenty-four hours ago, has reawakened my long-slumbering hemorrhoidal woes and necessitated a 300% increase in my already dangerously high daily doses of Valium, Percocet, and a heartburn medication whose complicated name escapes me in my agitated state. But then I thought: My voice needs to be heard. And what a voice it is, that I have! Capable of expressing the sort of puissant indignation that those who have written on this subject before ten minutes from now—when I plan on pressing ‘Publish’ with the gilded gavel I reserve for blog posts of unusual gravity/socio-political import—have really only let’s be honest tickled the mottled, corpulent underbelly of, whereas I plan on ripping the blood stained t-shirt off of this issue, diving into its flesh; plan on spending whole paragraphs figuratively brushing my teeth (rage-grinded into bloody stumps by now) with its esophagus, strangling the life out of dissenting (i.e. wrong) opinions with its small intestine, burrowing myself into its stomach only to re-emerge three days later well-equipped to deal my enemy the final blow that previous angry blog posts, well-intentioned as they may have been, have thus far failed to deliver. And I will swell one hundred times my size and everyone will cheer for me and my smart opinion.