So basically we met one time, at a sort of makeshift Korean bar in midtown that was not checking IDs. We spoke for ten minutes about Pitchfork and pop-punk and then she made out with my friend, who at the time had a girlfriend he’d dump a couple days later. The next day I added her on Facebook and for the following year and a half we’d communicate in fits and in varying degrees of sobriety through Facebook likes and comments, and sometimes text messages about the band Orange Juice. She (seemingly) lived the life that, cloistered in the stacks of the University of Delaware’s library, I hated myself for not living: hanging out with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Robert Christgau, attending exclusive D.I.Y. shows, writing for a succession of publications I was barely cool enough to know about.
It made me realize that my interest and love for independent music was (and is) totally removed from a greater (or at least physical) “community”; I was (and am) not in the trenches, helping Todd P assemble stages for bands that won’t last past September. I was (and am) not meeting like-minded scenesters at Bushwick bars and staying up with them until six in the morning, discussing Dirty Beaches’ critical reception and snorting coke bought off one of the guys in Das Racist. It’s 2011 and I don’t need a scene, a graying hipster to tell me what to listen to or how Archers of Loaf sounded live in ‘95; I have the internet for that.
Anyway Saturday night I went to see Beach Fossils perform at hip D.I.Y. venue 285 Kent, mostly because I had nothing better do to; the few times I’ve listened to them, I’ve yearned for The Drums. I said something to this effect to the girl from paragraph one, who after seventeen months of oddly familiar cyber-communication I finally met up with again on the sidewalk of Kent Avenue. She, like virtually everyone there, looked disarmingly stylish, in glasses that were at least five times the circumference of her eyes. It’s odd, the disconnect; between what indie rock exists as between my headphones (i.e. a bastion of ill-dressed outsiders) and what it actually is, at least in an age where Bon Iver beats out Lady Gaga on the charts, where Wavves releases singles on Mountain Dew’s record label, where the combined efforts of Urban Outfitters and American Apparel have turned an aesthetic that spiritually if not musically grew organically out of Black Flag and broken vans (none of which I could ever really get in to anyway, I’m a Death Cab for Cutie fan, and also speaking of Vans they’re sponsoring a series of indie rock concerts in Greenpoint this summer wonder what Ian MacKaye would have to say about that actually wait no I don’t) into something stylish and sophisticated and desirable. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.
That is unless your entire self-image is tied up in a sub-culture that you’re now realizing you have no tangible ties to and on the sidewalk of the Beach Fossils show some guy was just like “hey, get off my sidewalk!” and you were like “what?” and he’s like “just kidding!” and then it turns out that the guy responsible for that killer joke was none other than Todd P, who the girls you’re struggling to make conversation with call “daddy” and discuss with an eerie sort of reverence. (By the way absolutely nobody here has confessed to actually liking Beach Fossils.) And anyway the girl you’ve been sporadically communicating with for, like, ever is barely acknowledging you, and when she does acknowledge you it’s in a bizarre weird remote isolating way, and the friend you’ve come with is getting antsy and wants to leave because he has even FEWER ties to this sub-culture and is just kind of weirded out by the whole scene. Also you’re wearing a white V-neck because it was your only clean shirt, but it’s making you feel incredibly self-conscious, as the whole white v-neck think was (probably?) played out years ago and now the hipsterati of Brooklyn have seemingly moved on to the kind of shirts where if they weren’t wearing pants you wouldn’t see any dick or anything, like imagine a little kid wearing his unusually tall father’s shirt. (I have an aspiring comedian friend who, far removed from a world where Odd Future signifies something besides the ever-present strangeness of tomorrow, went to an event in Williamsburg and likened it to a depressive’s Halloween party.)
So I was all set to write a Tumblr post illustrating just how much more authentic/tastefully dressed I was than Saturday night’s Beach Fossils crowd but on the rainy walk back to the L train the next morning (from the apartment of a girl who the night before had kissed me and I kissed her back even though I didn’t want to, because I’ve been rejected and wouldn’t want to make anyone else feel that way, a stance that has landed me in a whole lot of unfortunate situations) I realized that my feelings of bitterness towards the interestingly-coiffed masses stemmed mostly from the fact that I did not feel like one of them and that they did not individually make the effort to introduce themselves to me and maybe invite me to their Captured Tracks-themed apartment parties (I’d totally come as Wild Nothing). Plus also the one person I ran into there that I did actually sort of know was incredibly nice and welcoming, so.
This post doesn’t have a title but if I commissioned Los Campesinos! to write one they’d call it Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #76. (This is my 76th Tumblr post.)
