What also could be happening, though—if you happen to watch this show looking for deep, spiritual meaning like I sometimes do—is a call to arms for like-minded individuals to continue creating great things. If you love Pete And Pete, let’s say, don’t just lament the loss of the show on the ’net, or say “Hey, remember Clarissa?” Watching old DVDs to try and recapture the feeling you once had the first time you saw something might be fun, but it can be a little pointless, too. (Blasphemy, I know, considering that’s basically what we’re doing here—and then writing about it.) Pete’s lesson—and our lesson—from this show is not just “find a song and love it,” but rather, “if you love something, go make something someone else can love.” Polaris did this for Pete when they accidentally fed him the song that he loved. The Blowholes did this when they played “Surfin’ Bum, Surfin’ Fun” for grumpy Fred Hurley. The creators of Pete And Pete (deep, I know) did this when they heard a Magnetic Fields song they liked or saw a Hal Hartley movie and said, “Hey, we should introduce this band or these actors to other people.”Though the writer is quick to repeatedly qualify this sentiment, I think it's exactly the right one. Indie music is an incredibly conservative genre: it has a clear narrative (Velvets to Patti Smith to college radio to Nirvana), a golden age to which we would like to return (the late 60s, 70s, 80s, or early 90s, depending on who one talks to), and a tendency to treat the nth recitation of the exact same thing (Horses or Murmur) as a superior exercise to the enjoyment of whatever is new.
The problem, as any good conservative cultural critic will tell you, is that so much of what is new is mediocre, because so much of everything is mediocre, and the sorting process has yet to begin. Granted, the clerk who rents Archimboldi his first typewriter in 2666 insists that small works and great ones have a symbiotic relationship quite apart from quality; Quentin Skinner and company would say that those minor and mediocre works tell a lot about the world in which the great works were made; and there are plenty of reasons to doubt canonical judgments individual (my personal great white whale, Moby Dick) and collective (as I've argued before, I think most poetry has or will soon fall out of the generally read and accepted canon). In the interest of ending this paragraph on the same idea with which it started, one might well notice that, for the most part, the culture of criticism is passive, and consists of judging the work of others while never creating any of one's own.
As it happened, a few weeks ago I attended a Toad the Wet Sprocket show with a few friends. We thoroughly enjoyed the nostalgic aspects of the concert, even though I had the notable limitation of knowing only four of their songs. They also played a couple specifically-labeled-as-new songs, both of which were, not surprisingly, mediocre. I've been thinking over my reaction to them since, and in particular the strong feeling that I'd probably rather listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy again rather than middle-of-the-road guitar pop, even though I remain committed to a place for guitar-based music in the cultural landscape and (if you hadn't noticed) there aren't a lot of bands out there committed to it.* So perhaps it's better, on balance, to continue to support the better-than-average in the hope that something truly great will come along because of it.
*Correction: there aren't a lot of successful bands that aren't unremittingly terrible (I'm looking at you, Ray LeMontagne, and your pseudo-Van Morrison mom rock**)
**No offense intended to my actual mom, who has pretty good taste in music.
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