Anti-Climacus

Semi-agree with this Slate piece on nostalgia and music, or at least that there's something a little unseemly in a number of indie bands that made their names on credibility and authenticity cashing those in for a bigger payday now (though if someone wants to buy me that deluxe Nevermind box-set, I won't stop them). I can recognize my own nostalgia for the 90s as what it is, which is a memory of that time, not a desire to recreate it now. That there was a Pavement reunion tour was of little interest to me, because what I recognize my fandom to mean is that I would like to have seen them live in 1994. Since they cannot make it 1994 in 2010, I will spend my entertainment dollars elsewhere.

But this part is all nonsense:

Cobain, arguably the last rebel-rocker-as-star, had owed his rise to the centralizing power of the old media; now in his death, he was entangled with the emerging new media disorder. The old media and entertainment channels (what I think of as the analog system) constructed the mainstream while simultaneously creating the possibility of that mainstream being breached and reinvigorated by forces "outside." In grunge's case, that meant the flannel-wearing, slacker-minded alt-rock underground that had developed during the '80s, fostered by a network of independent labels. This curious process of inversion—the underground becoming the overground—was how the analog system had worked repeatedly in the past. ('50s rock'n'roll came initially from the regional independent labels.) And with Nirvana and their fellow travelers, that's how it worked one last time.

But what is also true is that that the media organs of the analog system generated what you might call the "Epochal Self-Image": a sense of a particular stretch of years as constituting an era, a period with a distinct "feel" and spirit. That sense is always constructed, always entails the suppression of the countless disparate other things going on in any given stretch of time, through the focus on a select bunch of artists, styles, recordings, events, deemed to "define the times." If we date the takeoff point of the Internet as a dominant force in music culture to the turn of the millennium (the point at which broadband enabled the explosive growth of filesharing, blogging, et al.), it is striking that the decade that followed is characterized by the absence of epochal character. It's not that nothing happened ... it's that so many little things happened, a bustle of microtrends and niche scenes that all got documented and debated, with the result that nothing was ever able to dominant and define the era.

This account is wrong as a factual matter. We know enough about the history and development of rock music to know that it would frequently posthumously elevate obscure bands to prominence. The forefathers of college radio/indie music in the 80s were the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, neither of whom sold a lot of records. Nor did Patti Smith, nor Television, nor Wire (people were too busy listening to Rumours). Nor the Replacements, Husker Du, or the Minutemen (people were too busy listening to Thriller). Actual indie bands that were successful were the B-52s, R.E.M. and the post-Nirvana grunge bands. So if we count the consolidation of rock 'n' roll in 50s regional labels, that makes exactly twice that the 'underground' became the 'overground.'

It also explains why the concern over 'shattered' internet culture doesn't matter: White Blood Cells or Is This It? are not competing with Nevermind, which was in all other respects an unrepeatable moment in pop culture, they're competing with The Velvet Underground & Nico and Raw Power. We won't actually know how important and influential they are until some band yet to be started decides to use the Strokes or the White Stripes as a blueprint. There is an actual crisis for guitar-based pop and rock music, but this is not the explanation of that crisis.