Nobody move quickly and freak them out, but it appears Pre-Durst is back again. Indulge your 90s nostalgia.

In an AV Club recap of The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and specifically the episode where young Pete forms a band, we find this reflection on the episode's meaning:

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.

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.

Many months ago I read an article on the AV Club about Riot-Grrl, the 90s, largely Pacific-northwest-centered movement that combined punk with what might legitimately be described as radical feminism. Being both the punk-ish sort and always interested in and committed to feminism of a kind, I listened to several of the riot-grrl bands and formed a life-long affection from Sleater-Kinney, the most musically accomplished of the bunch. Throw in the other major female alt-rock stars of the time--Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, Bjork--and one realizes the 90s were a good time to be a fan of strong women playing electric guitar.

But--and there's no way to put this delicately--it was hard not to notice the prominence of men in the lyrics. The use of men was multifaceted: sometimes as oppressor, sometimes as object of desire, sometimes as source for imagery to be subverted, as in "Man Size," or sometimes as shorthand for everything that's wrong with the world. It makes the sensitive man's response to this music more difficult: there's Thurston Moore singing "I believe Anita Hill" in "Youth Against Fascism" and... not much else to guide one through proper male responses.

Of course, there are responses that are clearly wrong. It's been said, and with some justice, that if you're the sort of guy who thinks a song on Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville might be applicable to your own life, you're the sort of guy she was singing about the the first place: the Nice Guy™. To stay on Liz Phair, though it's true as a matter of aesthetics to say "Help Me Mary">"Cinco de Mayo">"Polyester Bride">"Extraordinary," ie the quality of her recorded output has declined over her career, it's sad how much commentary is framed in terms of her desirableness or sexuality. It's not uncommon to see the same general kind of lyrics which were once regarded as shocking but titillating now regarded as a desperate attempt to recapture her earlier magic, a trope that reappears so much it makes me wonder how so few draw the obvious implication that the criticism she receives is only tangentially related to the quality of music she makes.

So when I listen to "Man Size," a great song in the middle of a great run (after "50ft Queenie" and "Yuri G," before "Dry") on the great Rid of Me, I'm not entirely sure what to do with it. It's a great song in composition (there's no better appropriator of the blues from the 90s) and in lyrics, but the album as a whole is dealing with what seems to me to be a particularly feminine kind of loss, and many of the gender inversions are there to deny agency to men (i.e. "Rub It Till It Bleeds" or "Dry"), so: do I like the song because it's a good song, or does this mean I've read out the sexual politics in a way directly contrary to the purpose of the song? Or is there any decent answer at all?

The difference between Nevermind and In Utero is attributable to two things. The first is the difference in production styles between Butch Vig and Steve Albini--Vig liked things to sound polished, which is why "Breed" sounds too much like "Drain You," and the second half of the album gets a little indistinguishable. Albini, by contrast, appears to have gotten out of the way of the band. In Utero, at least to these ears, does not have the usual Albini production touches.

The second is that Kurt Cobain became a better songwriter, and was finally able to do things other than write loud and fast pop-hard rock songs. On "Serve the Servants," the tempo is slower and the composition less dependent on a wall of guitars to keep the song moving forward; the individual parts are more complex and the lyrics come closer to narrative coherence (they are, at the very least, no longer a succession of nonsense words). "Dumb" is close to acoustic; "Pennyroyal Tea" and "All Apologies" will fare better that way. In general, the better a song plays on acoustic, the better the song itself is.

Desert Island Disc #3: R.E.M., Automatic for the People


Among the reasons to find R.E.M. a cut above the average band, they're one of the few who are both aware of and consciously invoke imagery and symbolism, with the idea that both need to be consistent not just across a song,* but across the album of which they're a part. This is part of the reason early R.E.M. albums play better as wholes than as a collection of individual tracks: not for nothing does Reckoning say "File Under Water" on the spine, or Document say "File Under Fire." The appeal of R.E.M. for the cultural upwardly mobile was the implicit promise that great music could point towards great other things. Their two big early 90s videos steal from Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Soviet Realism and the opening scene of Fellini's 8 1/2.

Automatic for the People is understood to be a fall album--the imagery is consistently of death and loss and the fleetingness of all things. On this trip, listening to the album again, I realized there's exactly one time reference, in "Nightswimming": "September's coming soon." It's a summer song. This makes sense, in a way: "Nightswimming" is both a nostalgia piece and a song in which the singer anticipates the moment when his experience will be over before it's happened. These moments of prospect-in-retrospect (or the reverse) pervade the album. The time shifts (measured in careful changes of verb tense) of "Sweetness Follows" and "Everybody Hurts," send the message is that whatever the listener's experience is, no matter how bad, there will be a time after it when the experience will look and feel different. That temporal shift also makes it a great transitional album--remembering the past with nostalgia, thinking about the possibilities of the future--which makes for a reassuring listen when one is literally halfway between the old life and the new life, as I am this weekend.

"Find the River" is in the grand tradition of end-of-great-album songs which sum up, amplify and complicate the themes of the album. "Soul Survivor" from Exile on Main St. is the ur-example, and "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2" from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is probably the best. Nothing much to note about it except that it's a great song, and cautiously optimistic. Also, dig Michael Stipe's terrible goatee and the fact that they're all wearing Ray-Bans. The 1990s, children. Weird times.

Assuming my math is correct, I bought and first listened to Automatic the summer before 6th grade, which should be 1993. I played this and Out of Time constantly over the course of that year, sometimes more than once a day. It's not out of the realm of possibility that I've listened to this album 1000 times (which would be approximately once a week for 18 years), and perhaps many more than that (five times on this trip alone--now seven since I started drafting this post). Yet there's always something new to notice. This time around, in addition to the lyrical conceit discussed above, I realized how many of the album's hooks play on established genre tropes but de-nature them: the guitar line in "Drive" is a straight-ahead acoustic blues, but doesn't sound like it; the rhythm of "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" is derived from girl groups, but you'd never know it unless you listened for it; "Ignoreland" sounds the messiest but has the most precise instrumentation--and the most spaces between the notes--of all the songs on the album.


*On the most recent listen, it occurred to me that the lines "I know that this is vitriol/ no solution spleen-venting/ but I feel better having screamed don't you?" are one small example of consistent imagery for the duration of a lyrical thought. No mixed metaphors here.

Baby instant soup doesn't really grab me
Today I need something more substantial
A can of beans or black-eyed peas
Some Nescafé and ice,
A candy bar, a fallin' star, or a reading from Dr. Seuss

Began with the intention of writing about The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" as an example of a great song with reprehensible politics. The post duly expanded to cover my re-reading of 2666 and, specifically, the questions it raises about Benno von Archimboldi's politics in "The Part About Archimboldi;"* and there to art and politics and the problems of conservative attempts to separate the two in response to the rise of postmodernism and critical theory. Obviously, this significantly violated my '15 minutes per post' rule, and will go up whenever I am done with it.

Instead, you'll get this, and you'll like it:



...imagine if you can, children, that there was once a time in which hip-hop was not considered a legitimate form, and was considered to be too dependent on electronic instrumentation and samples to even be considered music.** But here's LL Cool J, charismatic and powerful, making you believe, if only for a moment, that the rest of his career isn't populated by half-R&B loverboy concoctions. And this changed peoples' minds about hip-hop. The 90s were weird, kids, the 90s were weird.


*As I noticed this time around, the end notes indicate that the entire novel is supposed to be narrated by Arturo Bolano, one of the characters in The Savage Detectives, which raises the question again and in a more intense way (but which will only make sense if you've read that book).

**No one said this about Kraftwerk, of course, but we'll leave aside the racial politics angle, which is not Kraftwerk's fault in any case.