Has anyone else noticed their indie music collection getting a little stale recently? I don't know, some albums aren't holding up as well as they used to for me. Worse, my interest in new albums from bands I used to love immediately fades in under a week. The Shins, Modest Mouse, Wilco (gasp), Flaming Lips, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire (I insert mad caveats here however), Radiohead among others all released fairly mediocre albums over the last couple years. Now, what existential dread can I wring from the very marrow of this catastrophe? That way I dare not tread for it is a path fraught with dangerous rumination, arthritic knees, and discount antacid. Suffice to say, you must have also noticed recently that your old jazz albums from high school (the ones you have because you played in a high school jazz band--you may have even been terrible) have been sounding better and better. Check out Basie's tunes on the upper right and I defy you not to grin wider than you have at a song in like four and a half years.
5 comments:
Remember in college there was a professor who wrote a song for Bob Dylan? And then he went on to lament that there was no good music and the best was, like Matchbox 20? You made him a mix tape of Beck and Wilco which was cutting edge then. And a solid 9 years ago. Yet, are you sure you're keeping up with good music? As evidence, I suggest Antarctica Takes It!, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and cocorosie, which you dimiss with derision.
I'd say that the old stalwarts of the last five to ten years have failed to remain consistent, while Bob Dylan, an absurdly ancient monolith, still finds a way to remain vital and interesting. As to the bands you mentioned, I'll certainly check them out, but I guess what I'm trying to articulate here is that pop/indie music, and the general rules it abides by, its shape and overall ambition, is familiar to me, perhaps overly so, and that as a medium, indie 'rock', for lack of a better word, is a medium which has exhausted itself. This is a personal declaration, not a statement on the relevance or state of that music in an objective sense. Subjectively, I just think I'm done with it; there's nothing compelling coming out of that genre of music for me. I'm more interested, at this stage in my life, in pure musicianship, as opposed to weak-wristed laments about the mundane tragedy of living in Williamsburg. I guess I never understood why, as people get older, they often tend to graviate away from pop and indie music, and now I do. Ultimately, it just gets boring, and classical music and jazz (along with Dylan, Talking Heads and other consistent and, shall we say, meatier projects) reward deeper listening and thinking than do, say, TV on the Radio, Be your Own Pet, Herbert, cocorosie, etc...
Greer,
I feel the struggle for indie rock in the past few years is the compresion of time between bands. With bands like Clap Your Hands getting noticed without a traditional studio album and then catapulted into the limelight, indie fans quickly become saturated and are looking for the next big thing. The art form itself is more about people trying to find the next thing that no one has heard of. And in today's 24/7 environment, it's hard for them to succeed. I applaud you for foresaking the desire to find the next "little" thing and enjoying music for music's sake. That said, I recommend you check out Charles Mingus' Pithecanthropus Erectus. I end this with a warning that this came from a man who last week (after a long day at a Cubs game) said that he really like Hall N Oats.
Out of curiosity, what are your caveats regarding the new Arcade Fire? Funeral never did much for me, but I like the new one a lot better. Even if things aren't half as dire and dead serious as they make them out to be.
Agree about the other bands you mentioned, at least the ones I've heard. Anyway, if you're bored in Indieland, there are plenty of other neighborhoods for you to explore. Soul, for example? Maybe some Sam Cooke? Night Beat, which isn't complex like jazz or classical, but is definitely soulful, or his early gospel stuff with the Soul Stirrers? Tango (see Astor Piazzolla)? Afrobeat (see Fela Kuti)? Early Motown? Blues? I realize some of these may not satisfy a craving for complexity, though Piazzolla probably would, but they're guaranteed to be more sincere and joyful (or sorrowful, as the case may be) than your typical indie band.
Or do this: pick a country, and find out what the cool kids are listening to over there. Think about the first time you heard The Streets, and how alien his language seemed. Go for that kind of experience, even if it's the music that's strange, and the language is one you don't know.
But I'm not sure it's worth paying much attention to genre in the first place. Does it matter that Deadwood's a western, which is arguably a pretty played-out genre? Doesn't the good stuff transcend genre? Half Nelson's a great movie; does it matter that it's superficially in the same camp as Dangerous Minds?
First off, Dangerous Minds is the greatest movie ever. Coolio was robbed both of his oscar and dignity!
Second off, no it wasn't.
Post a Comment