My new brother-in-law is a genius. It’s possible that he’s one in the conventional sense – the guy’s pretty sharp – but I mean this more in the sense that my high school friends and I used the term. That is, to define someone defined by semi-spazzy savant-ism. Ben writes crossword puzzles for a living and is an ethnomusicology grad student and is learning Thai and adds plausible-but-fake nicknames to obscure baseball players’ Wikipedia pages and generally just kind of does – at a notably high level – things that few other people would even ever think to do. Among these little flashes of genius is his identification of a unique but utterly recognizable Least Favorite Musical Genre.
We all have these – Bill O’Reilly’s is “The Rap,” Prince’s is “Everything I Didn’t Write,” yours is “Anything But The Cranberries,” which is honestly just weird and something I never got about you. Ben’s is “Nostalgia Rock.” By this Ben means “Old Time Rock and Roll” and “Summer of ’69″ and other examples of that goofily Mellencampian subset of cheesy rock revanchism that exists primarily to flatter the parochialism and out-of-it-ness of its target audience.
Nostalgia Rock doesn’t have to be old, per se, or even made by old people — Kid Rock has made a smooth late-career transition into Nostalgia Rock with his drowsy Foghat-isms and stupid fucking hats, and proto-model-humping cornball Lenny Kravitz is basically the Sunglasses-Rocking Destroyer Deity of Nostalgia Rock (and someone who did a straightforward cover of “American Woman” for an Austin Powers sequel and honestly seemed to feel pretty good about it). It’s an easy genre to look down on: rock music that disdains and disavows everything that’s scary and challenging and good about rock music; the sonic equivalent of Glenn Beck getting teary over old Coca-Cola commercials, except that parents dance to it at weddings.
And yet the last two shows I’ve seen at Manhattan’s impersonal, strange, totally great-sounding Hammerstein Ballroom – expensive-ticket reunion shows by My Bloody Valentine and The Pixies, about 18 months apart – have me reconsidering my own rock nostalgism, and that of other right-thinking music fans. Even Ben, the mighty brother-in-law, jumped at a chance to see the reunited (and very amazing) Chavez a couple years ago. We are, none of us who bother caring about this sort of thing, immune from this.
I don’t go to many shows anymore, because I am old and married and uncool, but also because I’m only now beginning to emerge from a period of severe fiscal austerity. During the spring and summer, I was working long hours at a handful of different jobs for what amounted to a barely break-even living. I canceled and dialed back just about everything I could – that is, everything but my weekly spa treatments, food and shelter.
Shows, which hadn’t been a big part of my life for a while, proved to be a fairly easy cut. I would far rather listen to music played live with an overpriced drink in my hand while self-conscious people half-dance self-consciously around me than listen to it on my headphones while at home, writing something goofy about sports for $50. (Sadly yes, those are the only two options) But I found myself not necessarily wanting it, after awhile – the acts I generally saw every time they passed through New York seemed increasingly to be playing the same shows I’d seen during their last visit; John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, for instance, much as I love his work, seems increasingly to play only his quietest and most downcast songs, as if to get through his set with a minimum of noise and disruption. When you have a decent job, it’s still something worth paying $15 for; when you have a half-dozen crappy ones, you stay home and listen to your CD (and eat sardines for dinner and tearfully mend your socks).
And I suppose, disappointing though this can be from the audience’s perspective, that it’s hard to argue with. The thrill of a musician’s gift is new to us in the crowd every time we hear it, but it’s something the musician wakes up with every day, and something he or she carries to each show. As a writer – that is, an artist unlikely ever to get laid or asked for an autograph or even very well paid in return for my art – it seems cool to me to have a gleeful crowd calling out requests. As a musician for whom that is no longer novel, I imagine that it must sometimes seem more like they’re barking out demands. What I’m saying is, I empathize. It’s often easier for me to imagine how a band might break up than stay together.
But of course there’s money in performing – increasingly, there’s money only in performing – which undoubtedly has much to do with the recent trends of bands getting back together for the kids (their kids, not the ones in the audience). The London-based show promoters All Tomorrow’s Parties seems to have a lot to do with this, which is to their credit, even if their name is almost sarcastic in its obvious irony – unless the “tomorrow” in question is in 1995, and the “party” is my college-years CD collection coming to life Indian in the Cupboard-style, it’s wrong in two ways. It was for a series of big ATP festivals a couple years ago that My Bloody Valentine – the Scottish roar-pop outfit that is both one of my favorite groups and one which I had long since given up on ever seeing perform – came back together, and they’ll reportedly be playing more ATP shows in 2010. I didn’t go to the big ATP festival at which My Bloody Valentine first performed – that was an expensive show, and held at a big spooky deserted Catskills hotel that is probably haunted by the ghosts of my old Jewish aunts and uncles who once vacationed there. But I did catch them at Hammerstein a few days later.
And it was awesome – in the full-of-awe sense, as well as also in the “totally” sense – and everything my 19-year-old brain imagined it would be, except that I wasn’t there with Winona Ryder (I was 19 when I imagined it!). I’m aware that, in certain rock-crit corners, there’s some disagreement over whether MBV’s songs are as remarkable as the volume at which they’re played. Having experienced their performance, I can say that I’m not really able to contribute to that debate – the weirdly modest sweep of the songs and the jet-engine noise of the performance were inextricable from one another, and combined to make the show one of the most transporting musical experiences I’ve ever had. The show made a physical impact on me – I left feeling as if I’d gotten a massage, while also receiving some weirdly pleasurable blows to the head. It would be a stretch to say that MBV seemed to be enjoying themselves especially up there – that was never really their style, but maybe eight words were said from the stage all night – but that didn’t really register with (or matter to) me. There wasn’t really occasion to wonder what what MBV was feeling up there – they were playing in the dark, with hair in their faces. And there wasn’t really room for an ambiguous show-going experience – I, and everyone else, was pretty firmly in uncritical holy-shit mode.
That, I suppose, is the sort of blanking transcendence we look for in art, sometimes – total and uncompromising and a little harsh, but undeniable at least. It’s a show I remember well, but one I seldom parse terribly hard – it was only what it was, and so overwhelming an experience as to leave next-to-no room for interpretation. This was not the case with the performance by the reunited Pixies, which I saw at Hammerstein a few days before Thanksgiving. But since I’m already running long – it takes awhile to explain my feelings for Kid Rock’s stupid hats – I’ll deal with that next week. Although I’ll give you this spoiler alert before I go: writer, Flip Collective Editor, and former National Merit Scholar Paul Shirley really, really does not like The Pixies.
Tweet
It’s true.
It’s also true that no one should tell ESPN.com about how well David writes about music. I might be out of a job.