Forces at Work

Sorry for missing Friday's random 10 - I've been playing that game on facebook lately, which has advantages, being more interactive... it's purposes here are to force me to post something - to give me a framework for fairly arbitrary links posts - and to say something about music. But today - in compensation for not posting anything all week, I am going for something more substantial....

Tomorrow night, the Feelies are coming to town - I will be there. They're opening for Sonic Youth, but, much as I like Sonic Youth (and despite the fact that I have never seen Sonic Youth - one of the significant underground bands of the 80s I didn't see at the time), they are an afterthought. The Feelies are back, playing live, and the world is a better place for it.

I don't follow the music world very closely these days - I might never have known about this show if I hadn't found their web site a month or so ago. I was looking for them on the web because I was feeling nostalgic. I was feeling nostalgic because I went to see a concert a month or so ago - my niece was in town visiting colleges, and wanted to see The Airborne Toxic Event - I tagged along with her and her mother out of curiosity, and just generally enjoying live music, even though I don't see it much anymore.... There were three bands on the bill, the other two called Red Cortez and the Henry Clay People - bunch of LA bands on tour together, I guess it is... I went in innocent - I had never heard of any of these bands, and the only exposure I'd had was to look a couple of them up on YouTube, though I never finished any of the videos. I went in innocent, and came out - I guess disappointed isn't the word, but - they weren't awful - just drab, by the numbers, indie rock. They all felt like cover bands - though I admit that may be a function of me being 1000 years old, and of pretty much every rock band in the last 30 years sounding like a cover band. I don't hold that against them. They just weren't, any of them, very good cover bands. A really great cover band can make the originals sound like the copy.

You could say I'm building to something here, though it's another paragraph away.... Back to that show - none of the three were good enough to get me past guessing who they were channeling. Red Cortez? Franz Ferdinand trying to recreate Rattle and Hum era U2 - I include fashion sense and the singer's fondness for slinging his guitar across his back.... Henry Clay People? Mott the Hoople by way of Kings of Leon? They were the most interesting, by the way - Mott the Hoople? They didn't cover All the Way to Memphis, but they didn't have to - all their originals sounded like All the Way to Memphis. I think we could do with more bands trying to sound like Mott the Hoople.... And the headliners? I hate to cite Pitchfork, but - you know... Seriously? they usually sounded like New Order fronted by Chris Martin - the first half of that will keep your toes tapping at least. They too betrayed a fondness for Rattle and Hum, quoting it, and the lyrics I could catch certainly seemed up to the standards of mid-80s U2 - which is to say, godawful. And - I don't know if this is the most damning thing or not - they looked like they came straight from central casting. Lots of onstage speeches about not being from the glammy side of LA, but they still look like a Disney band. Acted it often enough too....

Okay. Enough bitchery. I was not, after all, the intended demographic (the niece is - at the bottom of the demographic, maybe, but 17-22 seems about right.) And complaints aside, it was a reasonably pleasant evening. Derivative, bland, but likeable enough. Not every band is going to knock you on your ass the first time you see or hear them. Ah - but - you gotta hope.... It does happen. Not often - but I have seen bands I'd never heard before that won me over on the spot. The Butthole Surfers, say - though I'd read about them, and I admit, that was the show, the surgery films, the stripper, the bullhorn (I missed the fire and the riot, as my ride was bored... still...) And when you get that feeling a couple times, you want more of it - and when a band you have never heard takes the stage, there's that moment or two when they still can do it - they can do absolutely anything - they can surprise you - they can blow you away - they can be perfect.... Which I suppose brings me back to the beginning.

I saw REM in 1986 - at that time, they were my favorite band, by a long shot. I went to the concert (and they were in fine form) and came out humming - the opening act's music. (Mixed in with Little America, for some reason...) "Slipping (Into Something)" to be precise.... The Feelies, of course. I had heard of the Feelies - I knew Peter Buck produced their record - that's all I knew. They opened and completely stole the show. I saw them a few months later - they opened for Husker Du - they stole the show; they were faster, more intense - it wasn't close. And after that, I saw them every time they came to town - usually playing once or twice a year at the Paradise. They never disappointed, it never got old. I see video of their recent performances, back together after all those years - they still seem sharp and tight and as thrilling as ever. So there you go.

They are (and were) also the band that - more than anyone - signaled - something different about rock music. That crack about everyone in the last 30 years sounding like a cover band - I'm not kidding. And the Feelies were probably the first band that drove that idea home to me. Granted - this is the 1986 (and on) Feelies - Crazy Rhythms doesn't fit the theory so well... but the rest of their career feels almost like the Borges of rock. Not just for the actual covers (which very often do make the originals sound like Feelies covers) - for their way their originals sound like covers of songs someone should have written. Everything sounds like that lost forgotten unreleased Velvet Underground record, or maybe something by Iggy Pop or the Beatles you’ve never heard before. There are records that exist in dreams that seem as though they should be real, just as there are books you dream about that should exist. The Feelies are like the caretakers of these dreams, just as Borges is the caretaker of the libraries of dream books. Their songs sound familiar, half-remembered - though better than the originals must have been...

But these days, this is the rule, not the exception. Rock music is an odd genre - once upon a time it was a generational marker, a big old break with the past.... When I was growing up, no one I knew had parents who liked rock - that extends to most of the people I know within 5-10 years of me. But now - my peers are all getting old, and have kids of our own, and those kids listen to the same stuff we did. And the new music they listen to is the same as the stuff I listened to 20, 30 years ago. My niece is coming down to see this Feelies/Sonic Youth show - bands 12-15 years older than she is. Bands obviously a lot more adventurous than Airborne Toxic Event and their ilk. Though in fact - both of them feel like very "late" bands - or like - how to put this? like bands that have accepted that there isn't much more new to do in rock, so you stop worrying about that and start exploring the sounds you can make.... a new translation of Thomas Browne's Urn Burial - a new tuning, a new trick you can play with a screwdriver...

Because as far as I can tell, rock has stopped. There has been nothing new since - well - there's Rap, which is a new movement somewhere next to rock (though it's pretty much in the same boat, only since 1990 or so, not 1980)... Seriously? I'd say the Minutemen were the last band that didn't sound like what came before them. Since the Minutemen, there have been no bands that would not have fit easily into the music scene before they existed. If this sounds like criticism, it is not - I think this is true of some of my favorite bands ever - The Feelies, REM, the Meat Puppets - I like an awful lot of music from the last 20 years, from Pavement to Sleater Kinney to Mercury Rev to Six Organs of Admittance to TV on the Radio to the Liars to the White Stripes, and on and on... But they could have existed 10 years before they did. Could Pere Ubu or the Minutemen have existed in 1968? (They at least needed the Stooges and Captain Beefheart to inspire them, right?)

I have a theory about why this is, actually: I think somewhere in the 1950s and 60s, we became a completely media saturated world (or, big chunks of the world did.) Media saturation meant, among other things, that nothing ever went away. Everyone my age and younger has heard all of the history of rock and roll all their lives - we have the records, we live in and with pop music in ways my parents absolutely did not, and most of my friends' parents never did. Music, pop music, rock, rap, etc. is a completely pervasive presence in our lives: it's a given in our lives. I think, for all the insistence on the ephemeral nature of pop music, that its pervasiveness has made it almost eternal. Nothing ever goes away - at least the good stuff never goes away. I think it makes rock, and other pop forms, more like folk music - old songs passed along, new songs built on the structure of old... A nice idea, actually. I like having 12 year olds marvel that I don't have enough Elvis on the iPod, or 9 year olds play me Johnny Cash as the greatest thing they've ever heard. I mean, it is!