Mission From God
I
had this idea so I’ll start here. Laptop home-recording (via garageband, protools,
et al), digital distribution (via myspace circa 2005, via soundcloud and
tumbler circa now), and the tastemaking of the Internet and its attendant music
blogs and websites (pitchfork, stereogum, your local blog if you live in a
larger city) has changed the way we find out about music. In one significant
way, its resulted in generation of young musicians who become (relatively)
famous from their first primordial outbursts – especially in the historical DIY
indie and hip-hop scenes. I’m thinking of – in no chronological order (because,
indeed, chronologically this is a
phenom that can trace its roots to Napster, the mid-90s internet, home-taping,
etc.) – James Blake, Arctic Monkeys, Youth Lagoon, Smith Westerns, Wavves, etc.
You know: youngsters. Part of their boilerplate bio was to mention how old they
are, as in “holy shit, have you heard that James Blake album and can you
believe he was 21 when he made it?” (“yeah, but I prefer his early stuff.”)
Music
culture has always been obsessed with youth and rightly so: for generations
artists have made their best albums – as a general rule – in their first five
years or so. Of course, we never saw the years of local and regional toil,
never heard the neophyte demos of our old favs. Overnight success wasn’t unheard
of (I remember my junior high music teacher siting Boston [the band; “More
Than A Feeling] as an overnight-success, especially within the context of
mid-70’s regional touring and fan-base building), but it wasn’t the rule. The “acceleration”
of this process via the influence of the Internet means that the Youngsters
aren’t “paying their dues”. We’re hearing some of these artists from the first rosy
flush, but we aren’t getting a road-worn, hard-won, blood+sweat+tears sound.
In
some respects, I think we – as listeners – are getting cheated. In particular,
I look (personally, in my opinion) at Wavves and think “that guy sure has an
ear for a catchy tune” but I also can’t help but think that instead of hearing
his home recordings at 21, I’d rather hear the songs he writes after he makes,
breaks, remakes his band and his sound – after he’s been worn-out by shitty,
meagerly attended shows at all-ages clubs, after he considered and
reconsidered, after he’s temped in an office or hung sheetrock, after he’s
lived, after he’s become more thoughtful and measured, after he’s taken his
toothpick sculptures apart and recast them in bronze.
Despite
this trend, the Youngsters as still the anomaly. Rock bands are still people
well into their twenties, who’s friends are finishing up law school and getting
married and buying homes, fighting the good fight against ever having to tell
anyone their age, because at 27, isn’t it time to give this up?
And
people do give it up: the world needs graphic designers, office managers, web
developers, screenwriters, and late-blooming accountants, after all.
But
then a curious thought hit me:
What
about people who are still making music, still thinking about music, still
dreaming about music? What about people in their 30s and 40s, who still breath
music – even if its just secretly nestled in their hearts, instead of
vestigally on their sleeves? People who continued creating – and because their
hey-day never came – continued creating with that fire that we associate with
youth... but is it really associated with never quite getting there?
And
I’m not talking about a 40-year old dude who still listen to Nevermind everyday and talks about music
with the same tin-eared retro-virus that plagued the Baby Boomers and now
certainly (or irrevocably) threatens to infect Generation X.
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