Hold onto your genre/ your genre’s got a hold on you
There’s something irritating me today, and before long I realize that it’s the radio. I have written this same sentence before, I know, and I’m writing it again. It’s not a matter of pretension that has me thinking such things either; the radio really is just plain and terrible. I twitch a little bit in relation to its horribleness and then switch to something else. And then I change the station again. Every station has up for offer today some horrible simulacra of simulacra. Every group is some weird parody of a group that sounds like a group that sounds like Nirvana. And then, through the static, something weird happens. I switch to 103.9 (“The Edge,” a station named for its own sense of daring) and they’re actually playing something that I have some vague cultural affiliation with: an indie rock song. Which then has me positing the question, how “independent” can that band be, now that it’s getting commercial radio play? Is this station really that “edgy?” And furthermore, what does any of this really matter?

Hanging out in a bar in Albany, New York the other night, for what seemed to be some kind of record release party for a “punk rock” band. The band, fashioned in the way of your latest hipster aesthetic, was a group of 18 year-olds doing some parody of that Sum 41 version of punk that has gone some distance towards totally killing music as of late. The kids were into it, though. There was a circle in front of the stage, where crazified young men with muscles did a dance involving no shirts and running around in circles. My companion and I looked at each other in vague amusement. It’s always at least somewhat amusing when a bunch of people get together and run in circles while doing a flapping arm motion, even while horrible music plays. Although, what better music is there to accompany dancing that is so bad?

I’m easily confused these days, out in public. I’m not quite at the age where I feel the complete and total disconnect that has me saying things like, “crazy kids,” but I can definitely see the chasm, the pulling away of the ship from the docks, and the distance between. I can more easily recognize the ornate cultural mishmash, the various shapes and forms, and their corresponding titles. A review I read today on Pitchfork.com reads, “If you’re lucky enough to see this band when you’re sixteen, it’s going to change your life.” And it kind of makes you wonder if all of those labels weren’t there all along, taking so long in your 16 year-old head to catch up to the amorphous forms of what you were experiencing then. I remember talking to my friend Suz Massen about this same thing over dinner a couple of months ago. “Being into indie rock in 1995 was a totally subversive thing,” she said, “and there’s not really anything like that anymore.” And I guess I side with the amorphous and undiluted interpretation of experience inherent in her description of that period in time. But everything’s changed around these days, in the post facto, everything goes type of landscape we seem to be inhabiting. It’s weird, turning on the television set and seeing how your (sub) culture has been incorporated into primetime television. The music you thought was somehow subversive was in fact just waiting for the proper moment, the appropriate test market, and the corresponding labels that would push the product form.

A fanzine that I’ve recently read has touched on this same issue 10 years ago. The revelation was that when your subculture becomes commodified, and the people who were beating you up in high school start hanging around at the venues you do, how do you react to that specific set of incidents? Do you abandon your stances and jump ship, or do you stick to your guns? (Do you, in other words, start wearing khaki pants and playing lacrosse?) The malleable mainstream marketplace will listen to and embrace any trend or fashion thrown down the cultural conveyor belt. They will stand there with open arms, and even if it’s something that had those same people deriding you years before, they will consume blithely and plainly. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you were to contact a polling company and set up a test market with a total hoax of product form, selling the repetitious beating of a jack hammer on pavement, it would be enthusiastically purchased by the masses in time. This has already been proven with any number of “artists” you see and hear daily.

I’m not sure where I was when my revelatory experience occurred to me. It could have taken place at any number of all-ages shows, in the absence of a mosh pit or much of a crowd at all. The music coming through the speakers occurred to me then, and it had me looking around and thinking, this is where I belong. These are my people. Because outside of these four walls, in the world, with its everyday degradations, this is where those people are not. But what kind of revelation are these kids having, I wonder? They’re probably really big fans of The OC. And revelatory experiences, I think, should fall outside the timeslot of primetime television. But mostly, what it broils down to, is I don’t want to be associated with those kinds of people. Even after all these years.

Watching the band at the bar the other night, I tell C., “This sucks, I need to get out of here,” which we do. On the way out, some tricked out rock guy makes eye contact with me from the distance, mistaking me for someone else. “Oh, sorry, man, I thought you were my friend,” he says to me. It’s cool, though. I can take it. I give this whole thing another five minutes in the limelight, until it’s all really outdated, when these haircuts are considered really passé, and things get back to normal—which is already such a horribly compromised word.