UNDERRATED
One afternoon in 2005 my friend Dave and I bought a bunch of snacks, hopped in his car, and drove the 26 hours straight it took to get from our homes in San Francisco to Austin, TX. Our small group of friends had started a music label, and Dave and I were headed to the SXSW fest to meet people and promote one of our artists, who lived in Austin and had graciously agreed to host us. It wasn’t a very well-thought out plan, which is indicative of why the label didn’t last all that long, but we were excited to see a bunch of music and explore a city we’d heard so much about. We arrived, had some BBQ, saw the Daniel Johnston mural, learned we were supposed to pronounce “Guadalupe” street “Gwadaloop,” and immediately dove into a week of day parties, free beer, long lines, and awkward juxtapositions of underground and corporate culture.
Having grown up as a music nerd in Portland Oregon, regularly attending shows since my teenage years, I was intimately familiar with the sensation of being simultaneously vibed-out and fascinated by crowds of hipsters a few years older than myself. By this point I already had been through the gauntlet of basement and DIY spaces, including as a touring member of my friend’s band, and was acclimated enough to the sensation of alienation that inevitably accompanied going to a certain kind of indie-rock show. I’d even spent a while writing reviews for Pitchfork, known then as a pinnacle of sneering cooler-than-thou posturing, though I was sort of an odd man out (penning mostly uniformly positive reviews of new composition, experimental, and leftfield indie pop), and ultimately some self-reflection about what I was doing and why led me to stop writing after less than a year.
I say all this to emphasize that, even with said background, I don’t think I’d ever encountered quite as intensely distilled a skinny pants, tattooed, crossed-arms, tall-boy drinking crowd as the one at a SXSW day-party thrown by a magazine called “Chunklet” at the Church of the Friendly Ghost (which I remember as being an amazing show, despite an epic bathroom line). I’d never heard of the mag, but a stack of free copies was out and I took one called “The Overrated Issue,” which I flipped through on the way home. The writing was hilarious, but also made me kind of uncomfortable; the tone of the articles was all based in an ironic (or was it, rite?) mockery of great underground bands. Its ethos was roughly the same as I’d encountered in the few issues of Vice I’d seen — make fun of everything and everyone, until it’s not even clear what you actually like and what you don’t. Any sincere expression of emotion or vulnerability was to be immediately seized on and torn apart. It was a print version of the vibey-est aspects of the indie crowd, though undeniably funny and appealing.
Since college, my friends and I had slowly been building our own universe of aesthetic worship around the vague concept of “new sincerity,” a popular phrase at the time. Musicians like Neutral Milk Hotel, Sufjan Stevens, and the “freak folk” artists as well as authors like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace all seemed to be pointing us toward some radical reclamation of big feelings and direct experience, a rejection of ironic detachment. This was the era of Funeral by Arcade Fire, who’s ten+ members standing on stage and shouting about love and death and childhood felt (if you were in your early 20’s) like a challenge to build a new world apart from all the bullshit, without losing whatever was innocent and valuable about your experience in the first place. Encountering the heavily cynical energy of Chunklet and Vice was anathema to my liberal arts-educated, west coast mentality at the time, but it was also confusing because — in the end — we all mostly liked the same stuff.
15 years later, I suppose we have some perspective as to where each posture/philosophy led. We all know what happened to Gavin McInness, founder of Vice, who increasingly straddled the line of punk-inspired ironic contrarianism until there was no line. When I see the Proud Boys — a group of his creation — in action, I think about how the Beastie Boys got famous because tracks like “Fight For Your Right to Party” and “Girls” were embraced by frat boys who didn’t get that the songs were a joke, and how ultimately the band’s intent didn’t really matter. Our country got four years of Trump, a president who was in many ways the zenith of that early aughts “fuck you, no hey I’m just joking” attitude. Even the year-2000-hipster’s ironic appropriation of redneck culture in the form of PBR, trucker hats, and bacon everywhere found a home in the marketing genius that was Trump’s campaign.
Not that “new sincerity” fared all that much better. I distinctly remember one evening at a bar in Williamsburg around 2010. The Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are had just come out courtesy of Disney™, the trailer of which employed the rousing singalong chorus of an Arcade Fire song. I was sitting there surrounded by people in those cutesy little animal-ear hats, and Where the Wild Things Are t-shirts, and hoodies that were two sizes too small, and I was suddenly overwhelmed both by the blatant commercialism of the moment and by the sensation that all this twee culture was, in fact, a sort of grotesque unwillingness to exit childhood and deal with reality. I felt I was witnessing my generation’s desire for sincere experience morph into a particularly destructive form of nostalgia, a retreat from the world, and in the coming decade it would become clear just how commodifiable and profitable mining that cave of nostalgia could be. I recently read an interview with Alan Moore, creator of “The Watchmen,” where he touched on a similar point. He said:
“Most people equate comics with superhero movies now. That adds another layer of difficulty for me. I haven’t seen a superhero movie since the first Tim Burton Batman film. They have blighted cinema, and also blighted culture to a degree. Several years ago I said I thought it was a really worrying sign, that hundreds of thousands of adults were queuing up to see characters that were created 50 years ago to entertain 12-year-old boys. That seemed to speak to some kind of longing to escape from the complexities of the modern world, and go back to a nostalgic, remembered childhood. That seemed dangerous, it was infantilizing the population.”
I love superhero movies, but I can’t help but agree with Moore’s cultural assessment. And I still love Arcade Fire, but every time a goddamn Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes song comes on the radio I mentally shake my fist and think about how Funeral’s popularization of wide-eyed, heart-on-sleeve, performative emotion is responsible for a lot of vapid bullshit. Meanwhile, whatever was culturally or humanistically valuable about the “new sincerity” seems to have migrated in the past decade to the resurgence of underground dance music culture, which has the benefit of being harder to commodify, and being a lot less uniformly cis and white.
I recently came across that same issue of Chunklet in my boxes of old magazines, and flipped through. It was still hilarious, and whatever part of my soul had found the tone so jarring 15 years ago is apparently gone. I guess a decade spent in NY city, going through several failed relationships, etc. taught me the self-preserving value of a little cynical detachment, not to mention the importance of killing yr idols (whom, in the metoo age, often have no problem killing themselves for you). So calling this series of posts “Underrated” is a play on the magazine title that stuck with me, and an homage to all these memories. Once a month (hopefully) I’ll be writing about a musician or album or song that I think more music-lovers should pay attention to, or just music in general… most posts won’t be as long-winded as this one, but I’ll let myself get a little autobiographical if warranted. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with an album that label of ours put out all those years ago, and which I continue to insist is a PERENNIALLY UNDERRATED guitar-based ambient record: One River, by my friend Scott Solter… RIYL Stars of the Lid, Hammock, Harold Budd.