In the 2004 film Garden State, Natalie Portman passes Zach Braff a headset playing The Shins and says "You gotta hear this one song — it’ll change your life; I swear." The song is New Slang and it's a pretty good song although to be honest, it's probably not life changing (those are some pretty big shoes to fill). Or is it?
The Shins released New Slang in February 2001 as the lead single from their debut album, Oh, Inverted World. I didn't hear the record when it came out and hadn't yet heard of The Shins in 2004 when Garden State was released. To be honest, the reference went right over my head at the time.
James Mercer, the lead singer and songwriter for The Shins, told Spin Magazine that writing New Slang was “the most punk-rock fucking thing I could do,” precisely because the song wasn’t punk rock or even vaguely aggressive. As described by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker, "The track, played in gentle quarter-note time, doesn’t sound like it needs a whole band—a tambourine keeps the beat, and the acoustic-guitar strumming sounds more like Tracy Chapman than the Pixies."
"There’s a wordless, lovely melody before and after the verses that could be whistling," Frere-Jones notes. "Every verse is modest but confidently executed, and there’s an appealing lightness to the whole affair, as if Mercer has simply abandoned the need to rock and has let the desire to sing take over."
"There’s a wordless, lovely melody before and after the verses that could be whistling," Frere-Jones notes. "Every verse is modest but confidently executed, and there’s an appealing lightness to the whole affair, as if Mercer has simply abandoned the need to rock and has let the desire to sing take over."
At the turn of the millennium, rock music was dominated by some of the most rambunctious and adventurous sounds around. New albums were routinely promoted as "brutal," "ferocious," and "feral." A review of one new album claimed "some people might not even recognize this as music." Most of the people playing and listening to this music appeared to be heavily tattooed, multiply pierced, festooned with body adornments and tribal jewelry, and wearing uncomfortable-looking Doc Martin boots.
I was a professional in my mid-40s at the time, bustling through airports in my shirtsleeves to meet with business clients, and the Y2K music scene appeared neither welcoming nor accommodating.
Music had always been important to me, though. I'm old, and can remember the shock of the new when I saw The Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. I had an AM transistor radio back then and like my childhood friends listened to the Top 40 British invasion bands of the mid 60s. At some point, I started listening to FM - I recall that my transistor radio broke and can remember scrolling up and down the dial for something to listen to on my parents' FM radio. In between the classical music stations and the talk shows, the FM rock d.j.s were playing songs by the same British bands I had been listening to, the Beatles and the Stones, the Who and the Kinks, and so forth, but they were playing deep cuts off of the albums other than the Top 40 singles. They were also playing psychedelic San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver, and a whole slew of other bands that were new to me. I discovered Jimi Hendrix.
Like much of America, the late 60s were an age of discovery for me, and I went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole listening to ever more exotic and obscure bands. I had developed a taste for eclecticism.
This fascination continued through the 70s and 80s, going from the age of glam rock (David Bowie, Roxy Music), to prog (Yes, Genesis, King Crimson), to punk and new wave (Devo, The Clash, Talking Heads), and on into the 90s with grunge (Nirvana and other, mostly Seattle bands) and alt-rock (Smashing Pumpkins, Chili Peppers, etc.). For a while, I made a major detour into jazz and so-called "modern classical" (oxymoron, anyone?). With the advent of the internet and MP3 files, I was able to collect massive amounts of new music, and began replacing all of those CDs that had replaced the cassette tapes that had replaced old vinyl records. At times, in the age of Napster and file-sharing sites, I was downloading and burning music faster than I could even listen to it.
But at some point, although I was still listening to new music (new to me at least), I had fallen out of touch with what was contemporary. I was listening to what had been recorded back then, and when I did come up for air from the stacks of CDs I was burning, I was turned off by the aggressive, angry, turn-of-the-century rock music. I followed the events of Woodstock 1999 on MTV and couldn't identify with all the nu metal and pop-punk music being performed, and as that festival descended into chaos and violence, I knew my 40-something ass was no longer a part of that scene.
I remained for the time in my own little world of collecting and cataloging obscure German electronica, African world beat, various Latinx performers, chill lounge, acid jazz, and the deep back catalogs of various American bands. By 2003, the only thing resembling "new" music I was listening to was Nora Jones' Come Away With Me and Josh Rouse's nostalgic 1972, both decidedly retro- sounding albums.
I was a professional in my mid-40s at the time, bustling through airports in my shirtsleeves to meet with business clients, and the Y2K music scene appeared neither welcoming nor accommodating.
Music had always been important to me, though. I'm old, and can remember the shock of the new when I saw The Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. I had an AM transistor radio back then and like my childhood friends listened to the Top 40 British invasion bands of the mid 60s. At some point, I started listening to FM - I recall that my transistor radio broke and can remember scrolling up and down the dial for something to listen to on my parents' FM radio. In between the classical music stations and the talk shows, the FM rock d.j.s were playing songs by the same British bands I had been listening to, the Beatles and the Stones, the Who and the Kinks, and so forth, but they were playing deep cuts off of the albums other than the Top 40 singles. They were also playing psychedelic San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver, and a whole slew of other bands that were new to me. I discovered Jimi Hendrix.
Like much of America, the late 60s were an age of discovery for me, and I went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole listening to ever more exotic and obscure bands. I had developed a taste for eclecticism.
This fascination continued through the 70s and 80s, going from the age of glam rock (David Bowie, Roxy Music), to prog (Yes, Genesis, King Crimson), to punk and new wave (Devo, The Clash, Talking Heads), and on into the 90s with grunge (Nirvana and other, mostly Seattle bands) and alt-rock (Smashing Pumpkins, Chili Peppers, etc.). For a while, I made a major detour into jazz and so-called "modern classical" (oxymoron, anyone?). With the advent of the internet and MP3 files, I was able to collect massive amounts of new music, and began replacing all of those CDs that had replaced the cassette tapes that had replaced old vinyl records. At times, in the age of Napster and file-sharing sites, I was downloading and burning music faster than I could even listen to it.
But at some point, although I was still listening to new music (new to me at least), I had fallen out of touch with what was contemporary. I was listening to what had been recorded back then, and when I did come up for air from the stacks of CDs I was burning, I was turned off by the aggressive, angry, turn-of-the-century rock music. I followed the events of Woodstock 1999 on MTV and couldn't identify with all the nu metal and pop-punk music being performed, and as that festival descended into chaos and violence, I knew my 40-something ass was no longer a part of that scene.
I remained for the time in my own little world of collecting and cataloging obscure German electronica, African world beat, various Latinx performers, chill lounge, acid jazz, and the deep back catalogs of various American bands. By 2003, the only thing resembling "new" music I was listening to was Nora Jones' Come Away With Me and Josh Rouse's nostalgic 1972, both decidedly retro- sounding albums.
I probably would have blithely continued down that road, listening, as most people tend to do, only to music that was familiar and comfortable to me. But my own personal "You gotta hear this record - it’ll change your life" moment came when I saw a post on one of the file-sharing sites titled "Top Five Albums of 2005" and realized that I had never even heard of any of the bands listed, despite all my active collecting and cataloging. Curious as to what I might have been missing out on, I downloaded the albums, listened to them and liked them, some a lot, and realized that somehow, a whole new scene had developed outside of and beyond the realm of my perception.
For those curious, the five albums were Silent Alarm by Bloc Party, the eponymous first Black Mountain album, Gimme Fiction by Spoon, Live It Out by Metric, and Feels by Animal Collective.
And after that, it all started to come together. Spoon's music featured prominently in the soundtrack for the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction, which I watched over and over again more for the music than for the story, and then, also in 2006, the song Young Folks was recorded by the Swedish band Peter, Bjorn and John (with additional vocals by Victoria Bergsman).
For me, Young Folks was the match that finally dropped in the roomful of gasoline created by those Top 5 LPs of 2005. Here was music that fun to listen to but also non-threatening - it's hard to imagine a Peter, Bjorn and John audience rioting and burning down the stage after a performance. On the other hand, it was also musically sophisticated without being pretentious about it, and was hip and young - hell, the song is called Young Folks and the lyrics include the lines, "We don't care about the old folks talking 'bout the old style too."
Much like The Shins' New Slang, the Young Folks brand of post-millennium indie rock presented a refreshing alternative to the bruising, mosh-pit melodies of 90s alternative rock and the bland comforts of MOR pop and recycled 70s oldies. Here was music that was interesting to listen to without threatening your health with bodily harm. It wasn't "soft rock," but music that seemed to be accepting of all and anyone interested, even now 50-something music fans, but still had that fresh, new-car smell of youthful hipness. It was something . . . different.
It was something new.
It was something new.
I was hooked. I wanted in.
By the mid-90s, the 40-something me had decided that I had no interest in mosh pits and stage diving and had grown too old to go to ear-splitting rock concerts. After hearing Bloc Party and Spoon and Black Mountain and Metric, after Garden State and Stranger Than Fiction, after New Slang and Young Folks, well, fast forward to 2010 and the 50-something me is front stage for Animal Collective at Verizon Amphitheater.
But I can see that if I'm going to continue to try and describe all this accurately, it's going to take a long time. I still haven't got to the point I wanted to make when I started this post, so I'm going to call this "Part 1" and end it here for now, and hopefully pick this back up again in the very near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment