"Same Mistake" - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
- I understand that these kind of broad strokes generational profiles tend to be glib and overly broad -- and one should probably be wary of any article that uses the term "hipster" without air quotes -- but I nonetheless found this piece in the Sunday NY Times interesting. I listen to a fair amount of satellite radio when I have some of my longer car trips to meetings and I usually listen to the contemporary indie rock stations like XMU and altnation -- I strive mightily not to be one of those fifty year-olds who dismisses music made after the first Bush Administration. Artist interviews are pretty common on these stations and I am always struck by how they tend to bore me to tears -- and I think it is because most of these artists have a similar affect -- nice, soft-spoken, self-effacing young people with little edge and, sometimes seemingly, no energy or conviction. Certainly no sense that they are special and that what they have to say is revelatory. These are probably great characteristics for your kids prom date or college roommate to possess or in the intern you are thinking about hiring, but damn does it fall flat for an artist. Forgive my nostalgia, but I think of reading interviews with artists when I was growing up -- Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger leap to mind -- and how provocative they were -- often untruthful and unfair in their assertions, sometimes mean-spirited, supremely self-involved, these were people who had no doubt that they had something to say that was worth hearing. Among my contemporaries, the people who mattered -- Elvis Costello, Joe Strummer, John Lydon for instance -- were palpably angry and contemptuous of much of the world. There was rebellion in every fiber of their being.
What I feel like I hear in interviews now is people who are mentally healthier but artistically less interesting. The result, it seems to me, is a lot of good music, but not much that is grab-you-by-the-collar-and-shake-you great music. I don't know if this stems from what the article describes as the "entrepreneurial" spirit of the generation -- the Willy Loman syndrome -- or the fact that in a narrow cast world it is hard to think your art is earth-shaking. But I don't know that the latter is the case -- the punks of the late '70s and their fellow travelers had no reason to believe that their music would be heard on any wide-scale basis and yet, I can assure you, many of them performed like it was a matter of life and death.
Or I could just be old.
And like a suitably old guy, I must get to work.
What say you?
Oops -- as Rick Perry might say -- spelling error in title corrected.
