The Kids Are A'ight

The company I work for throws a cruise for the staff each summer, where we circle up and down Lake Michigan, eating second-rate pasta and downing top-shelf drinks, gazing out on the city, while the DJ plays hip-hop for the floor runners and the younger set on the deck down below. Along with the annual company Christmas party, it is one of the few chances I get to listen to the music that kids dance to today.

The cruise has a schizophrenic vibe. Early on, the decks are dominated by corporate types, holding forth on whatever these folks do, looking out on their employees with a slightly inebriated noblisse oblige. Once dinner is served, all the secretaries and overweight traders seem to take over, elbowing their way up to the prime rib table, determined to secure their share of chocolate mousse. But the initial phalanxes slip away soon after the dance floor opens up, which is quickly filled by South Side steppers and mostly, but not exclusively, young booty-grinders.

It is a constitutional weakness of mine that after a few drinks I’ll start dancing to almost anything, and sometimes when I’m out there cutting the parque I suffer the delusion that I’m still in touch with things, but usually I’ll be decisively disabused of this notion, like the year I was grooving to what I imagined was some righteous soul cut, only to find out later that it was a hit by Justin Timberlake. Even more embarrassing was the morning after one Christmas party when the desk staff on the trading floor nicknamed me Danny Tario. But, despite embarrassment, these parties make me happy to be a Chicagoan because they give me a rare chance to be part of the bubbling of different cultures that comes together in the underlayments of our great metropolis.

My wife Melissa is much more shy than I am when it comes to dancing, if only because my enthusiasm is greater than my fear of looking like an idiot. The two of us that night on the cruise were looking down on the dancing mob from the deck above, and it was good just to watch it all, the wait staff, including the cute little Euro girl with the lilting accent who had been serving us Bombay-tonics just a bit ago, now bumping it to the oft-repeated exhortation blasting out over the speakers to “get that affy-taffy”.

The next night, our friends Anne and Dave were throwing their annual Tiki Party. A bunch of us were sitting in their backyard debating the merits of heavy metal versus hip hop, specifically a lady-or-tiger proposition about which of these makes for more enjoyable listening when you’re at a bar or some other social gathering where you’re captive to an alien taste. Most of the party opted for the heavy metal option, but I argued in favor of hip hop. I admit to being of two minds about this: I hate all that drawling, snotty talk about fancy cars, impressive weaponry, and bitches as much as any middle aged white liberal, and I think that turning up the bass so loud in your car that the windows shake half a block away is just an exercise in being a jackass. But I can hang with the part of hip hop that mixes the old ghetto tradition of putting on the dozens, and I sometimes just have to smile at their stoney, whacked-out fun. All that kooky crunk dancing that’s all the rage looks to me like a more coordinated version of what I sometimes try to pull off in my living room on a Friday night when I’m listening to New Order and I’ve drunk a little too much wine. There’s an element to the culture that levens any gangsterism with the vibe of a chocolate Napoleon Dynamite.

When I was a freshman in the dorms at UCLA, my roommate Kurt was into classic hard rock, while I at the time was throughly immersed in English and O.C. punk. Next door to us lived an Asian girl who had a boyfriend from the ghetto, and we would engage in little music wars with them, playing the Clash or the Who whenever they started blasting Kool and the Gang. One afternoon as I was coming back from class, I could hear the music war going full force between Kurt and our neighbor as soon as I got out of the elevator. Kurt had cranked up Led Zeppelin II, while our neighbor was blasting a 10-minute jam by Fundadelic. As I got closer to our rooms, I started grooving to the mix, and then I just stood outside our door, listening to the odd cacophony, Bonham’s drumming and Page’s jams weaving their way between the heavy funk bass as George Clinton, et al, kept repeating, “Not just knee deep, she was total-ly deep, when she did the freak with me.” After standing there for a few minutes listening to both stereos, that Funkadelic groove won me over, and a tipping point occurred somewhere in the deep recesses of my repilitan brain, where I felt for the first time that these funksters were a whole lot cooler and more legitimately heavy than all that wanky Zeppelin shit.

One of the things that drives me a little nuts about cultural commentators are their tendency to put themselves into one of two camps. On the one side are the conservative traditionalists, standing tall at their cultural Iwo Jima, raising the flag of the eternal classics, surrounded by a sea of what they perceive to be relativist dross. On the other are the post modern critics, who look at a host of middle brow entertainments as not just valid but exemplary pricesely because of their popularity.

I guess most outside observers would look at my friends and I as a bunch of white weirdos living in the city. Like the hippies who moved to the national forests of northern California, we’ve chosen to ignore all of the cultural crap that irritates us. We’ve created a very comfortable subculture for ourselves and, if we ever have to deal with mainstream culture, it is only in very transitory ways. And since I hate that kind of self-imposed isolation in hippies, I guess that I should hate it in us, except that, in our defense, living in the city exposes us to the detritus of mainstream culture, not to mention the odd tidbits from dozens of divergent ethnic eddies.

I remember the first time I heard the kind of croony R&B that Mariah Carey and her ilk would eventually make so obiquitous that even I couldn’t totally escape it. I was just out of college, living in Hollywood and playing in a punk band. In the apartment across from us lived a black mother in her 30’s and her two kids. On what struck me as odd occasions, like on a Sunday at ten in the morning, she would take to blasting this strange music that didn’t make any sense to me. There wasn’t any discernable melody, nor a groove, nor any kind of beat to dance to, just someone singing like their foot had been caught in a trap, these wandering moans going on for way longer than seemed humanly possible for either the human voice or ear to bear. After a few songs, she’d play another record by a different singer, but with that same odd moaning, and it just baffled me that there must have been some strange backwater of the music industry which specialized in producing these queer and, to me, totally unpleasant records. Little did I know that this type of crooning would take over the mainstream airwaves in the coming decade, culminating in a wildly popular TV show where tens of millions of Americans would sit glued to their sets as aspiring stars would try to out moan one another.

My point being that I have no inherent affinity for either most forms of popular culture nor the more annoying aspects of African-American culture. Rather, I put hip hop up there with house music, reggae, doo wop, and ragtime, to name a few random examples of some very cool shit that was created mostly by black people.

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One of the lifestyle comprimises that I’ve made in a nod to my creeping middle age is that I look for all ages shows as a way to go out and hear some music and still be able to catch the 559 AM train to work the next day. I’ve done it a couple of times this summer, once to see the Germs at the Beat Kitchen on a Thursday night and once to see the Wolf Parade at Metro on a Monday.

Being a working stiff, I’d forgotten how much more fun going out on a weeknight can be. The clubs are not that crowded, the wait at the bar is minimal, and you’re much more likely to get in a conversation with a band member or a long lost friend. And both these shows also filled me with at least a modicum of faith in the kids coming up these days, that their enthusiasm for good music is alive and well.

If you haven’t had a chance to see Wolf Parade live, it should be on your short list. I don’t know if it’s something they put in their beer up there, but they join Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene as three groups of Canadians that are among the best live acts on the planet. Wolf Parade has that nerdy jam element typical of the two other aforementioned Canadian bands, that sense that the rehearsal studio is akin to a lab experiment for them, as they check to see what happens if you make a certain keyboard sound here or make the Theramin do this weird noise there. By now, the songs on “Apologies to the Queen Mary”, which made up most of their recent set, are probably old hat to these guys, but there was still a sense that all five band members were letting it loose at the Metro that night, that it could still spin entirely out of control. Which of course is a good thing, as long as you keep that dynamo spinning back within the orbit of the songs, and as long as the basic riffs are strong.

That’s the first thing: Wolf Parade write great riffs, like the chorus “this hearts on fire” in the song of the same name that most of us chanted in full throat at the Metro that night, or the bridge that kicks in, complete with a high pitched hooting and one-note honky tonk piano, at the end of “Modern World”. The bands’s two singers each have their distinct persona, Dan Boeckner, who we labelled the Dave Grolsch of the band, dark and hairy, the happy master of the rock riff, and Spencer Krug, like a Canuck Ian Curtis, arty and intense and pale, his falsetto full of half-conceived ill intent. With a wall of sound, from keyboards and background hums to the standard rock guitar, bass and drums, Wolf Parade is like the Arcade Fire met Tortoise in the back room of a dingy bar and they all got inspired to write some songs by the Wire and Joy Division on the jukebox.

I admit to a concern about places like Iceland and Canada being the font for so much of today’s great rock ‘n roll, not out of some misplaced, flag waving, American chauvinism, but because the great social events rarely come out of these backwaters. The out-of-the-way rarely leads when the zeitgeist is healthy. If the monks of Ireland were the holders of Western Civilization for a century or two, it says a lot more about the general backwardness of early fuedal Europe than it does about any particular Irish genius. Sibelius is a copious talent and a treasure, but his influence on the planet is just a breath against the hoary wind of Beethoven. Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire may have joined Neil Young, Rush, and Nick Gilder as notable Canadian rockers, but of these three, Neil Young is probably the only one to have any kind of larger cultural resonance outside of the scattered camps of music geeks who follow such things, and Young had to move to the Bay Area to reach that greater fame. But you have to take inspriation where you find it, and right now a whole lot of it comes from somewhere north of the 45th parallel.

That night at the Metro, as the crowd, which spanned thirty years, from 15-year old kids to 45-year old working stiffs, chanted the chorus to “We’ll Invent Another World”, the keyboards went nuts, and the rest of the band woo-wooed into their mics, I was gleefully certain that the state of the music world is strong and that the kids are alright.