The Importance of Being Earnest

From my mid-teens through my early 30’s, music and writing were my life, my reason for getting up in the morning to face all the sundry crap the world was going to throw at me that day. This obsession with music, in particular rock music and the nightlife associated with it, began to wane when I reached my late-20’s, and by the time I got married in 1997, it had shriveled into a much smaller space, still a cornerstone perhaps, but one comprised mostly of bygone bands and memories.

Over the past few years, I have experienced a renaissance of my old fandom, lured by a new generation of musicians, ones not just rehashing the same old shit but looking to expand the notion of what one can do with electronics and sound, bringing passion to their playing out of a sonic idea, bands like Sigur Ros, Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire, and the National. But recently, this fandom has started to wane. I still love Sigur Ros and the National, eagerly looking forward to their every release, but I have to say that, as a whole, I have felt letdown by this latest wave of new bands, although I couldn’t tell you exactly why.

A couple of weeks ago, I was playing a Yo La Tengo mix tape that my buddy Brendan made to prep me for the upcoming Pitchfork music fest. Listening to this well-loved band, I began to feel a little empty and stupid, because I just wasn’t getting it. Not that their music was bad, or even uninspired, just that it wasn’t really doing anything for me. But it all became clear when I heard Yo La Tengo do a sincere, pretty cover of Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby”: “That’s it! These guys are like an alternative version of Jackson fucking Browne! That’s why I don’t like them.”

And the world once again made sense. It’s why so many of this current generation of “underground” alt bands are so irritating: they are little Jackson Brownes, using song to prove their earnestness to all the unshaved ladies in the crowd, these young bards strumming their guitars and seeking to change the world, one lay at a time.

As a primer for those too young or forgetful to know better, Jackson Browne encapsulated every thing wrong with music in the 70’s. His smug whininess was marketing as being “deep”; his absence of any kind of eroticism was sold as somewhere sexy because it was “sincere”; his total whiteness and lack of soul was marketed as somehow countercultural. And the scam worked, at least for a time, as Browne sold oodles of vinyl to an audience too stoned to know better. To add insult to injury, Jackson Browne was the first rocker from Orange County to score a gold record, although I will always think of him as a carpetbagging army brat who has almost nothing to do with the essence of my old home. He was the beast that punk rock came to slay.

As I get older, it is both messed-up and oddly reassuring to see how the same cultural currents keep circling around over and over again. Over the past few years, a raft of new bands have arrived, practicing their chops and looking through their thesauruses, eager to prove that they are artists, earnest to seduce you and just maybe change the world. Last week, I watched one of these bands, the Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn-based outfit with a ton of buzz, play a free show at the Pritzker bandshell in Chicago. After the set, I turned to one of my old punk rock buddies, who was visiting from out of town, what he thought of the set.

“Too much like the Grateful Dead for my tastes,” he summarized. “It’s like they were in a time capsule and never heard any music from 1977 to 1997, like it was still OK to just noodle around for an hour.”

Going all the way back to the courts of the French aristocracy, the recurring virus of the troubadour, who looks to prove his sweet sensitivities through song, has periodically plagued the music of the West. And now, for some reason, this has become the new alternative.

I think the band in this new school that I hate the most is Airborne Toxic Event, with its insufferable indie hit “Sometime Around Midnight,” a five-minute jam session in which the singer whines on about an old lover that he sees at a club, a tale made even more annoying by being told in the 2nd person, chock-full of pretentious lines such as “all these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind”. “Shut the fuck up, already,” I’ve felt like shouting at the stereo the three or four times I’ve had the misfortune of being subjected to this seemingly never-ending song.

In the original “Bedazzled”, Dudley Moore is granted seven wishes by the Devil, who then proceeds to mess up Moore’s life. At one point, Moore wishes to be loved by women, and he is turned into a pop star, crooning his love live on television, surrounded by dozens of adoring female fans. Then Peter Cook arrives as the Devil, wearing black, looking bored, a cross between Bauhaus and the Velvet Underground. He stands almost motionless on stage, backed by eerie synths and spacey female vocals, and announces to the stunned fans: “You are nothing to me. You bore me. You fill me with inertia.” Then they all leave Dudley Moore, with his “love you”s and his “yeah, yeah”s, in the dust.

The point is this: Using your music, or your writing, or your art, to prove how earnest you are makes not just for wimpy songs, overwrought writing, and bad art, it’s also not a very good way to get laid. Take the age-old debate: Who’s better, the Beatles or the Stones? Personally, I’ll take the Stones because they came to rock, while the Beatles morphed into a bunch of guys out trying to prove how earnest and precious they were. But even when it comes to getting the ladies, who would you rather bed down with: Yoko Ono or Marianne Faithful? Linda McCartney or Bianca Jagger? The evidence is clear: it’s better to act like a man than a courtier; you’ll end up with hotter women, and you won’t have to play the simp for the rest of your life.