The Trouble With Elitism

Elitists come out of every form of music culture. If you like a band, and you get to know them, you become and expert and eventually you become an elitist. Elitists tend to think they are the cock of the walk, that there are no elitists that came before them. Unfortunately for them, they are wrong, so if you're one of those current Elitists, enjoy it now because soon you'll be in the past.

We've all run into them, the person who thinks they are the expert on music. They've explored music and they know what's exciting. You ask them their music choices and they say a little bit of everything, so you decide to test them, and they've never heard of any of the bands you say. But then they tell you the bands they know, the ones within a particular genre of which they seem to be the expert on. That is when you've found an elitist. You can find elitists in almost every form of music, and some are more bearable then others. But the ones who are bearable are the ones who were once the newbies but now see they've grown up.

The New Kids on the Block, the newest Elitists forming, are those of the Indie generation. They think they know music, they're the big men on campus and they know all there is to know about music. But soon they'll be a thing of the past and go through what all past genres have done. Classical, Jazz, 50s Rock, Woodstock, Disco, The 80s, Grunge, Alternative, Pop/Punk. Each of these and many more have gone through being the elitist faction who comes into the music scene and thinks they are the only ones around. Now those who are still elitists of these groups look on the new kids and think, "If only you knew."

The funny thing is, and Indie person would look at this article and think, "ah, but those were all the popular genres, Indie isn't popular, Pop and Rap are. We're under the mainstream. We're the rebellious ones." But let's look at all these genres, all of them were created to be rebellious to what was currently popular. New Music is created when someone wants to go beyond what everyone else is listening to. Soon enough they are what everyone is listening to and the circle of life continues. Those in these other music cultures, the ones of the past, they don't even compare themselves to the current Pop and Rap scenes, they don't need to, they're in a different league. But Indie constantly has to remind us that they aren't the currently popular group while still maintaining they are better. Which soon enough will breed into popularity. Just you wait Indie fans, soon you'll have people becoming rebellious of you because you're too mainstream for them. It's already starting to happen, so live it up now, you don't have long left.

My Multi-Sensory Aesthetic Experience

Mae redeems themselves in this hipster's eyes.

So when my friend Lady Ally called with the news, I was moved by her generosity, but not particularly nonplussed with the selection: we had missed Explosions in the Sky, and inexplicable pursuits and a friend's wedding reception kept us from Jose Gonzalez, so she had gotten us tickets to Mae. I was much more into Mae two years ago, when again unfortunate circumstances kept us from seeing the Virginia five-piece (now three with touring musicians). I've always associated their relationship to indie with the Gin Blossoms' relationship to alternative: not really part of the sound or the scene, but somehow always associated with it in some way. That being said, I like Mae still.

Their 2007 release, Singularity, was not much to speak of. A couple of single-worthy tracks, but like nearly everyone's first major-label release, something was lost in translation (see Death Cab's Plans). Aside: would that everyone would release R.E.M.'s Green rather than Death Cab's Plans on their first big-name at bat. Further, I had moved away from whatever you want to call Mae: indie pop, post-emo, power pop, whatever, and I'd really strayed into Sufjan Country: disgusted as mentioned by Plans, only accepting of new Decemberists work inasmuch as it was daring in the album-oriented sense, getting into mini-indie like Yeasayer and the Brobecks (and mega-mini-indie band Vampire Weekend), and like everyone else who owns a pair of Chuck Taylors, waiting for the second coming of The Postal Service. I thought the show was going to be tofu for the mind.



We got there as Between the Trees was starting their set. They sound like Taking Back Sunday. Then the Honorary Title. Bad name, boring tunes. Then Mae came on to wild accords. OK, fine, I'm excited too. A projector had gone on during setup. I was both excited and concerned. They opened with "Futuro" from the B-Sides album, and suddenly it was okay that we hadn't gone to see Explosions. The projector shone over all band members neo-retro-futurism, a cheesy mix of planets and binary--it was awesome. They cut the crap and went straight into "Embers and Envelopes" with the background now showing images from a night drive on the freeway. Post-emo, indeed. It was so good. The whole show consisted of five guys having fun. (And getting paid an obscene amount of cash, I guess.) It was as if, after three tours, they realized they'd finally made it. There were lots of singalongs, but in a very innocent way.

Also, frontman Dave Elkins is a nice boy. In this world of plug, chug, and bug concerts, Dave's talk to the crowd was full of gratitude and cordiality. He didn't bogart the mic, but he didn't ignore Salt Lake City either. If I were a grandfather, I'd ask him to marry my granddaughter. They played a lengthy set (not primarily from the new album), and two encores.

Ill will toward Singularity aside, my live experience with this exceptional group has gotten me back on the Mae train.

(Thanks to Lady Ally for the picture and the t-shirt.)

Les vidéos «super-cool» de Chryde

French über-vloggers force us to romanticize the indie we've come to take for granted.

Through Sam's personal blog I found a video of Beirut performing "Nantes" in a new and interesting way--Zach Condon, frontman, descending the stair singing the lyrics as strategically placed bandmembers meet him on landings, some following, some not. At first, I thought this was a homemade music video à la OK Go's dance classic. Turns out, however, that it is instead one of a treasure trove of indie vids, the brainchild of Vincent Moon and someone named "Chryde". Most of these "Take Away Shows" («Concerts à emporter») are shot somewhere in Paris--Montmartre seems to be a popular locale for the more prominent ones--and mostly by the same crew. There are some major exceptions, including everyone's favorite Argentine-Swede José González singing "Hints" in the back of a pickup in a Texas pitstop town, and Sufjan Stevens (and friends, including My Brightest Diamond) in a Civil War era concert hall in Cincinnati.

The videos are brilliant. The whole thing has the air of an art project, a collection of mostly indie performers doing their thing acoustically while the camera pulls in the surroundings. Some are brilliantly layed out, like the Beirut "Nantes" performance or the Shins' "Australia" in a Montmartre apartment, some are spontaneous and amazing, like Jason Mraz playing with a Bulgarian busker or Final Fantasy aka Owen Pallet taking off at an awkward gallop while playing "Your Light Is Spent". Some are just normal, some are a little disappointing. That's what makes it awesome. Also, everything's written up in French, so be warned. My French 202 skills paid off, but not quite enough.

There isn't an actual explanation of the reasons behind the project, and given the amount of time they've had to put one up, I wouldn't be expecting anything other than "lorem ipsum" anytime soon. Great indie videos are reason in themselves, says I.

The Weird, Wild World of Misheard Lyrics Vids

YouTube, which has given so much, continues to give with an MS-Paint induced phonetic craze.

Ever wonder what the lyrics of "Yellow Ledbetter" actually are? Well, you won't get any answers from the internet, but you might just get a couple exceptionally cheap laughs. Turns out a bunch of people with MS Paint and Movie Maker have decided that misinterpreting the classics is the wave of the future, unleashing a number of rebus-and-bad-pun laden vids online, interpreting the lyrics to everyone's pop favorites in strange, new and inappropriate ways.

My favorite? This one of Fall Out Boy's "Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner".

After three years, my Pandora station is finally awesome.

And, despite my better judgment, I think it was worth it.

So, a few years ago, I discovered Pandora. I'm not sure how I did it. I think it was a friend of mine emailing me. I loved it. Previous to that I was using LaunchCast, and it was really crappy. It didn't help that I was listening to primarily crappy music at the time, too (everyone has a Linkin Park phase, I'm just the only one man enough to admit it). Nonetheless, LaunchCast was crap, and there were too many commercials, and you could only listen to a certain number of songs a month, if I'm not mistaken.

Then Pandora helped me see the light of streamcasting. It was beautiful. Just one problem: the same thing as happened on LaunchCast was happening here--I only liked about half the songs that played. I learned of the thumb up and the thumb down, and sometimes I'd listen just to my station just to get more nuances of my preferences in there. It also was amazing because as my tastes were changing, so was my station. Then I knew it had come: it was time to start a new station with just my standard tastes (and a few curveballs thrown in there for fun). That was about a year and a half into my Pandora experience, and in that time, I've gradually shaved my "songs-I-hate" ratio down to a manageable 8% (I made that number up). I actually listen to my station for fun now, not just out of a duty to create something of it.

It's great! I'm stoked!

That might mean bad things for all of you who are just starting out, though. Remember to write your congressman and tell them to support the rights of internet radio.

My Pandora station can be found here.

The Content Rush

From a service-based economy to a content-based one?

I just watched Juno. The comedic coming-of-age and carrying-to-term story of a 16-year-old girl with a razor wit focuses around two driving forces: the touching story of Juno's trials, and one-liners. You might have to think about it as a teenage Garden State for the YouTube generation. By that I mean I'm using way too many buzzwords. Let's break it down, y'all:

This film is amazing. In essence, a string of well-crafted jokes sitting in the bed of an interesting plot. Its influences are obvious (the awkwardness-comedy of Wes Anderson and Jared Hess, 90's high-school dramas like TV's Freaks and Geeks, a little bit of School of Rock, and fast, verbally-driven comedy that reaches back into ancient times, but has also produced such shining moments as The Thin Man, the works of Groucho Marx, and M*A*S*H). Yes, we love the characters, and a million reviews have touched Juno with the Midas's finger of "real characters", but I'm talking about the jokes. There are lots of them, and some scenes seem to be made for the lines that are going to come out of them. In other words, besides characters, Juno sells us Content.

Content is a proto-buzzword on the Web 2.0 now, meaning: stuff you watch or listen to. Homestar Runner puts out content every week (I know the meme has passed, and it's all about the webcomics now, but H*R was magic for me, and still is), iTunes sells content at a buck a pop, and YouTube funds everything by giving free user-made (or, more often, ripped) content and selling ubiquitous (unless you have the firefox plugin) advertising. More and more, content is something that isn't produced by people with prerequisites--Diablo Cody, writer of Juno, was not trained in screenwriting, and the Chapmans weren't even familiar with Flash when they first drew their terrific athlete.

What does this mean? You can create content. I can create content. If either one of us is lucky, our content, whether it be art, comic strips, music, punditry, commentary, video, screenplay, instruction, education, fiction, or Other, will sell in some way, perhaps to a producer/director, to advertising, merchandising, donations, or on an online store.

What does this mean? A gold rush. The net is in the process of being inundated with new people trying to sell new stuff in new ways. Unfortunately, the majority of internet content is, well, crap. Comic strips without punchlines, terrible home videos, faulty information bases, and links deadened by the thud of the dollar.

Solutions. Stop producing crap and advertising it as gold. If you go through archives of webcomics, you'll find that the first year or so of them are poorly done. So, as you're beginning, don't try to oversell. There's a refining process that needs to happen first. Stop trying to "go big or go home". Maybe you are going to only have a small audience. Do you want to keep producing? I think the answer is yes. If your production of this media costs you less in time than the peanuts you're making in advertising, keep going. Maybe you'll make it big. Maybe you'll just have an enjoyable hobby that gets you a couple extra bucks. Stop copying jokes, visuals, etc. The joy of content is that it's fresh. Really new stuff is the best selling, and contributes to the community. If you're going to make a cultural reference, record a cover, or reveal your influences, do it in a tasteful and interesting way. Don't waste our precious little attention span bandwidth on something we've already seen and heard. That said, the situation or circumstance surrounding new content is only marginally important, and most people won't mind if you reuse a setting if you have something new to say in it.

I'm such a freaking expert about content 'cause I've produced so much of it! (This is sarcastic!) Note, this is an observation, a suggestion for everyone's benefit. Disregard it at the risk of proving me wrong.