I have been driving everyone in my life crazy over the past week recounting my reading of “Meet Me in the Bathroom.” Aside from being a bad book about some fundamentally uninteresting people, I feel like it’s my first direct, personal experience of history being written from the top down*. The victors (successful major label musicians, employed music journalists) tell a story that bears little resemblance to my own experience and recollections of loving music and seeing bands in New York in the early 2000s. I mean—honestly thank the goddess that Random House isn’t publishing memoirs about seeing generic touring d-beat bands at ABC and watching beat Essential Cinema prints in the torturous seats at Anthology Film Archives, but it feels unsettling to know that a record of “your” time and place excludes “you” and others for whom music isn’t just about drugs and financial remuneration. There's a chapter in which musicians advocate "selling out" or signing to major labels juxtaposed against these same people mourning about how the Lower East Side and Williamsburg became corporatized; no one even tries to connect the dots. Karen O gets a lot of credit for being the "only woman" in the "scene" with no reflection about why that might have been the case, or if it was. T*dd P describes attending shows at DIY venues as "real estate voyeurism." According to this book, everyone went out and partied hard after 9/11 and the only New York artist who commented on Bush/the Iraq War was...Conor Oberst? Needless (I hope) to say, I um, disagree on all these counts and many others.
I found the section about the Killers (not from New York) the most interesting, because it reminded me the most of reading about the warped ways that small town kids found out about and interpreted punk in the '80s. Brandon Flowers worked in a restaurant on the strip and used to go to the mall and listen to CDs in the listening stations and that was how he learned about any music, and that was how he found the Strokes and that fused some kind of circuit in his head, and he and his bandmates who also all worked in restaurants or casinos or whatever started playing literally wherever they could and just putting on wild spangly performances to like 5 people in a shitty Las Vegas bar on weeknights. It makes me think about how in the grunge book (Everybody Loves Our Town) most people came from working class backgrounds and were true freaks who got beat up for liking the music they did and, had they not been successful, would have had to join the military or work in a factory or something--which in fact proved to be the case for some of them. Besides the Killers, the majority of the musicians in MMITB probably would have just gotten an MFA if they hadn't gotten signed to Interscope (which also makes their repeated canard that "only privileged people care about selling out" difficult to parse). My main takeway: Kim Thayil > everyone in this book.
When I picked up MMITB--which does NOT tell you the name of the bar where they filmed the "Someday" video--I thought it might give me some nostalgia pangs or retroactive FOMO about having not "been there" for certain things while I was busy doing uncool stuff like having terrible depression, living in weird places, writing my undergraduate thesis, watching videos, etc. That said, it brought back some visceral memories of just loving music, basing my life and the people who I wanted to befriend around shared taste, a hunger for taking in more and more and making maps (sometimes even physical maps!) of bands and shared members and influences and labels. This sounds corny and overwrought, but at the same time, these grotesque feelings and behaviors brought me to many of you my readers. Music fandom used to be my most public life.
The book does a decent job of describing the dawn of the music internet--downloading, some blogs, how downloading fed into reissue culture (a topic I want to address another time), etc. But I remember how fun it was to just use nascent social media as a locker interior, festooning your profiles with bandnames and quotes. Later, a lot of us had blogger or blog-city blogs to think through our tastes and lives, before the best bloggers got to go pro and the rest of us got social media where text lost out to images. On the internet now, it is not only Not Cool to talk earnestly about what you like, there isn't really a space to do that. We can post a picture of a record cover on Instagram but it can feel more like fetishizing an object than sharing an enthusiasm; we can tweet about how the new Magnetizer record smokes but 93 things will happen that make people mad that very second and it will slip away. Listening to Nathan's excellent radio show last week (every Tuesday 12-2 wbar.org) I remembered how much it means to find out about good things from a real person who you trust. It feels less urgent to share music share music share music (or books or movies or whatever) than it did in our late teens or early 20s, but still important**. That is why I am trying to blog.
*Ironic given the "oral history" format which, outside of journalism, is typically deployed to do the exact opposite work: elevating unheard voices, history from below, whatever
** or maybe--I care about why you like whatever it is you're consuming (what are you listening to?) almost as much as I care about your complaints about the MTA or Bernie memes, but while the latter is acceptable to share the other feels embarrassing--maybe as an overcorrection to taste's centrality in our younger years?
** or maybe--I care about why you like whatever it is you're consuming (what are you listening to?) almost as much as I care about your complaints about the MTA or Bernie memes, but while the latter is acceptable to share the other feels embarrassing--maybe as an overcorrection to taste's centrality in our younger years?
This is wonderful please keep doing this.
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