Picking up a Music For America flyer last week, I noticed the slogan “Do Something Sucka” written lengthwise across the laminate hand out. While the information about the RAVE act and the RIAA that the cards boast is all true, the sideways slogan seems to be more telling about the state of entertainment and political involvement with regard to Generation Y. While Generation X found artistic solace in alternative or underground scenes and “not selling out” (a concept that has all but disappeared as pop-punk and screamo stylings become the next heavy metal and begin to dominate more and more pop radio and video programming), Generation Y has been bred to find music through passive arrangements like MTV.
It no longer takes hours of sifting through B-side vinyl and cut-out bins to find a cool band. Now FUSE or Spin could simply hand you a list. This is where the Internet comes in. File sharing and music downloading offer an alternative musical landscape, a wide-open cyber-society that is part anarchy and part consumer culture runoff. But either way, it is the most viable option for new musical trends to be spread, without mainstreaming through MTV and Clear Channel.
Dangermouse and his countless copycat remix bandits have begun a new era of remixing and secondhand musical reconstructive surgery. The Gray Album was only the rawest beginning to a new conceptual journey that will no doubt be able to condense the broadest of influences and disparate styles and sounds into one overflowing entity.
And local music scenes are tightening up as a backlash to the overwhelming corporate rock structure. Bands need to lean on each other, and as alliances form, new sounds will be explored. Even negative emotional output, like the way-too-many anti-Bush compilations and tours, are at least putting groups in a community mindset, giving musicians something with which to bond over. Strong communities yield strong music. Just look at Dischord records in D.C. or Chicago’s punk scene (from Steve Albini’s noise punk and Touch and Go records to Cap’n Jazz and Chicagoans’ various post-rock explorations) or any moment in the history of dance music (especially dance music, since scenes and sounds revolved so much around small groups of pioneering DJs or producers: i.e., hip-hop’s Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa in New York; Frankie Knuckles slamming through Chicago House sets at the Warehouse; The Happy Mondays and Joy Division setting the Madchester scene aflame, etc.).
Art is something that never stops. So as soon as someone gets stuck in the doldrums and begins feeling nothing but nostalgia for the recently departed past, music passes them by and the next person in line discovers the most important new style or scene or artist and his or her world is literally set on fire. There is always good and there is always bad. Yin and yang and what have you. The Pixies return (for who knows how long before they explode again) and are touring the states, but Robert Pollard has just announced that Guided By Voices will disband after the release of the group’s next album, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, which Matador will release on August 24.
Regardless of what institutions are reuniting or disbanding, this summer should find some innovations taking place within the musical structure. As communities build, the possibility of new waves of genre combustion and strikingly unfamiliar sounds become greater. As discontent over the RIAA, Clear Channel, Bush and our country’s latest war (all things that a generation of young musicians should be concerned with) continues to grow, musical expression (as well as the need to listen) will grow more important. Backlash to the ultra-conservative era that the last few months have let wash across our entertainment and aesthetic domains will be strong enough to compel artists to forge forward. Discontent breeds good art, so be on the lookout for some of the best new noise in the last few years to emerge as our country undergoes a few changes. During the single year that the Sex Pistols were around, Johnny Rotten told his legions of gobbing fans to “Get pissed, destroy!” and hopefully people are still willing to listen and still willing to emote with a guitar or sampler or drum stick in hand.
