Blank generation

A longish, but amazingly epic article on the state of "indie" music today. Also, quotes from Thomas Frank. Love.

Even though it feels weird to admit as an alt-looking 25-year-old, I've never been a huge music fan. Maybe it's because my formative years were spent in Seattle circa 1993-2000, where everyone from the kid behind the Pizza Hut counter to the homeless guy on the street-corner was guaranteed to know more obscure indie shit than thou. I did my time -- pored over a hard copy of The Stranger every Friday while skipping pep rallies, went to Sonic Youth and Pavement concerts at Bumbershoot, and made my share of jokes about Death Cab For Cutie as they got really big -- but generally avoided the bulk of the rabidly cultish indie scene, which felt too hopelessly contradictory and trendy to ever traverse. Or maybe it's the simple fact that I was never able to listen to anything but ambient noise or wordless jazz when reading or writing, and the latter two things always took precedence and ate up most of my time. Whatever the case, college pretty much confirmed my dilettantish stance towards music; my friends were into college radio, and I was happy to feast off the crumbs of knowledge they'd occasionally toss my way in the form of mixes and mp3s. I went to see a lot of good shows (New Orleans was unparalleled for that, bless her), but I still never really actively sought to unravel the Gordian knot of the contemporary music scene. Music was a lot of things to me -- meditative background, emotional refuge, dancing/drinking accompaniment, wooing currency. But it was never the focus of my intellectual energy, and thus never my life.

This has been changing lately, and I wonder if it's indicative of a personal attitude shift or a generational one. I realize that a huge chunk of credit goes to, ahem, certain illicit downloading technologies that make the acquisition of music frighteningly, mindlessly simple. But with that simplicity comes a healthy heaping of boredom, jadedness, and ennui that inevitably follows disposable culture, which I sense emanating heatedly from many of my friends who've been into music for much longer than I. Maybe I'm lucky to have missed the indie music craze of the 90s and early 00s, since it's allowed me to preserve a certain naivety and childlike eagerness about things that most people are already on their third degree of ironic removal from (my latest infatuation is Of Montreal -- need I say more?). Whatever the case, I'm certainly grateful to catch things in their twilit baroque phase. Being much more accustomed to the post-mortem flavor of literary criticism, the academic in me is so much happier to study things after they're dead.