Damper Pedal: 04.2007

Local References, Tomorrow at Skybar

Just a quick reminder about my show tomorrow night at Skybar in Somerville. Be there by 8pm, 'cause I'm the first on a long bill. Since it is my penultimate show in the Boston area, I'll be including all of my songs with geeky local references in my set.

The blog has been quiet as of late out of necessity and not out of a lack of material. My first day of non-work freedom will be in two weeks, followed closely by a wedding and an interstate move. Oh, and my surprise bachelor's party, erm, extended itself into several additional days and two additional countries. The summer (once it gets here) will be blogtastic, though. Chicago will host two major music festivals in addition to the almost-weekly neighborhood festivals that fill the summer calendar with more local acts...and with fried snickers bars, onions, dough, and whatever else my beloved midwest can think of to submerge in burning oil.

God, why haven't they done that out here with clam chowder? Benjamin Franklin would have been all over that shit.

The Evolution of Selling Out

I've had a chance to give four or five full listens to the new Modest Mouse CD, "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank." They're a favorite of mine, so giving the album a simple thumbs-up here would be kind of like me recommending chocolate ice cream to you. (Unless you haven't yet tried Mexican chocolate ice cream...mmmmmm...)

But I do find the general trajectory of their albums' reviews to be an interesting study in reinventing language for what in the 90s was monolithically called selling out. While music critics and bloggers have a less reactionary and judgemental response to bands signing to major labels, there is a legacy of mistrust for commercial success that has followed bands since the punk days. The current landscape of music is such that bands with a non-mainstream sound, like Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire, are now chart-toppers, but it seems critics need a language for describing what happens to these bands once they move to the majors if it's not selling out.

In Modest Mouse's case, it seems that most music critics have focused on the story of the band's popularity moreso than the soundscape of each album. Modest Mouse moved to the majors four albums ago -- The Moon and Antarctica -- which features such taboos in mainstream pop music as track lengths over 5 minutes and unintelligible lyrics. But their last album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, is what brought upon the music critics' version of an IRS audit. The presence of a hit single ("Float On" being the one you have heard. No, I know you've heard it. Trust me.) alerted the authorities to a suspected shift in the bands' musical priorities. So music critics were faced with this problem of (1) maintaining their indie cred with their readers, while (2) acknowledging that an album with a chart-topping single such as Float On still had the musical verve of previous Modest Mouse albums. You can't just come out and say "This is a good album!" without acknowledging, "...and, um. It's at Best Buy."

This round of criticism has found a more-or-less homogenic approach to this paradox, which is to avoid talking about the musical characteristics that give Modest Mouse such a distinctive sound. A glance at Metacritic's roundup of reviews shows that focusing on track length, danceability, and the addition of former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr are some of the things potentially defining how poppy a rock band can get. But for listeners who have never heard Isaac Brock's scream-singing, his lispier quiet side, or his often-morbid lyrics, one would wonder how the album topped Billboard's album sales this week. These are not the qualities of the frontman for a mainstream or pop band -- not in comparison to some of Modest Mouse's peers on Billboard. Indeed, critics have been almost brilliant in isolation only those qualities that could be construed as a popification of the band's sound.

I'm not faulting the critics for this -- they know their audience, after all. Hardcore music fans (myself included) like to think we have some sort of secret power to detect good music. So the criticism which is targeted at us (especially in the blogosphere) must address this paradox: we are in love with this commercially successful indie band that everyone else is in love with. And that's totally OK.

Labels: metacriticism