Wednesday February 27, 2008

SEASONS CHANGE AND SO DO I/YOU NEED NOT WONDER WHY, BABE. "People think seriously about writing their dissertations on Radiohead," says James Poulos, who has written one such for AFF Doublethink and invited me to read it. I'm flattered and abashed, not only because it gives me yet another opportunity to play the old fart.

Poulos tells the Radiohead story in epochal flashes. When the Foo Fighters' "The Colour and the Shape dropped... proto-indie emoheads of the high school thrift-store set worked up wrenching solo arrangements of big single 'Everlong.'" But wachet auf! Then came Radiohead's "Let Down," which "blew off the doors on the nostalgia for the present that had already been the soundtrack of every unrequited emo-boy’s life for what felt like one long year." Well, they all seem long at that age.

But Poulos, "a doctoral candidate at Georgetown," spares moments between orgasmic droppings to notice context. He's aware of "sensitive boys just coming of age and desperately in need of equally sensitive girlfriends... college hookups, group-sex ‘friendcest,’ university counseling, a wavelet of party drugs." In his reading these are not, as we are accustomed to think of them, new players and set-dressings for the latest version of an ever-renewing goatsong: they represent something even bigger -- "sexual and emotional corruption" that needed a cleansing fire: "But in 2001, the summer still seemed endless, and any reckoning with the full import of that line was postponed. And then the war came."

There are many reasons for which I thank God that I had no 9/11 in my younger days, and now I have to add the possibility that I might have been tempted to shake it into the kaleidoscope of cliches through which I viewed my own experience. "9/11 set in motion a long span during which neither adulthood nor The Future ever quite seemed to arrive," Poulos informs us. We got instead "a psychosexual milieu in which satisfaction seems obsolete, mutual manipulation is common currency, and fully contingent commitment defines our interrelationships." Sounds like Spring Break stretching backward and forward into infinity. Is there hope of rescue, grandson? Well of course:

Perhaps, among rock bands, only Radiohead has the credibility to do that in a way that can move people to steer away from the rocks of the age on something resembling their own terms....

For its fans, the band has provided a decade-long emotional field guide, and a ready shield against the turmoil of extended adolescence... slowly and surely it has also risen up as a sturdy cultural touchstone, an icon of an age that even those who failed to worship at its feet will remember.

But it remains an open question whether we can ever really convert the shared escape of spectators and audience members into any sort of permanent redemption. Radiohead has imparted a measure of hope even while chronicling its loss.

Boy, that takes me back. Lately I've been revisiting Pere Ubu -- like Radiohead, a technically danceable but willfully freakish band that had less resonance for the hoi polloi than for the "particularly smart and creative but somewhat adrift" back when that Poulos phrase described me.

Pere Ubu came up in a time before their kind of avant-garde twists could be widely appreciated, and we the smart, creative & drifting had no hope of seeing them into the Top Forty. We instead contented ourselves with the warm insularity of fringe fandom.

From our fringe we shouted extravagant and wounded aesthetic claims for our weirdo heroes to the unlistening world. There was no intrinsic merit in these claims -- what God cares what music you dance to? -- but the older-to-younger-brother transfer nonetheless took place. Like many another sticky social phenomenon, Pere Ubu eventually forged a path for future iterations, by adding enough clicks and grunts to the lingua franca of popular music that clubs, fans, and producers would be less confused and more accepting when they came up thereafter.

Flash forward: there are more colors in the pop paintbox than in decades past, and the eccentricities of a Radiohead more easily pass into the mainstream. Their sardonic lyrics and sonic innovations may puzzle, but they don't put off. So critically engaged supporters are relieved of the need to parlay on behalf of their heroes with the mob. What's left for them is to explain to fans, who have already been enjoying their morose sounds, what it all means.

I hate to tell Poulos, but there isn't that much to tell. Though each Radiohead joint is a lovely, grimy snowflake, in terms of content I can't see any significant difference between their glowerings and those of any avant-gardists from the late 19th Century onwards. What distinguishes them other than personality? Here's Poulos' In Rainbows rundown:

“Nude,” though edited down, still speaks for itself; “Weird Fishes” pick at the bones of an emotional captive; “All I Need” lavishes the subject of “Skip Divided” with tuneful, but no less bestial, monomania. Yorke idles in post-coital reverie (“Faust ARP”), disavows pleasure (“Reckoner”), and gives in again to begged-for adultery (“House of Cards”). “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” places Yorke and That Woman in a centrifugal club: drunk, dazzled, losing control. Eyes lock eyes; words function with all the delicacy of a “sawed-off shotgun;” a collapse into sex will finish the night, but the only path open to the future requires that you “wish away the nightmare.”

Sounds like Franz Wedekind to me. Did Bin Laden teach us nothing? In artistic terms, pretty much yes.

Which is great: if we had to define ourselves by our mortal enemies, we'd be very weak indeed. But a loyal opposition -- that's something worth rubbing up against. While I admire Poulos' spunk, I recommend he switch to the short view. Back in '77 Robert Christgau was leery of Elvis Costello, "suspecting that he is 'New Wave' for people with good taste," in the context of the taste-challenging punk rock onslaught of the time. But Christgau had the good sense, and the good taste, to also approve the critical consensus for Fleetwood Mac and Ornette Coleman. He had his political issues, but he also loved music enough to prefer cross-pollination to stasis or revolution.

Any band may find itself, by dint of talent and circumstance, in the Voice of a Generation role, but that doesn't mean it has much more to say to us than "Hey Hey We're the Monkees" (or "Nay, Nay We're the Refuseniks"), nor that it has a stronger or more long-lasting or valid claim on our attention than the next revival or New Wave. Critics, attend: Awareness of this fact may, counterintuitive as it seems, give your reviews a longer shelf-life.

UPDATE. I am pleased to see that Poulos appreciates Eyes Wide Shut more than most. But here too I would advise: it's not so much about now as ever.

UPDATE II. This post has engendered a lively comments section, much of it devoted to which bands/albums/genres suck, and which rool. The shamanistic power of Jerry Garcia is invoked, and Lester Bangs derided (to which I take exception). Fighting over the scraps of pop culture is fun for graybeards and Now People alike. Since pop can't bring us together, let us cherish that it can bring us to one another's throats in entertaining and non-lethal ways.