Some Kind of Happiness is Measured Out in Miles
I’m white, socially awkward and fond of large words. Thus it is mandatory that I listen to the genre of music called “indie rock”, which, depending on what blogs you read, may or may not be mainstream rock. Since I’m too conformist to understand the notion of authenticity, I have little else to say about the music as a category. But there is a consistent theme I’m hearing in these “indie rock” records lately, and it’s starting to upset me: Over and over again, I hear new songs describing the hollow disorientation of adulthood.
Two recent records immediately come to mind: The Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” and The National’s “High Violet”. I like both of these records quite a bit, and don’t intend to stop listening to them. And I confess that sometimes, the songs almost convince me that I’m a listless, isolated and shallow middle class survivalist. With lyrics like “I figured out what we’re missing / I tell you miserable things after you are asleep” [The National, “Conversation 16], it’s certainly not difficult to relate. Leaving behind The National’s lonely relationship, The Arcade Fire widens the scope: “So can you understand why I want a daughter while I’m still young? / I want to hold her hand / and show her some beauty / before all this damage is done.”
The characters in these songs have embraced futility and the inescapable.
It’s not just in music either. I was left with the same gnawing sense of captivity after watching DiCaprio and Winslet in Mendes’s “Revolutionary Road.” Even television shows like “Mad Men” and “Dexter” are permeated with stoic, solitary hopelessness.
I don’t relate.
I’m starting to wonder if perhaps I could relate if I were smart. Possibly, I’m too simple to grasp the internal disorientation in all these media characters. But, so far, I much prefer adulthood to childhood.
To be fair, it’s easy for me to discount childhood freedom. I was homeschooled by a mentally disturbed stepmother from 3rd grade through graduation. I regularly had to sleep outside on the doorstep or go without food if she took offense to any of my thoughts (which she claimed Jesus had revealed to her). I had an Amish haircut and a slight lazy eye. I couldn’t relate to other kids because I was protected from all TV, movies and popular music. It was extremely hilarious and it gets funnier as time goes on, because the context expands.
I kept my head together because I didn’t take myself seriously. In my adult life, I try to live by the same method. It’s amazing how much effort and style it takes to be miserable and unfulfilled while shopping for earth-friendly dish soap at Target. Those moments of commitment are comedic gold.
There are so many great things about being an adult. Sure, adults must live and breathe complexity instead of wonder how mirrors work. But with that complexity comes the ability to engage in things outside you, in the larger realm of culture and society. Instead of questioning whether anyone understands us, we can test the limits of our influence. We can become members of a community. We can contribute.
I’ve learned these lessons since coming to Tacoma. As I try to integrate into the community, my world grows by leaps and bounds. It fills with people who are using their energy for something other than self-analysis. I lose interest in my own peculiarities, and become remarkably upset about electronic billboards or transit funding. I jot down names and learn how the system works. I become so busy, I hardly even notice how happy I am.
15 comments
D debivans August 6, 2010
I LOVE THIS! This is some quality blogging. Please continue. I am intrigued. Want more.
L lostinlosangeles August 7, 2010
I am assuming you want feedback. Well here is my feedback paragraph per paragraph.
Paragraph 1.
I sense a false modesty here. And I also sense that you have not traveled enough to understand that you don’t have to feign a stereotype to self analyze your self image.
Anyway, indie rock simply means, at this stage, bands who are actually not conforming to a studio or label’s A&R producers/engineer’s idea of what a genre is doing, and why the way it sounds is currently popular and should be repeated in some clever way so everyone can retire early. One has to wonder though how much the forgone napster generation had a hand in causing indie rock, and the return of heavy touring for a lot of bands. It’s probably the only way they can make their money, so in effect, they are not touring because it’s the funnest or most righteous thing to do.
The current popularity of the genre is due to it’s honest attempt to share depth and range of emotions as well as experimentation of the artists, which is a little like what you are attempting to share with this blog. But like science, experimentation doesn’t always get a lot of support from those on the profiteering end. Which is luckly where indie is able to make it’s bread and butter, and validity. Where things go wrong is when MBA fuckheads and jerkoffs like Mike Damone from FT at Ridgemont High, get into the music business and start their own blend of contriving the holy f’n fuck out of the genre by signing bands who shouldn’t get signed, and putting out music that becomes simply a product. I think “High Violet” is a good example of how something goes “Stone Temple Pilot” in a genre. It is widely known that the band actually had the fking audacity to sit down and try to make a song that actually was radio friendly with “Anyone’s Ghost”. The only thing that saves the album is that most of the other songs on the album are break up songs as well. So perhaps the band or the song writer has just hit some turbulence and is wanting to share. Great, but don’t circulate the terms through the blogs that one of the songs was an attempt at a pop song, even though most of The Nationals stuff is blatantly emo heavy, but on the indie tip. And a dead give away at a band that also doesn’t mind getting enough money to retire off of.
In that respect, Tacoma bands are a godsend because absolutely none of them is going to get rich off of garage rock right now, but they don’t care, they are just having fun. Even if it is just them beating a dead garage rock horse into their 40’s. It could be that Tacoma garage rock bands are just plain stupid as well, but regardless, a heart of gold seems to be utterly present in the local scene.
Ok well I am not even going to get to the other paragraphs, but I suggest tending to the subtle tone of false modesty present in your writing.
Plainly put the indie rock genre is best when performed by the Mark “Rat” Ratner’s of the world after they get laid a couple times and have smuggled hash out of Turkey and been on the midnight express to the dark night of the soul. After sht like that, you come out sounding like Arcade Fire, ready to melt faces, and keep a good thing going like Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, etc are good at. And it shows by the hardcore attitude of their fans. Like fans of Tacoma bands, some indie bands can be rated at how hardcore their fans are. Because the more hardcore the fans, the more bullsht detectors are out there in the scene, running on all cylinders, keeping sht on an even keel during stormy seas of uncertainty, gold rushes, and episodes of deliberate pop cultural expression.
But to address the main theme, the theme of “not being able to relate”. It’s not about that it’s about just picking a side, a skill, and sticking to it till you get good enough to create something honest. Whether its honest music, or an honest attempt at controlling a city council’s lack of ability to relate to the world of the common man. Because more likely you can’t relate to the world because those manipulating the world have no need in relating to you. If they did, they would manipulate things a lot differently and the world around us would be a little kinder. But inter and intra-species competition has got organic life tripping on itself right now. Fix the factors which influence that, and you’ll see a world that has the leisure to be able relate a little more than is the case.
L lostinlosangeles August 7, 2010
Oops I get it now what your post is about, you are not able to relate to the world out side of your world, the world that is experiencing alienation into adulthood. Well, I wish I had a bubble like that to live in, one where you are in complete control of of the changes within the bubble and happy beyond cognitive measurement, and utterly unable to relate to the suffering of others.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but those lyrics are perhaps just a white person’s way of saying, don’t push me, coz I’m close to the edge, I’m trying not to lose my head AH HUH HUH HUH. Anyway, the same factors bothering the Suger Hill Gang back in the day are still present, they just bother each cultural group in a different way. So when whitey whines about how fked up he/she feels, then it comes out like indie rock.
What’s interesting is some of the stuff Kid Cudi is doing. He seems to be balancing between cultural groups with his music. He’s like indie hip/hop. And he lives in the world of music business, money, and success right now. And he’s still troubled. Perhaps things outside the bubble are indeed a bit more intolerable for some than others.
But I think you are ultimately on to something when you have found a place you are able to be happy and productive in. Because at the end of the day, you only really have influence over your direct environment. Unless your name is Sean Penn, and you’ve been living outside the bubble in Haiti for the past 6 months, experiencing how life can also be for some. The endless night. Then you can say you are exposed to the uncertainties of the world. But indeed, the world of bliss, certainty and repetitiveness, like the Tacoma bubble, is an attractive life to lead. I am almost feeling sorry I left it. There is something comforting knowing you can go the same places, see the same people, and never really have to experience an existential earth quake.
L lostinlosangeles August 7, 2010
Ok I read it a third time and know I really get what it is you’ve discovered.
You’ve discovered that being productive in a community doesn’t equate to being a sheltered, middle class survivalist. In fact, being productive and proactive brings alleviation to social pressures, commonsense understanding and mends the sense of alienation within your general surroundings. So much to the point that you are able to let go of certain life savers like current favorite albums of those singing a tune that you’ve become less familiar with since putting away the crutches of teen angst. Thats a good development. It maybe temporary, but good nonetheless.
K Kimberly Malone August 7, 2010
So well said…
I feel that I came fully into my adult self in the last year.
The view from here is gorgeous. My life a dream and a wonder too.(Had I known how grandly childlike it would be I may have gotten to it sooner.)
My inner cynic prattles on in whispered tones. Some days she don’t say a thing.
Cheers to being a grown up!
M Mofo from the Hood August 7, 2010
Good God! You were homeschooled to become a Romans 12 Christian and you missed the point?
People strive all their lives to reach a state of imperturbability by conforming to the empty promises of popular culture—-a culture founded on mindless entertainment.
There is no certitude in a culture that celebrates novelty and self-indulgence to the point of triviality. One exception might be the certainty of perpetual dissatisfaction.
Something of value reduces uncertainty.
T Tacoma Joe August 7, 2010
If nothing else, this blog caused LostInLosAngeles to actually use capital letters in his ramblings. See, people can mature and grow!
L lostinlosangeles August 8, 2010
The funny thing is, the most powerful humans in history were notoriously immature megalomaniacs holding various titles, occupations, and properties. Like the pharaohs for instance. And I am neither a god king or the owner and publisher of a community targeted blog.
I am merely the baboon than runs through the streets of your virtual Giza and rubs excrement into the hieroglyphs so punctilliously placed for all the ‘mature’ readers to mull over.
Something tells me though, that there is more room, nay, more directions to grow into, in a blog with less easily perturbed ‘adults’.
But tonight I will dream of a bubble. A bubble I can perpetually float in around Tacoma, from farmers markets, to art space walks, to concerts performed and attended by those still living in the early 1990’s, while the rest of the planet wrestles with the giant existential boa constrictor called reality.
Then again, reality is relative.
I think I’ll just forget to set my bubble bursting alarm clock tonight and snooze my way through the paths of least resistance. And, perhaps, if I am lucky, my bubble will float by Tacoma Joe frolicking bare ass through a field of capital letters. I hope so!
R RR Anderson August 9, 2010
don’t really pay much attention to lyrics. I get in trouble because I like a song without having any idea what it is about…just like the sound. For example at my wedding when I wanted the pixies song ‘where is my mind’ song or whatever and my wife was horrified… or the Ilinoise CD with that my wife had to point out was about the Son of Sam serial killer.
Anyhow, you’ve done your city a great service with your Clear Channel blog posts. Knowing is half the battle!
PS – Your step mom sounds like a real winner. Can you believe the Tacoma Rescue Mission is filling up helpless peoples heads with that bible nonsense?
M Mofo from the Hood August 9, 2010
Reality is relative?
Does anyone really believe that Mr. Anderson is just a social construction?
A Altered Chords August 9, 2010
Lost refers to “The Message” that was done by Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five not The Sugar Hill Gang. Sugar Hill did the lighthearted rap over the music of “Good Times”
“The Message” is anything but lighthearted.
L lostinlosangeles August 9, 2010
Ooops thanks Altered. I’d also like to add that KRS ONE and Boogie Down Productions will always get paid, they’ll take the wackest songs, and make it better.
A Altered Chords August 9, 2010
Lost – The message and rappers delight are tunes 1 and 2 on a cd I put on when I work out at home.
I like that “old school” rap. Detested the lyrical content of “gansta rap”, enjoy the newer stuff that has rich harmonic content and detest the annoying machineish treatment of pop singers and r&b singers that can’t carry a tune.
Lyrical content seems to reflects the age of man that we find ourselves in.
A Altered Chords August 9, 2010
I was raised by a mentally distubed atheist step father who used to make us play music, excercise, read classic literature, solve differential equations, read scientific american and do physics problems every night.
Can you believe that U. W. Tacoma fills the heads of Tacoma students with that rubbish?
R RR Anderson August 9, 2010
@15
Amen!