How we like music

There's a part in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" towards the end, after Elizabeth and Darcy have gotten together, where Elizabeth demands to know how he ever fell in love with her in the first place.

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation," he says. "It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."

I often find myself in similar straits when it comes to albums that have become favorites, but it never stops me from wondering, as I first become familiar with a band or an album, if this is going to be a band that I'm going to fall in love with.

There are just so many ways that a band can get at you: maybe you hear a song on the radio one day, and then hear it again and again, and finally wonder who it is. You stick around in the car long enough to find out, then go find out if they have a webpage. Maybe you buy their disc. And then maybe that track you couldn't get out of your head is the only decent one on the disc, and it ends there.

Or maybe you find out that song that you were so taken with is not even the best song on the disc. But then what you thought was the best song is simply the most immediately appealing, and in fact you come to realize that some deep album cut is really the best one, even if by then it's no longer your favorite. Your favorite is that unassuming seventh track--the one you used to skip when you first got the disc.

This is the point at which a band and an album have gotten under your skin: the point when you have a favorite track on an album which you acknowledge is not the best track on the album. Case in point: You'd be hard-pressed to admit that "The Way We Get By" is not obviously the best song on Spoon's Kill the Moonlight. They're a band that's all about swagger and feel, and "The Way We Get By" has been stripped of every unnecessary element, leaving nothing but a knot of perfectly menacing pop. It has one of the finest opening couplets of all time: "We get high in backseats of cars / we break into mobile homes." It has handclaps.

But "Jonathon Fisk" is my favorite song on Kill the Moonlight. The first couple of times through, it seems strikingly unremarkable compared to "The Way We Get By," but repeated listenings reveal a subtle structural and melodic genius. First of all, it's the story of a school bully. The melody of the verse hovers in a tense relationship to the muted guitars behind it, and the tension holds until the third verse, which opens with a line that descends down a major scale. Satisfaction is delayed, and the song is three minutes and fifteen seconds of uneasily riding nerves.

See, this is the kind of thinking I get into when a band really gets under my skin. I've tried to watch it as it happens, but it's so hard to tell. Sometimes I listen through an entire album, and nothing really hooks into me. But then, magically, at the end of the disc, I need to go back and start it again. Building Better Bombs' Freakout Squares was like that for me. Something sticks, is the thing, on albums that are going to turn out to be favorites. A melody in a chorus. Something the drums do.

I probably view these things too piecemeal for my own good. I come from a background of being a musician, so sometimes it's the little musical things that I latch onto, or just the way an album sounds. That's the way it was with Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. Right from the first moments of the first track, the feel that the band imbued the album with is astounding. You can feel the floorboards in the titular house, the glass in the windows, and the Atlantic Ocean washing up drowsily on the beach outside. Behind it, a forest stretches back up a hill, lights floating in it. Sure, maybe someone else gets something completely different from the album, but I can't believe that it won't hit an open-minded listener as redolent of something, and that's an achievement.

So I can say, most of the time, why I think this band or that band is worth your time to check out, but when it comes to how I first discovered that, I feel like Darcy. I was in the middle before I knew it had begun.

We're getting the band back together

The rock reunion has long been the subject of scorn and ridicule, and for good reason. Jane's Addiction seemed to embody everything that was great about alternative music in the '90s while they were around: they were dark and depraved, but catchy and expansive. Daring, artsy, funny, devil-may-care-- and then, at the height of their popularity following the release of Ritual de lo Habitual and the first Lollapalooza tour, they broke up. Much as I knew I was going to miss them, I had to kind of admire them for going out on top.

And then they reformed for a reunion tour with Flea on bass because original bassist Eric Avery was the only with sense enough to leave their legacy alone. And Jane's Addiction is only one example in the endless parade of bands that are flogging their crusty reputations to make a buck.

But a really odd thing has been happening over the past few years: A handful of significant alternative bands from the '80s and '90s have been reforming and putting out records that, while perhaps not the classics that their early stuff is, are vibrant, current and excellent albums that deepen and refine their earlier efforts.

I could be wrong, but it seems like the trend really began with Wire, who put out the LP Send back in 2003, garnering a 7.5 from Pitchfork and even then only because they'd already released most of the album on two previous EPs.

Then came Mission of Burma, the Boston stalwarts who re-formed to put out OnOffOn, then arguably bettered that already solid comeback effort with last year's The Obliterati.

Now, just this past week, Dinosaur Jr's Beyond arrived in my box. This disc even looks like an old Dinosaur Jr record, complete with handwritten band name and title on the front cover. The album's also resolutely lo-fi, and it sounds like they J. Mascis and company picked up right where they left out.

Of course, I'm not hear to review Beyond, which will happen later when I've gotten more familiar with it, but rather to talk a little bit about what makes bands like Wire, Mission of Burma and Dino Jr able to come back to relevance (well, at least critical relevance) when Jane's Addiction put out Strays, which basically sucked.

Music fans of an older generation are enamored of pronouncing rock and roll dead. They point to things like classic rock songs in car commercials as a sign of the death of rebellion in rock and roll, as if that were what rock and roll were about. Now, I'm not going to argue that rock songs in commercials is a good thing per se, but I think we have to face facts and acknowledge that rock and roll stopped being rebellious a long long time ago, and consider the fact that it may just have grown up, and more gracefully than a lot of boomers have managed.

For groups like Wire, Mission of Burma and Dinosaur Jr, I really don't think rock was some kind of tool to be used against the man. For Wire, it was maybe a way to rail against the mores of upper class England. And for MOB and Dino Jr, it was maybe a way to carve out their own niches in New England (which, let me tell you, is harder than it looks), but I think these bands were primarily interested in the freedom granted them by the idea of being in a band, by the idea of making something personal into something they could share.

But I guess maybe I doubt that that separates them from Jane's Addiction. Again, we've circled back into a discussion of authenticity, which is something I'd generally like to avoid whenever possible. I don't believe my ideas about who's realer than who are very illuminating.

Maybe-- just maybe-- what lets a band hold on to whatever made them great in the first place is as elusive as what made them great. It probably works better for bands that were ahead of their time than bands that were distinctively of their time-- for instance, a lot of Jane's Addiction's stuff now sounds awfully tinny and metally and kind of bombastically huge in a way that hasn't held up very well, whereas Wire and MOB made albums in the early '80s that sound like they could have come out yesterday.

To continue down that line, I have little doubt that Fugazi could reform five years from now and put out a great record. I doubt the same could be said for Smashing Pumpkins.

I'm still working on it. Dinosaur Jr review to follow soon.

Tonight on Homegrown

Tonight at 10 p.m. CST on Drive 105 and also at radiohomegrown.com, I'll once again be guest hosting in Dave Campbell's stead while he's out on the road. Tonight's guest will be Minneapolis hip-hop duo extraordinaire Big Quarters, who just released their debut LP, Cost of Living, about a month ago. Good times are guaranteed.

I think we're all poseurs on this bus

Here's a well-written review of what sounds like a pretty interesting book by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor called Faking It.

I haven't read the book yet, but it seems like they're pointing to the inherent pointlessness of dividing musical acts into authentic and inauthentic. And it feels kind of liberating to think of all pop music as essentially contrived, and therefore it becomes a matter not of judging realness, but of examining all kinds of other aspects of the music. After all, authenticity has this monolithic quality based on the fact of its indefinability-- most often it's cited by people as something you "feel," or as something a performer either has or doesn't. Well, that's not very helpful, now is it?

It seems definitely true that certain bands are going to get at you in a way that feels profound and for which you have no explanation, but that doesn't mean they're any more authentic than a band that doesn't do that to you. We're all conglomerates of influence and experience, and it seems to be, by my own internal reckoning, that a band that strikes me in that peculiar way falls in a kind of sweet spot between so familiar to my taste that they don't challenge me, and so outside of my familiarity that they don't connect with the things that I've previously found meaning in.

One thing that always perplexes me a bit is when people say they like a band because it's not like anything they've ever heard before. I mean, I can appreciate the feeling of discovery, but in my experience, the things I've heard before (and heard a lot), I've heard because I liked them. That is, I've chosen to delve into and listen to things because they reverberated in some way with me, and things I haven't gotten into, well, they've left me cold. I can always appreciate it when a band does things differently enough that I begin to reconsider things I've previously ignored (viz. Jay-Z w/r/t mainstream hip-hop or Boris w/r/t metal), but those artists are gateway artists precisely because there are aspects to them which connect to what I know. Boris bring elements of experimental music into metal, which everyone acknowledges, but their recordings also have a garage-y quality which is quite different from most of the metal that I've heard in passing. The drums often sound more like the Meters in tonal quality-- they have a kind of boxy, woodiness to them that sounds more Motown than Motorhead. And then seeing them live totally sold me. There was very little of the posturing I associate with metal; the whole thing was very zen and calm, despite being overwhelmingly loud. Of course, I also appreciate a band like Zebulon Pike for embracing those very inauthenticities w/r/t their album art and stage presence.

Sigh. I guess we're back to discussing realness. But at least we're discussing it, rather than just haphazardly attributing it to stuff we like.

Protest music today?

Does anyone want to weigh in on this interesting Talking Points Memo Cafe commentary/discussion on protest music today, that includes the likes of Bright Eyes, the Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, Dylan and hip-hop? I'm curious about what people here would say.

The point of discussion begins: "Jason Zengerle's attack on Conor Oberst's pretensions to be doing good political music is welcome and correct, but in a tragic case of thesis inflation, Zengerle seems to be arguing not merely that "When the President Talks to God" is bad but that quality political tunes are impossible under present social conditions. That's a clear error.

Consider "Combat Rock" and "Entertain" by Sleater-Kinney, the Decemberists' "Sixteen Military Wives", "Monster Hospital" and "Succexxy" from Metric, or even Le Tigre's charmingly didactic "New Kicks"."