In a desperate move to stay contemporary, I feel a need to find good new music every year. Yes, I know there are some people whose music tastes froze the minute they left high-school. But hey, they can go suck down vb’s/budweiser’s in their local pub/bar and dream about when they were the star half-back/linebacker in high-school.
Meanwhile, here we are, at the business end of the first decade of the 21st century. Music has moved on. It’s hard being in your early 30’s and remain plugged-in to new music, but if there’s anywhere to do that, it’s the Mission district in San Francisco is the place. It’s a place where you can easily tread water, floating in an extended young adulthood, before suddenly realizing that you missed the boat.
But I digress.
How does one grab hold of the jagged edge of music? I am not by nature obsessive, so I need easy ways to keep current. We can’t spend entire Saturday mornings listening to the radio like I did in high-school. We have jobs and friends and lovers and commitments and furry pets. We need to find music in a reliable efficient way. And for that reason, end of year music lists are perfect.
Of course it must be the right list, one calibrated in taste and aesthetics. In today’s hipster clime, look no further than pitchforkmedia.com. Opinionated and idiosyncratic, pitchfork has managed to hit the big time yet maintain its transcendental cool. Besides, they has some very verg good writers. Rolling Stone managed this for decades but has since rolled into a black hole of indiscriminate blandness.
I’ve been trawling the pitchork top 100 list the last few years, and it has been a treasure trove of new discoveries. Listening to new music has also become immeasurably easier. Gone are the days where I’d listen to the “Top 40 songs” on radio, record it on my cassette deck and then edit out the dross on my wack two deck set. So please, if you’re reading this, stop reading this and go to the Pitchforkmedia top 100 tracks of 2007. You will see that next to every song, there is a link, whether to a myspace page, or a streamed file, or a mp3 file. Never has instantaneous gratification been more instantaneous. Any more instantaneous, and they’ll beam the music straight into your skull.
Pitchfork was good for me. Their list was unfamiliar but not too unfamiliar. I already had M.I.A., the National, PJ Harvey. Feist. I even downloaded In Rainbows. I listened to the list of 100 songs. Okay, so maybe not all of them, and not so carefully. I listen to tracks like how I look at paintings in museums. I give each track 10 seconds to see if I like it. And if I like that, I’ll listen further and maybe buy. This year, I discovered the remarkable James Blackshaw, a 12-string guitar instrumentalist, Bat With Lashes, LCD Soundsystem, Blonde Redhead, and some more I may chase up.
Still, the point of this post was the #1 song of Pitchformedia.com of 2007. Namely, LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends. As the #1 song, it sits on the top of the totem-pole of hipsterdom. This song above all, captures the zeitgeist of music nerds of 2007. I needed to buy a copy of the album. The first opportunity I got to buy it was at a Borders. The cashier was a total, like, hipster. Shaggy dark hair, thick black glasses, ironic t-shirt. He saw my purchases: a Benjamin Franklin biography and LCD Soundsystem “Sounds of Silver”.
He nodded with approval.
“You know,” he said, “I didn’t think I’d like it as much as their early albums but I was surprised. It turned out to be great. Some of the songs are really quite sad”. I said that I just wanted to check it out because I read it on some top 100 list. He raised an eyebrow. Anyway, I thanked my Border’s cashier and went home, safe in the knowledge that the disc was not as edgy as their early albums but pleased that some of the songs were occasionally sad.
Which brings us back to the song, “All my friends”. It starts off with an off-kilter piano drone, a ubiquitous motif that anchors some gorgeous melodies. This is a song about many things. Ostensibly about the come-down of a night of drug-fueled partying, the song is really a lament about the process of aging as in realizing that others see him now “with the face of a dad”. It is also a lament about the come-down of youth, “The memories of our betters/keeps us on the dancefloor”.
This song did not just earn the lavish praises of the editors of Pitchfork, but the Pitchfork reader’s polls too. It scorched out to #1 by a long country mile. I can only gather from this fact that the majority of Pitchfork readers (and writers) fall into the late 20’s/early 30’s, the erst-while slackers of Generation X. These are the kids who grew up to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, who reveled in its narcisstic individualism, who raged through the 90’s as faithless dionysians, weeping over the death of Kurt Cobain in candle-lit vigils. These are the kids who grew up in the world of broken families, drug-fucked boomer parents, confused silent mid-life crises, thatcher and reagan.
These are now the grown men and women collapsing in a world devoid of meaning. This is me. This is my Border’s cashiers. These are the aging baristas in Starbucks.
If “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the snarling coming-of-age of Generation X , then “All Me Friend” is the belated curtain-fall. These two songs, I believe book-end the cultural relevance of Generation X.
Is that all there is?
