FLOG

Grey to grey

A few of my friends in the past couple of years have been rather shocked/impressed/appalled by my late-term embrace of indie rock and other music I used to reflexively shit on.

Well, don't get used to it. Yes, I'll admit that I was being unnecessarily contrarian when I'd veto your Flaming Lips and your Modest Mouse and your Stereolab for the Allman Brothers, Metallica, and Hank Williams Jr.

But I doubt I'll ever have the temperament to seek out and embrace new bands the way many of my friends do. As a fellow history student once said when a political science professor asked whether the class had been tracking Senator Jim Jeffords' disalignment with the GOP, "I'm a historian. I'll know about it in 20 years, if it matters."

It's my natural reaction to give things time to establish and prove themselves. Most of the music I hold dear was produced well before my birth. And I've approached newer stuff pretty conservatively. I met Radiohead after OK Computer, Public Enemy after It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Wilco just after YHF, etc. I was very cautious in getting back into the Beastie Boys post Check Your Head, because it was so uncool to like them in 1988 (as I still did, having been in London for 6 months). It's taken me a decade to actually like Nirvana.

While my approach to music precludes my ever being totally hip, who gives a shit? Being hip must be exhausting; I can think of nothing worse. I found being stoned and listening to the Stones was the easier course in high school, and that reasoning still applies. Let others cry, sweat and bleed in pursuit of the latest thing. I'll wait and see what they come up with, and then groove to the music.

Which brings us to our very buried nut graph.

Part of being an eternal latecomer to everything is the ability to discover an artist's discography in two directions at once. You start at the breakthrough album, and dig backwards while awaiting the new releases.

Speakerboxx/The Love Below,, for example, marked the first time I'd paid any attention to Outkast outside of strip clubs. So while others fretted over their inevitable breakup, I relished delving into FLOGette's collection of their earlier albums.

And when Brandon dropped Modest Mouse's Lonesome Crowded West on me a while back, it meant I'd eventually work my way around to This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. when the newer albums wore out their welcome. I just did so this week, and by god the bugger's fantastic. Based on the experience of Good News, I've taken to thinking that Isaac Brock's ideas sound best and ring truest when they're not fully formed and polished. So Long Drive sounds fantastic. As musically inventive as Moon & Antarctica, but with the spontaneity of Lonesome Crowded West.

But my god, the rambling. The only thing I intended to do when I started this post was to point out one of the best lines about the Pacific Northwest I've ever seen or heard, from Long Drive:

"Here things go from grey
To grey and back to grey again
And they get green and go to grey
And then back to grey again"

Awesome.

Some long, weird posts, huh? This is what finals studying does to the brain.

By the way, that photo at top is mine, but I thought it went well with Modest Mouse discussion.

Posted by FLOG at December 5, 2004 3:07 AM