You Didn't Miss It If Everything Is Happening At Once

One of the things I hated most about coming up in the music scene in early-90's Tucson (and there were a lot of things to hate about the scene, even if the music was quite good), was the near-past nostalgia. This is, of course, a symptom of the hipsterism that, even then, permeated the town. Nothing defines a small-potatoes backwater with big-city ambitions better than vicious backbiting about matters of taste. Of course, Tucson didn't invent sneering hipsterism, but when I moved to New York in 1996 and went around the music venues, the cynical affect of a lot of the folks I met was not entirely unfamiliar to me, even if I still had no idea how to respond to their lack of enthusiasm for anything.

But near-past nostalgia was particularly prevalent. If a band put out a new album, it was nowhere as good as their early effort, and even I got caught up in it, going so far as to come up with a rule with my then-songwriting partner: first album was best, and everything after that could only be in the running for second place, at the highest. Part of this was in response to a lot of metal and punk bands already being in their "difficult middle" years in the early 90's.

The more I write about this, the more I realize I might not really have a thesis. The truth is, I just hated the idea that, whenever I first discovered a band or an album, there was always somebody there to tell me, "Well, that's kind of their sell-out album. You should have heard them when they first started out." This always led me to believe that, whatever was going on, whatever scene was happening, I had arrived too late. I had always just missed it, whatever "it" was. When I got to New York, by the time I was hearing about Williamsburg in 1999, it was, per all the truly "in-the-know" kids, already over. Bushwick is the same now, as anyone who has been paying attention would be happy to tell you that it's been over since 2010 (or earlier).

I discovered Sonic Youth because of "Goo." I was told that was the "sell-out" album. Maybe they were right, all those hipster kids with their indie-cred gatekeeping. It was pretty pop. Even had a video on MTV.

But because of that album, I went out and found "Daydream Nation". And that's the money, right there. "Daydream Nation" made everything else possible: noise, melody, snark and sincerity rubbing shoulders and butting heads. It was more than a dialectic of rock, punk and art. It kicked ass, and it allowed all the bits and pieces of those things to co-exist and create something more than the sum of the parts.

Everybody told me that "Daydream Nation" was also a sell-out, and that the real shit was "Evol" or "Sister". Then some other people were like, no, even those were too poppy, and what you really wanted was "Bad Moon Rising" and the truly evil stuff they recorded with Lydia Lunch. Nope, said others, it's "Confusion is Sex" and "Kill Yr Idols" or nothing.

Fuck it. The noisy early stuff is fine. Not my thing, though. For my money, "Daydream Nation" is the perfect prescription. They had some good stuff later, too, but this is where it all came together. Art and pop. My favorite.

There's a larger point here, though. "Daydream Nation" put together a lot of disparate elements and allowed them to co-exist. Similarly, on the internet, everything is simultaneous. When the sum total (or damn close enough) of human expression is available at any given moment, suddenly which came first becomes less relevant. The new Anderson .Paak album isn't competing with just the last AP album, it's also possible to compare it with Sudanese dance music from five years ago, Australian pop from the late-80's, and whatever the hell is happening in some small town like Tucson. And not only that, but you can compare it (and cross-fertilize it) with the latest movie by Spike Lee, an essay on metamodernism, or a GIF of Steven Universe with superimposed text written by a kid in Oslo.

There will always be asshole gatekeepers, and there will always be those who hang on to their scenes with a death grip to prop up an insecure sense of self-worth and identity. Regardless, thank you, internet, for making the argument over "artistic progression" vs. "selling out" completely irrelevant, in fact if not in discourse.