When’s the last time you saw a video like the Breeder’s “Cannonball,” with girls playing instruments, goofing around, wearing their favorite tshirt, their inky black hair falling into their faces, singing their own words? NOT dancing in choreographed line, with the camera on their flat abdomens and the words of a team of three middle aged industry men oozing out of their mouths? – Julie in Library Bonnet #4 (2001)
The Breeders — “Cannonball”
This morning I had a brief job-search-related outing that found me killing ten minutes in the determinedly fancy-looking foyer of some little office park building that was trying very hard to look like a rustic chateau or quaint public house. This being America, an unattended lobby television tuned to Fox News blathered unassumingly at no one in particular. John McCain was doing the town hall meeting thing to what I’m assuming was an Irish-American league of some type (based on his frequent dropping of the I-bomb and general “Springfield is the rockin’est town in the whole damn world” pandering). And then it kind of dawned on me. I don’t know if I want Obama to win.
First off, I have no great reason for supporting Obama. If pressed, I think I am simply enamored of a politician who is at least willing to throw around big, fearsome ideas and whipcrack rhetoric in sort of a throwback candidacy. I’m a “words guy.” But still, I think Obama could be a very lousy president. Beyond that, Geo. W. Bush has been a convenient monster. Any doubts or despair or unsettledness can be hung on him for later burning in effigy. To get all high-falutin’, Bush is the mentally crippled king whose lack of vigor has reduced the United States to a wasteland. This allows us to imagine numerous scenarios and heroes by which America can be redeemed. Hell, I’d wager that about half of Obama’s early appeal was that he seemed the right kind of hero to banish the curse and rejuvenate the land. If Obama does banish Bush but the land is still pockmarked and the lakes remain brackish and dead, we’ll all have to admit that funtime is over and we’re looking at some kind of big trouble that transcends the small-time uglies of the Bush-Cheney cabal.
Consider for a moment the now mythical Clinton ‘90s. Like many folks, I am inclined to strap on the rosy goggles when looking back to the recent past. I assume that my fondness for those years is inextricably bound up my own teenhood. The 1990s are when I bought a bunch of records and behaved like an alternately manic or petulant moron. I wore stupid clothes and drove around recklessly and wastefully, arm extended from the window cutting the cool autumn air. The days of elaborate crushes and marching band and late-night milkshakes at Denny’s and other such nicey-nice suburban-white-boy bullshit. Beyond my own personal ‘90s hang-ups, it seems that other, older folks remember the ‘90s fondly as the days of economic growth and optimism and free internet money for everyone. This assessment also seems like bullshit.
If I think hard, the 1990s seemed kind of precarious – if you had money, you didn’t necessarily have fulfillment. This afterall was the decade of angst and slacking and ironic detachment. If you were ambitious, you had to worry that one little slip up would mar your permanent record or give you AIDS. Loyalty and diligence were still necessary, but now you had to be creative and dynamic too. The world became increasingly and absurdly complex in a very short amount of time. And from what I can recall, Americans reacted to this absurdity by letting their pain eat away at them, by gobbling Prozac by the handfuls, by cynically dismissing everything as a joke, by tuning out and letting it all whir by. The now-celebrated Clinton Era collapsed in a heap, leaving little more than partisan finger-pointing and public sex talk and Y2K panic in their wake.
Wherein The Big Lebowski sums up the 1990s in an artfully done musical number –
Granted, the metaphysics of the looming presidential election and a heaping dose of 1990s nostalgia are always distinct possibilities here at the record desk. However, this melancholy mood as it relates to John McCain and the overstuffed and darkly comic 1990s is quite likely a result of David Foster Wallace’s passing a little over a weak ago. Quite honestly, he was the only working writer whom I really followed and whose work I really cared about. He was a smart writer and a funny writer and an incredibly gifted writer. More than that, he wrote in a way that felt human. He wrote in a way that was both tremendously sad and extraordinarily joyous to the point of shimmering. He could cut right through something and make its little heart apparent.
So when I saw John McCain on teevee this morning, pretending to care about another crowd of “town hall meeting” goobers while I sat patiently in a little building that pretended to somewhere grand and nice and not an office, I remembered that Wallace was Rolling Stone’s McCain correspondent for the 2000 election. I remembered how Wallace found something honest and real in the McCain who spoke his mind and who “acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” And I wondered if that same John McCain is lurking unscripted behind those beady little eyes that tiredly scan the crowd as the current Candidate McCain rattles off the same old talking points about being a “maverick” and a “reformer.”
When I got home today, I decided to take another look at Wallace’s 2000 McCain coverage. Here’s a bit from his Rolling Stone writing as reprinted in Consider the Lobster (2005, Little, Brown, & Co.) pgs. 186 & 187 –
Who Even Cares Who Cares
It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Sure one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the political process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn’t seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as “amazingly lifelike”; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G. W. bush’s patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and “I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate – what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit.
One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he’s a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in student government and band, whereas McCain was a varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates, a guy who graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis and got in trouble for flying jets too low and cutting power lines and crashing all the time and generally being cool.
All that – very true, mind you – stuff about sadness and phoniness and coolness and just not caring is really the very essence of high school, and therefore the very essence of what the 1990s were for me. In retrospect, the 1990s were ten years of happy people pretending to be sad while sad people tried to be happy. They were manic times and reflective times. Uneasy – like that hot swampy air and nasty green light before the tornado sirens.
For me, the ‘90s are a tangle of looks and sounds. If I were to describe it, the stuff that really made me feel more alive during the ‘90s – the stuff that I still go back to when I need to recharge – had a sort of sleepy yet punchy look and sound. It’s that contrast of placidness and abandon. And lots of warm colors offset by very retro blueish greens. It’s easier to SHOW than it is to TELL.
Sonic Youth – “Bull in the Heather”
Pavement – “Cut Your Hair”
So what does all of this have to do with Wussy’s Left for Dead? Well, not much on the face of things. Wussy is a Cincinnati, OH band featuring Chuck Cleaver from the ‘90s one-hit outfit the Ass Ponys. On first look, they’re a pretty straightforward rock combo with some boy/girl vocals and lots of pretty guitar sounds. But something in the *feel* of what they do just has that “happy + sad” ‘90s appeal. Listening to them makes me feel lonely. I can listen to Left for Dead and get that same feeling that I got when I’d discover a band back when I was in highschool. And all of the in-depth analysis and album-review pretense aside, most listeners of a certain age who still bother to seek out new or unknown music are probably trying to reconnect with those first teenage highs. It’s about the feeling you get when a band crafts a little world that you can crawl into and live in. Musicians and cool music weenies like to pretend that rock fandom is more intellectual than simply liking what you hear or more often what you see and hear at the same time.
I’m not afraid to admit that I checked Wussy out because I dug their album art. Some online retailer popped it up as one of my recommendations and I thought is looked interesting enough to preview a couple tracks. I bought the album about five minutes later.
Because Wussy aren’t really mainstream chart-toppers, there isn’t a lot of information out their on the band. I dug up some videos of the group in action and found that they’ve got that ramshackle everyband look that I tend to associate with the music of my teenage years. That just sort of seals the deal for me.
“Jonah”
“Rigor Mortis”
Anyway, I whole-heartedly endorse Wussy’s Left for Dead. It makes me feel somehow happy and sad at the same time. It’s a lovely, real record that makes a sucky world suck a bit less. It’s not perfect, it’s better than that.
