The 09/09/09 Beatlemania thing has been a bit wearisome in terms of having to process all the “important” rock music that has been re-released. I didn’t run right out and buy both box sets or anything. I picked up the White Album because it’s an all time favorite. And I bought For Sale because it’s my current favorite Beatles sleeper record. It’s a slight record, a mixed record — about as “unimportant” a record as a band like the Beatles is allowed to have. I’ve also been dabbling with some home study versions of the mono mixes, sussing out the differences between the new “authentic” mono versions and the “sub-par” CD versions I know best.
Anyway, what impresses me about the Beatles pre-Rubber Soul (my mostly arbitrary point where the rock and roll Beatles stopped and the art Beatles began) is how slapdash and slight their records feel. Not that they aren’t well recorded or performed, but they’re recordings made for a disposable pop market. That something as fleeting as a disposable teen pop record could also be a little time capsule of real-seeming energy and enthusiasm is one of the great triumphs of mass-produced commercial pop culture. I can hem and haw about the “issues” I have with mass-market youth culture all day long, but listening to John Lennon and his band crank through Chuck Berry’s “Rock And Roll Music” is still a thrill.
The importance of the Beatles – especially the classic rock drug Beatles – sometimes obscures the fun to be found on Hard Day’s Night or Help. I’d wager that the “importance” of the social justice drug ’60s obscures the fact that the youth of that period remember it fondly because they were a catered-to market with enormous purchasing power and a whole world of new consumer goodies presented to them almost daily. I’ve often wondered how much of my own ideas of my youth (and the bits of my adolescence I paint with the summerglow brush of nostalgia) have been shaped by the ’60s ideas about and perfect teenhood nostalgia. The ’60s seem to have set the bar for all subsequent teenhoods. I mean, is the impulse to imagine the archetypal adolescent as suburban, white, sun-dappled, sensitive, and hungry for a wider world of authentic experience just a copy of a copy taken from all of the baby boomer understandings of what it meant to be a teenager during an untypical decade expanding consumer power and televised social change?
All of this brings us to the weird cult of imagined childhood, vicarious excitement, and re-created simplicity that is indie pop. I am, to an extent, a dabbler in and practitioner of this kind of twee fake simplicity and perma-adolescence myself, so I don’t mean this as an insult. Still, the world of insular jangle pop is built upon the foundations of other peoples’ (maybe not so real) childhoods. I’m not going to go into a complete history of twee/indie/jangle/whatever here. In fact, I’d mostly be cribbing from the very nice work that Pitchfork did on the subject a few years back (Pitchfork: Twee as Fuck – The Story of Indie Pop). Still, to connect the dots a bit, a lot of what the jangly nerd pop of the early indie/college scene was attempting was a recreation of that exuberant, joyous, innocent Beatle-esque pop rock.
As indie pop became an established form – and later a less-fashionable indie form – copies of copies or copies emerged. Bands rooted solely in indie sounds made records that didn’t so much aim for the Beatles or the Kinks but for the Field Mice and the Pastels. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is a band and a record that is lovingly built out of sounds and ideas that come directly from the C86 sampler and other such indie high-water marks. Much like that Horrors record, knowing how this particular sausage is made is not enough to put me off my feed. Sure, this is a slight, derivative record — but that shouldn’t be an impediment to you getting your kicks. It’s not like jangle pop is about meaning and substance. It’s about a mood, specifically nostalgia. Does it sound exactly like “Emma’s House?” No. It does sound like a brighter, clearer remembering of all that perfect pop stuff from the yesteryear of indie land. I suppose that’s an achievement of sorts for an album-length celebration of a genre that’s fundamentally about conjuring a bittersweet feeling about the sorta imaginary past.
