Kim: No, we were off 4AD after Title TK. And then we had Mountain Battles, and it’s like, well, we’ll do it on 4AD. But that was a one-off. [4AD has not yet confirmed that the Breeders are no longer signed to the label. -- Ed.] And for this one, it’s an EP. What am I going to do, take a meeting for an EP? Then we’re like, maybe we should just give it away anyway. It’s on sale on iTunes, but I don’t know if anybody buys digital music. Maybe they will, and maybe we’ll actually be able to sell something, but that’s not the point. Music is free.
I don’t know if anybody’s going to buy it. I assume one person will download it, and everybody else will steal it. I have no idea what people do nowadays. People might actually buy digital music. Do you know if they do?
Pitchfork: I buy off iTunes sometimes.
Kim: [To Kelley] He says he buys digital music off iTunes. [To Pitchfork] Kelley says you’re lying.
…
Kim: I don’t see the drawback yet. Like I said, music is free, so who cares? It’s not like we’re in a rap band and I really need someone to sponsor my hundred-thousand-dollar wardrobe and car. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a really stupid way. Maybe by doing this now we have just leveled ourselves, like [whispering] we’re a band who lost their label contract. Or maybe people actually think that if a band doesn’t want to use a label, they just don’t want to use a label anymore. Because labels don’t exist anymore. Do you think they do? I don’t.
– Kim Deal in a 2009 Pitchfork interview
I absolutely love the Breeders. They were the band that gave me that last final shove outta my identity as a mostly a classic and/or hard rock listening guy who dabbled in alternarock, into being a guy who was mostly interested in alternarock and later punk and glam and what many people would now call “elitist” smartipance music. Don’t get me wrong. I listened to R.E.M. and a little Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, but the summer of ’93 is when I fell hard for what then seemed like “weird” bands to a Midwestern kid who listened to Aerosmith, Van Halen, and the Beatles.
It’s easy now to think that a committed music fan would seek out the willful, the quirky, and the odd. But when you’re 15 years old and every single bit of music you hear must be filtered through commercial radio, MTV, or word-of-mouth recommendation, your tastes move slower. There were no college radio stations in the far southeastern suburbs of Chicago. Heck, my college didn’t really have a radio station that played what is generally thought of as college rock. This totally wired infotainment age of ours has certainly made the word smaller. Folks making their homes in pop cultural dead zones like the not-urban Midwest are no longer doomed to hearing about things way after the fact. Heck, if anything, the internet gives anyone anywhere the opportunity to be the first person to backlash and pooh-pooh a brand new song/meme/band/idea. Something better be polished or professional, or blindingly innovative if you expect the internet to get on board.
The inversion of standards brought on by internet culture (and a savvier pop fandom in general) doesn’t feel entirely comfortable to me. I suppose that the extreme-ing of everything in the 1990s helped create our appetite for endless edginess and pop culture products that “cross the line” more often than not. Perhaps this extreme-ing influence has split into several strains. One strain being the obvious crassness that fuels the popularity of shows like Family Guy and mainstream pornification and a lot of other cultural ephemera that I can’t help but associate with those serious-looking energy drinks at the convenience store. Another variant of extreme-ness is indie snobbery – the need to hear of and discard first minor cultural happenings that almost no one will ever like in the first place. A lot of the energy drink people would consider indie snobbery to be elitist, and the snobs would likely consider the energy-drinks-and-tribal-tattoos people militantly populist and vulgar (in several senses of the word). I reckon it’s kind of a counter/pop-culture “red state v. blue state” thing.
I certainly don’t exist outside of these debates. I once conducted an animated (and, no doubt, slurred) argument in defense of the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” in the general direction of my aggro-metal loving brother-in-law. He totally didn’t get it. “Leader of the Pack” is old-fashioned sissy music. How could I like that? In his defense, I didn’t get it either. I was trying to argue taste. I was trying to “improve” his understanding of pop music. It was a dumb argument – and I’m guessing a pretty common one.
This argument happened about 10 years ago. However, it sticks with me because I learned an important lesson – nobody wants to have their taste “fixed” for them. I didn’t experience an immediate epiphany, but I learned to roll back on the intensity knob when it came to arguing about taste.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been contemplating entering graduate school. As part of this process, I’ve had to take stock of what it is that actually interests me, what topics I’m passionate enough about to invest time and money into studying seriously. As an added bonus, I’ve spent some of this time thinking about what really flips my switch – what the core things are that I really love and that really got me into music and history and culture and books.
The Breeders are one of those things.
I’ve been on a bit of a Breeders and Pixies binge lately. When I found out that the Breeders were releasing a new EP I was psyched. Few things are better than learning that a band that you’re reconnecting with is releasing a new record. Fate to Fatal is an unassuming, homemade kind of record. As on the underrated Title TK and the most recent long-player Mountain Battles, this EP finds the sisters Deal sounding mainly like you expect them to. Rhythms chug beneath cooed, slurred vocals. Guitars sputter and pop. Strummed electric guitars shift in and out of time, eking out a delicate melody. Even the Bob Marley cover “Chances Are” sounds unmistakably like the Breeders. The only potential surprise is “The Last Time.” Instrumentally, the hushed, chimey pulse occasionally interrupted by a sloppy, trebley sheet of guitar noise wouldn’t be out of place on any previous Breeders album. It’s Mark Lanegan’s diva turn that stands out. The Breeders sound is built upon the interweaving Kim and Kelley vocals, so the vocal switch is unexpected.
Fate to Fatal is a slight release. Yet its very inessentialness makes it appealing. The whole self-released, homemade (even down to the hand-screened record sleeves) approach to record making touches on what makes a band like the Breeders special – they’re unpolished, they’re not untouchable rock celebrities. If Kim and Kelley deal can forge an identity in sound, then why can’t any committed, inventive person?
I suppose it’s the implicit democracy of the form that lead me to believe deeply in “alternative” or punk or whatever it was that turned me on when I was 15. It certainly wasn’t an elitist thing, an “I know about XYZ and you don’t” thing. It was about connecting with sounds that reflected how I felt – weird, shambly, wimpy, awkward, clattery, sarcastic. Last Splash didn’t make cool into something that required macho, phony cool. Unkempt Midwesternism could be just as compelling – just as charming – as high kicks and leering rock guy posturing.
It’s tempting to dismiss Fate to Fatal as an unimportant vinyl trifle, to give it a numerical score and cast it aside as not hotshit enough for these picky times. But the Breeders aren’t built for that kind of listening. Even at their loudest, they’re a quiet sort of band. I think you’re supposed to listen to this record and let it seep in.
Not that I’m telling you how to listen.
