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Saturday, April 12, 2008
those goofy oldies…
Found this interesting…
thoughts? comments? critiques?
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The riddle of the sphinx…
Remember the old Riddle of the Sphinx? What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs it the afternoon and three in the evening? My new-music listening of the past week has felt rather sphinx-like.
Coming in on four legs was a hot young band that’s all the rage in the indiesphere, Vampire Weekend — four guys from New York who tend to mix the laid-back, vaguely ironic and precisely rendered rock of privileged white kids with the skittery kick of 1980s Afropop. They sound like Pavement backed by King Sunny Ade — and, happily, it works.
Just as happily, R.E.M. is back. After more 14 years of slow, shuffing albums that sounded dull and sold poorly, the new “Accelerate” is fast, furious and great fun. It reminds me of the R.E.M. I fell in love with years ago. We’ll see if it can pull them back from the brink.
The Rolling Stones, meanwhile — who’ve never even heard of a brink, let alone been close to one — have hobbled in with their ninth live album, “Shine A Light.” It’s like most other Stones work from the last 20 years or so: simultaneously enjoyable but extraneous.
Now, these bands have nothing necessarily in common other than having all crossed my path at the same time, and I don’t mean to force imaginary connections. But in my mind, they crowded together in a way that made me reflect upon the rock biz in its current state, now that it has been around as long as a human life span.
I found myself identifying with R.E.M., three mid-career guys my age, taking stock and old past and potential future, and trying to strike a creative balance between comfort and creativity — planning out the next decade and imagining themselves as one day being … what? The Stones?
I wondered if the Stones have ever really considered calling it quits, or if they’ll forever keep trying to redefine the aging process for people in their business, and succeeding about half the time.
I wondered how I would feel about Vampire Weekend if I were young and just learning my tastes, as I was when I first heard R.E.M., and felt my socks being knocked off. Does any band any more knock anybody’s socks off? Does any new group feel instantly iconic? Do any feel much more than temporary?
Vampire Weekend is the sort of band that, years ago, might’ve had a shot at becoming an R.E.M., but today such at thing seems as unattainable as it does unimaginable. Not just for them, but for anyone.
R.E.M. might respond, “That’s OK. It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.” The Stones might say, “Pour another drink, mate!” All of them, in their own way, have got it right.
