When I attended community college a few years ago, I decided to challenge myself by taking difficult courses that would expand my knowledge base and prepare me not just for attending a four-year institution, but also for the real world that lied ahead. That was how I spent Tuesday and Thursday afternoons taking a class called “The History of Rock and Roll,” which was taught by a U of M grad student who walked us through a chronological history of music with intricate PowerPoint presentations while challenging us with impossibly difficult essay questions like “describe some of the differences between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.”
I won’t lie: sometimes, the class was so difficult that I thought about giving up. As the subject matter got more complex, eventually reaching mind-boggling subjects like “grunge,” it was tempting to walk out of the classroom, drop out of school, and look for janitorial work. But I stuck with it, and with enough hard work and dedication was able to earn an “A” in the course — something that remains one of my most impressive adult achievements.
What stood about the course, besides the difficulty, was how it turned something as exciting and life-affirming as rock and roll into another boring classroom topic that was rooted in objectivity. The course’s curriculum inherently made authoritative judgments over which bands were worth including and which would be left out of the history it was teaching us. The class stuck to the classic, practically official rock and roll canon — also seen in places like The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — tracing a linear line from artists like The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan to more contemporary music that was influenced by them.
One of my longtime insecurities as someone who writes and talks about music is that most of these canonized artists have never done much for me. This ranges from liking their songs, but not feeling any emotional connection to the music (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin) to outright disliking artists that are considered legendary and hugely important (The Rolling Stones — ugh). In all cases, I recognize the band’s influence and how they helped innovate rock, but even the most detailed and fascinating of PowerPoint presentations couldn’t make them feel as important to me as they seem to be to everyone else.
Not loving these bands has always made me feel alienated and sometimes even stupid. If I can’t like these artists that are universally considered to be incredible, maybe I don’t understand music. So I’ve spent a lot of mental energy reflecting on the canon and why it has never worked for me like it does for everyone else. My biggest issues are that the canon has two major biases: it is heavily skewed towards men, especially “rock gods,” and it is also biased towards older artists who came first, because obviously nobody in the last 20 years has innovated music. If you like listening to music that was made by women after 1980, the canon isn’t going to have much for you, and I can’t get behind a history that excludes so many artists.
Music does have a history, but the canon tells it incorrectly. It focuses on a single path that goes in a straight line, when a true, honest history of rock and roll is made up of different branches and curves off that path. One of my favorite things to do as a listener is find a specific genre or style of music, and try to piece the history of it together myself by connecting the dots between various bands. This way, the music tells the story rather than a professor or a bunch of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voters, and it stays true to what I enjoy about it, which is the process of discovery and the subjectivity.
The best example of this different way of viewing music’s history was from a random blog I stumbled upon online when I was searching out female-fronted punk music. A very devoted, possibly crazy person compiled a series of 12 CD-Rs that served as a reference of female punk from 1977-1989, and gave them to some friends, one of whom uploaded them online. I listened to it and was astonished at how comprehensive it was — it combined relatively well-known artists like Blondie with some of the most obscure bands imaginable, like German groups that released one song on a cassette in 1981 and gave it to three of their friends. What made it so enjoyable wasn’t just that I liked the music, but that the series was mixing artists of all levels of popularity and obscurity together and forming an entire story of a certain niche of music — one that is completely ignored by the traditional canon.
While the canon is based on exclusivity and favors artists who are popular and “important,” this collection made no judgments and included seemingly every female-fronted punk band that made a song in the time frame. A powerful feeling I got from it was that no band is more important than any other, and everyone who makes music is in their own way contributing to its history. Even a band that released literally one song was remembered and viewed as important in this context.
Rather than making certain music sacred or unimpeachable and clinging to bland objectivity, I prefer that collection’s more subjective and inclusive take on history that focuses on the music rather than what people have written about it. Obviously, a class can only discuss so many bands and a museum can only have so much space, but that’s why a History of Rock and Roll course and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are ineffective. The real history of music is sprawling and defined just as much by outsiders as the most popular artists of all time, and to reduce it to such a small number of popular artists is antithetical to what makes music great.
Savages are the kind of band I used to love. This is documented for posterity in my post about them back in 2013, when their first album Silence Yourself was released and I penned a historically bad “review” where I completely bought into the band’s hype and stupidly defended them against some detractors I had seen in my Twitter feed.
It was easy to be fooled by Savages, who marketed themselves as an exciting new rock band, and back in 2013 they looked and sounded the part. Their music was very striking and confident while their lyrics were strident, almost like a call to arms. Some songs, like “Shut Up,” even came with mission statements. These were virtues I admired a couple years ago, but since then my sensibilities and tastes have changed and I’ve become more aware of the phoniness of Savages and their “mission.”
With a new album, Adore Love, on the horizon in 2016, Savages are once again positioning themselves as the self-appointed saviors of rock. One of their new songs is called “The Answer,” fitting the band’s perception of themselves as the solution to all of music’s problems, while the video shows them melting people’s faces in an underground punk show like hardcore rockers. The album’s cover is literally a closed fist in the air, further signalling that Savages are a Revolutionary Band. The video for “Adore,” which the music press breathlessly labeled “stunning,” features singer Jehnny Beth STARING into the CAMERA INTENSELY, as if waiting for viewers through the screen to congratulate her on her bravery and fearlessness. It’s a video that reeks of effort and desperation as the band painfully tries to will their own self-described importance into existence.
Beth’s performance in the “Adore” video serves as a useful proxy for my experience watching the video and listening to the song. I stared blankly at my screen for five minutes, waiting for something to happen that never did. The song goes nowhere and ends with Beth unconvincingly shouting “I ADORE LIFE,” a trite lyric that is delivered like it’s the most radical thought anyone has ever had. This “adore life” message that seems to be the primary theme of their album rings particularly hollow given that Savages are possibly the least fun band to ever exist and make Radiohead look like Andrew W.K.
While I initially liked Silence Yourself, it quickly left my rotation in 2013 as something about the band left me cold. I didn’t figure out why that happened until I discovered a band called Nervous Trend from Australia. They had just released their first demo tape, which I saw linked on Twitter, and when I listened to it I was blown away. This band was drawing from many of the same influences as Savages, but made something that sounded much more original and exciting, without any of the manifestos and other media branding nonsense that had made Savages a small phenomenon.
I don’t think Nervous Trend and Savages are in competition with each other, and I can easily see people liking both of them. But for me, the Nervous Trend demo (keep that in mind, it’s a demo) exposed a lot of the flaws in Savages that I hadn’t considered before, and it helped explain why Silence Yourself had held up so poorly. Beneath all the imagery and attitude, the actual music Savages made wasn’t as inspiring as their portrayal of themselves indicated it was. Nervous Trend showed what a band drawing from similar influences could sound like, and how to have socially-conscious lyrics without being pretentious about it.
Part of my bitterness here is that Savages are a relatively big band, while Nervous Trend remain obscure — they just released an EP last year that I didn’t even hear about until yesterday, because the band doesn’t have a Twitter or Facebook account and has zero traction in the music press. It illustrates to me how Savages are a sanitized version of much better music, but have built themselves into an “important band” through branding, non-musical elements, and a music press that eagerly bought into their self-mythology because the band provides easy talking points.
Savages end up being a particularly brutal combination: a band that believes deeply in their own importance and ability, but makes music that is regressive and uninteresting. There are tons of bands, from the 80s through today, that have worked in a similar musical space and are much better, but aren’t as known because they lacked the flashiness and eye-catching press releases of Savages. It also makes it more insulting when Savages are perceived as fresh and exciting, when their music is mostly an imitation of bands like Bush Tetras.
Savages have ended up being a useful band for me personally, as the original post I made about them was a turning point where I realized I was too frequently liking music and thinking it was important because I was told to by others. It also made me far more skeptical of any band being trumpeted as exciting for reasons that don’t have much to do with their songs. The music decides whether a band is important or not, and in that regard Savages fall woefully short.
I’ve already written a couple of posts about Colleen Green’s I Want to Grow Up, while also consistently championing it on social media for the last few months. By now, I imagine people are kind of sick of me talking about it. But everything I’ve said about it doesn’t do justice to how much I’ve thought about this album over the course of the year and how it has become the soundtrack to my 2015 life.
“Soundtrack of my life” is a phrase I find really corny. I tend to be more detached about music, analyzing it as an art form and looking at the artist’s intent rather than trying to insert myself in the proceedings. This is partially because I enjoy critically examining things in this way, but also because my experiences (or lack thereof) never were really the subject of songs.
Songs are often about extreme moments in life: the highest highs and the lowest lows. Great art is often associated with dramatic feelings like ecstasy or heartbreak. If my life were a graph, it would just be a straight line down the middle. Nothing that great has ever happened to me, but nothing that bad has either. I’ve kind of floated along, feeling mostly invisible and inconsequential, waiting for something to happen. Needless to say, that floating, invisible feeling isn’t usually the subject of music, because it’s perceived as not being interesting.
I Want to Grow Up really resonated with me because it’s the first album that attacks that invisible feeling with pinpoint accuracy. After years of listening to music in a detached, analytical way, this album stepped up, confronted me, and basically punched me in the face. I almost had to stop listening the first time I played it because the lyrics were too real and I was getting paranoid that Green had gained direct access to my thoughts.
A couple months ago, I did something I never do: I went to a record store and saw Green play a concert. She played by herself with an iPad programming the drums, and performed every song on the album except for one (more on that later). Afterwards, I did something else that I really never do: I approached her and told her how much I loved her album and how it said everything I had been thinking. We exchanged some small talk about her tour before I shuffled out of the store, hoping I hadn’t embarrassed myself, but knowing that I truly needed to thank the person who made this album, which is not something I’d really felt a need to do before.
It’s all very gushy, but that’s the power of I Want to Grow Up: it’s an album about the type of people who normally don’t get immortalized in songs, the slackers and “losers” who have feelings too. And I give Green tons of credit for the execution, which is exactly what it needed to be: simple, direct, and powerful because of it. This is my attempt to write down everything this album has made me think about this year, track by track.
“I’m sick of always being bored/I think I need a schedule”
In addition to all the praise I’ve heaped on it already, I Want to Grow Up also arranges the tracks perfectly so the album feels like it’s telling a story. Here, the title track serves as the album’s thesis statement. A common creative writing lesson I learned was that your main character always needs to want something, which drives their action. In this case, Green obviously wants to grow up, and the rest of the album follows from that.
The lyric about “needing a schedule” jumped out at me on first listen because it’s such a mundane, true observation for anyone who has slacked off for extended periods of time. I’ve had long employment droughts in the last couple of years and every time I end up keeping a ridiculous schedule where I stay up all night, then have problems sleeping the next day, etc. This often meant being awake at about 12-6 a.m. when no one else is and struggling to find ways to fill the time, then sleeping too late to do anything productive during the day. It’s fun at first, but “I Want to Grow Up” articulates the desire I had to break out of that cycle, and also the difficulty doing it.
“And now I know he’ll never be my man/it breaks my heart but I understand”
I consider this the most traditional song on the album in terms of lyrical content. It’s classic pop stuff: loving the “wild one” who can’t be tamed and wishing you could change them. On a broader level, it is about one of the big themes of this album, which is really wanting something, feeling that it’s within your grasp, and not being sure how to get it. I want to grow up, but how? Is there a life manual or something that will fall from the sky? What am I supposed to do next?
“A big big blanket to wrap around myself/In my room/Where I don’t have to worry about a conversation/And I don’t have to worry about being fun”
“TV” is probably the most slackery song on an album full of them, a love song dedicated to the television that serves as a constant distraction from the real world. This song starts to get at one of the other big themes of the album, which is how people use technology to escape from all their real-world anxieties. In your room with the TV on, you can finally be yourself: there are no social obligations, no need to conform to what people expect of you — the TV almost becomes your truest friend because it is always seeing the real you. I often use TV and the internet as a crutch (especially during late nights), a temporary reprieve from everything life is throwing at me that I can’t handle. The problem is that these day-to-day distractions can accumulate until weeks go by and I’ve done practically nothing, which is the addictive danger of TV friendship that this song understands — the thing that in the moment seems like an escape can become another obstacle.
In the age where seemingly everyone has ADD, “Pay Attention” captures the inability many of us have to hold a conversation and put up with irritating small talk (“talk so small you need a microscope to discern much at all”). “How do some people talk so much?” is pretty much a verbatim thing I think all the time, especially at family gatherings where everyone has an opinion about stuff I never think about. The way other people seem to effortlessly make conversation while I never know what to say is a constant source of frustration, especially when being quiet is interpreted as being aloof or disinterested.
“Because I’m shitty and I’m lame and I’m dumb and I’m a bore/And once you get to know me you won’t love me anymore”
The phrase “centerpiece” is overused in music criticism, but it applies here: “Deeper Than Love” is in the middle of the album, is six-minutes long, and is its darkest moment, plunging head-first into all of our deepest fears. This is the song Green did not perform when I saw her play live, I suspect because she wasn’t comfortable singing it for an intimate audience.
The line I quoted is probably the one I’ve thought most about from this album. I do a lot of communicating online and I think a lot about how we perceive ourselves and others on the internet. I’m a lot better at articulating myself in writing than in person, so the online version of me naturally will look better than the “real” me while having the same thoughts. But it’s still an inherently incomplete picture that other people fill in: they might draw conclusions or think stuff about me that isn’t there, just based on how I post.
I’ve historically been scared to try to make any online friendships into “IRL” friendships for reasons given in the lyrics of “Deeper Than Love.” I’m always afraid that people will have built an image of me in their head that the “real” me won’t be able to live up to, especially given social anxiety and nerves that don’t exist as much online. “Deeper Than Love” really nails this intimacy fear that I suspect is common, especially in the era of online dating where everyone is working with limited, self-presented information. It becomes easier to keep people at a distance than deal with the possibility of not living up to what other people want you to be.
“Like a pet trained to return/But humans are supposed to learn/And change when things are going wrong/I always let it go for way too long”
The “things that are bad for me” in the title is left general in this song, so the listener can fill it in with their own bad habits. The lyric I quoted reminds me of all the holding patterns I let myself get into, especially when I’m unemployed and slacking. I feel worthless because I don’t have a job, which leads to me not applying to jobs because I’m worthless obviously, so why would anyone hire me, and it becomes this self-fulfilling cycle of low-key self-destruction that is certainly bad for me.
Like Green, I know I’m a human and I’m supposed to change when things are going wrong. But it just isn’t that easy, and this album gets that. While relatives and other people tell me “just get a job,” they don’t recognize how difficult it can be to break out of these negative cycles and routines, especially once they’ve accumulated over a period of time. I Want to Grow Up recognizes that these are real problems while also not ignoring the “first-world” aspect of them — I feel privileged that these are the only problems I need to deal with, but that only makes it more frustrating when it’s difficult to overcome them because it seems easy for everyone else.
“There’s an energy inside my brain/set to self-depreciate/some kind of anxiety/makes me do things that I know are bad for me”
Part one was about recognizing her own bad habits; part two is about what causes them. As someone who often struggles with tasks that others seem to find easy, I can’t help but wonder sometimes: why am I like this? Why do I keep doing these things I know are bad? Why can’t I be normal?
“Things That Are Bad For Me (pt. 2)” is where the album starts to really gel into a cohesive story. So far, every song has been about these different anxieties and fears and ways to escape from them. This is the one that explains how these problems overlap and connect with each other, like each is a separate thread that combines with the others to make a web that is nearly impossible to escape from.
Something I mentioned in my first post about this album was the feeling of not being able to stack up with your peers. This issue is exacerbated now by social media which quantifies “success” in a very narrow way: with numbers of friends, likes, etc that serve as easy comparisons to others. If your numbers are lower, it’s hard not to feel “worse” and wonder how some people make life look so easy.
The big pressure that comes from this feeling is to conform, to be like everyone else that is perceived to be more successful than you. “Some People,” especially the second verse, painfully expresses this feeling, as Green lists a litany of things she could do to try to fit in: dye her hair, drink alcohol, wear more makeup. When being yourself doesn’t seem like it’s good enough, it’s hard to resist the temptation to join the herd.
“I think about the future/about society/it’s all so overwhelming/it makes me grind my teeth and cry”
I’ve semi-jokingly called Green “the voice of our generation” based on how this album sums up so many fears and anxieties of millennials. “Grind My Teeth” is the first time she looks outward and mentions bigger fears, about the future, society, and “our generation failing.” On an album obsessed with personal anxieties and shortcomings, this song serves as a reminder that there are big things to worry about too, like how we’re all screwed and everything sucks. Just in case things were getting too easy for you.
“Don’t want to be scared/I’ve got to see what’s out there/Lately I’ve become aware/That I can do whatever I want”
I finally got my driver’s license in January this year at age 25. Driving is still scary, but one thing I instantly gravitated towards was getting to listen to music in the car, which lived up to all the hype I had heard about it. I Want to Grow Up was released a month or two later and quickly became my go-to car album, soundtracking many of my commutes to my job I didn’t really like with its simple guitar-driven rock sounding pretty good with the windows rolled down (my car’s AC doesn’t work).
The weirdest adjustment to finally driving has been realizing that I can just… do things. For a long time, while everyone else was able to get around and live their lives easily, I was still always dependent on others to drive me or get me things. I got used to not doing much socially because I would need to get a ride and it was a whole hassle not worth dealing with. The feeling that I can now do “whatever I want” is hard to grasp, and I still haven’t fully capitalized on it because it’s kind of scary to have so many options suddenly at your fingertips that weren’t there before.
I suspect “Whatever Your Want” is not about Green getting her driver’s license, but it has that same feeling of beginning to gain independence and realizing that you don’t need to hold yourself back anymore. It’s an optimistic note for the album to end on, but it doesn’t feel cheap or like it supersedes what the rest of the album is about. Instead, the most powerful part is it’s about Green reaffirming her individuality despite all the pressure to conform (as heard in “Some People”), and recognizing that you can only be yourself, even if it sometimes feels like “yourself” isn’t good enough for the rest of the world. And that’s okay. Because eventually, with enough little baby steps, you can create a world of your own that is just as good as everyone else’s.
The Noise Made By People 