SRSLY?
First off, I hate the term "indie." I think it's a cop-out, and I never describe the music I listen to as that, unless someone is completely clueless when I try to explain it in other terms. And secondly: wow, you know it can't be good when you start a post off with a picture of Fall Out Boy. But I just did, and I'm not ashamed of it.
I was driving home today, saw a guy wearing jean shorts down to his ankles, and a very over-sized shirt. I thought "wow, that could've been me." I even uh...came out?...this summer, and basically remembered that just over 3 years ago I was hard into rap and hip-hop, even with the underground stuff (Papoose anyone?...anyone?) - though no mixtape maniac or anything. I liked the stuff. I had an iPod full of Dipset, Juelz Santana, Jay-Z, Fort Minor, T-Pain, Kanye West, Three Six Mafia, Timbaland, The Game, Fat Joe, Young Jeezy...basically anything that was hot at the time, I had it. Oh, and all the remixes too.
I dressed a bit like it too. Not too much, but I certainly had bigger shirts and baggier jeans than a kid of my stature really needed. I rocked the sneakers. I tried the hat thing, but it just wasn't me...at all. And I had a chinstrap. Boy did I have a lot of ghetto chinstraps.
Anyways, I kept driving, and thanked God I wasn't still like that. But then I wondered...why did I ever stop being like that? What was the turning point? And I thought about it, and luckily, it only took a minute or two. It wasn't the fact I was starting university soon. It wasn't even that I had a girlfriend around that time. It was: Fall Out Boy. Yes, part of the reason I'm even here blogging about my favorite alternative music is the widely-despised, oft-crushed-on, Ashlee Simpson-marrying Fall Out Boy. Even worse, it's actually Ryan Seacrest's fault.
You see, one day, years ago, I was in the car, and "American Top 40 with Ryan Seacrest" was on. I was a big Top 40 and radio guy back then (still a radio guy now to a degree), so I listened intently. And when Seacrest debuted "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race," I was wowed. It was so different from everything I was used to. It was upbeat, it had catchy lyrics, and it had that same kind of swagger rap did, but in an entirely different way. I'm not even sure they could swagger at all really given how tight their pants were.
I went out and got their album Infinity On High and put that thing on damn near repeat for months straight. None of my friends liked it. My best friend couldn't even get through one song without giving me a disproving stare...and she was a girl. My younger sister was the only one who shared any kind of semblance of my appreciation for FOB, and that was from me introducing them to her, not by any volition of her own. The songs were fun and were rock-ish, without the jock-rock feel of Nickelback or the stuffiness of the classic rock so prevalent on the radio here. The lyrics were full of the same wordplay hip-hop employed so well, but without the proliferation of swearing and beefing. I was probably in musical heaven; of the 13 songs on that album, I didn't like 3 - that's it. The rest I could play for days on end, and did.
I'd always heard of Fall Out Boy, but wrote them off, for probably the same reasons many others do. But I embraced them with Infinity On High, and even took a liking to some of their older tunes. This post really isn't about FOB (though it seems like that, doesn't it?), but moreso what they did for me in the bigger picture. They played a brand of accessible, slightly-creative, maintstream pop-punk, with a little bit of alternative thrown in there - after all, Pete Wentz did come out of the Chicago hardcore scene. It was the perfect entry for me into alternative rock, which only fueled my desire to delve deeper into that alt/indie world. All told now, I have 32 FOB songs in my iTunes; no huge number, and I'm certainly not as impressed with recent Folie A Deux as I was with Infinity On High, but I still remain a fan.
From there though, I moved on to Joel Plaskett (my sister returning the musical recommendation favour), Foo Fighters, City & Colour, a bit of Red Hot Chili Pepppers, some Velvet Revolver, radio-friendly The Fray, a sprinkle of The White Stripes, My Chemical Romance, The Strokes, one great Silversun Pickups tune...the list goes on, and that's just from tracking the "Date Added" on my iTunes. Of course, there was an unfortunate run-in, on recommendation, with drum 'n' bass (think Massive Attack and Sneaker Pimps), but it was brief. The rap was still mixed in there, because I wasn't entirely converted yet, and I still liked the occasional banger here and there.
Does It Offend You, Yeah? was certainly one group that intrigued me along the way. Rock riffs and electro bounce? I was sold on them right away, and a big part of that was the now-defunct Indie 103.1 from Orange County, California. Rolling Stone named them the top alternative music station in the States, and because they were readily available on iTunes radio, I was hooked. Even now no radio even approaching that content exists here, and when they went off the air earlier this year, I was crushed.
The summer of 2008 was a huge turning point for me though. Justice, Rilo Kiley, Portishead, Santogold, Vampire Weekend...and Radiohead. Hell, my jazz-loving, vinyl-obsessed uncle even told me Radiohead was an all-world act nearly 2 or 3 years before, and I hadn't paid him any mind. Again, it was my sister who got ahead of the curve here, with the help of her boyfriend getting her onto In Rainbows. I was hesitant at first, especially given the fact the first song she showed me was "All I Need," a tune I still don't bother listening to.
But the CD was in the car, and on my trips to and from work that summer, I played the thing front to back, on random, over and over until...well, I never really got sick of it, which was the beauty. It was the perfect album: docile when you were feeling mellow (perfect for the days you get fired from the above job and have to drive home and think of what to tell your parents), upbeat when you needed something to amp you up a bit, and a perfect wind-down overall for after a night on the town. If Fall Out Boy was like that first time you started noticing girls, Radiohead was like your first great girlfriend.
So after that, I was set. I started hating rap (with a passion sometimes, and it certainly didn't hurt that this was all coming during Jay-Z's ill-advised comeback albums and Nas' self-proclamation of hip-hop's death), but could still stand a bit of the better, hipper side of that scene. Kanye West was obviously still in rotation.
One of the biggest factors that summer was an amazing girl I met through a mutual friend. In her, I finally found someone who liked the same music, plus so much other stuff I'd never heard that I really missed out on. There were concerts - Tokyo Police Club was an early favorite, and the first time I saw The Weakerthans was that summer - and there were iPod-fueled musical showcases of "here you have to listen to this" proportions.
So definitively, though that musical transformation may have begun in spring of 2007 with the haphazard Fall Out Boy listen, it really all came around more than a year later, when I can say MGMT made my summer, Kings of Leon put the rock in it, and Radiohead filled the space in between. If I were to take this even further, a well-advised viewing that summer of the somber Control really piqued my interest in Joy Division and all the historical roots of current alternative music. One of my ongoing endeavours is to really understand how music got to where it is now, to take that old adage "you don't know where you're going until you know where you've been" and apply it to the best of my abilities to music. That process certainly involves lots of Wikipedia-aided research, Pitchfork articles, and "did you know"s, but in my eyes, it's all worth it.
So what's this all mean? Well, it's an excuse to post what might still be my favorite Fall Out Boy song ever:
Posts
1 comment:
JACK, it took me two days to read this.
Post a Comment