You may have already seen this debate unfold, but we’re going to reiterate and add our own opinion because we feel somewhat obliged.
Basically, Guardian writer Ben Beaumont-Thomas wrote this piece challenging the “US music blogosphere” for its recent drift toward apolitical navel-gazing. He cites nostalgia-inducing acts like Ducktails, Pearl Harbor, Beach House et al. as “utterly outside the city… outside the America of healthcare debates and ongoing wars,” reducing them to “lo-fi hipster slackers.” He also claims that life in post-Bush America has distilled into a satisfied tedium, with our widespread hope and investment in the new President replacing a so-called rage against the machine. Beaumont-Thomas certainly has a point to make, and his dissatisfaction comes from somewhere we can all appreciate. He wants art that inspires action, to be not only self-directed but also conscious of its role in the wider cultural context. It’s worth noting, too, how familiar he seems to be with the “scene” he’s criticizing. This is not some knee-jerk missive written by a radio pop glutton.
In response, ChocolateBoka delivered an equally eloquent and heartfelt post focusing on Julian Lynch as an example of noble countercultural behavior. McGregor makes several important points: firstly, that music that becomes too aware of its own political edge is often counter-intuitive and redundant; secondly, that constructing an imaginary “new world” via lo-fi technologies, etc. is equally (or more) important than deconstructing the flaws of the world in which we’re already living. Rather than echoing the tired rhetoric of past generations, he argues that we should build from the ground up, using whatever cherished qualities we feel the mainstream has forgotten. This would be an inherently political act, subverting the current order by suggesting a viable and comprehensive alternative.
The first thing I want to add to this is that musicians aren’t obligated by profession alone to make political statements. Beaumont-Thomas begins his article under this assumption, allowing his other points to blossom out of it, and it’s simply not a reasonable expectation. There’s a plurality of reasons why someone might begin writing music; political righteousness is just one of them. Also implicit with this assumption is the idea that unhappiness and paranoia are the status quo for these musicians, that their brand of pleasantry is an avoidance tactic. After all, we live in Orwell’s Modern World, and because our nations are riddled with systemic inequality, it’s simply not possible for us to experience enough bliss to generate an album’s worth of melody. Well, no. He fails to consider that Pearl Harbor’s “beautifully lilting” songs might reflect their actual life experience, less “bitter rejection” than direct evocation.
Furthermore, I think he misses the obvious fact that politics embed themselves in content and production despite whatever dreamlike veneer adorns them. Using outmoded technology is inherently political, just as likely to bristle a casual listener as some facile words about Occidental guilt. There are two fundamental elements to pop music, and lyrics are the lesser in importance. Which would you feel more comfortable playing for a pop-loving friend: Lily Allen’s embarrassing anti-Bush testimony “Fuck You,” or Ducktails’ hypnotic “Deck Observatory”? If you chose the latter, we have very different friends. (Witness the recent shockwave the iTunes community felt when Beach House’s “Norway” was chosen as Free Single of the Week.) As ChocolateBobka implies, the average listener is less likely to internalize political angst when it’s plainly articulated, plugged into a glossy formula. We’re unfazed. We’ve heard it before.
On the level of lyrics, the unusual and often intelligent ways in which these artists address basic feelings is, again, something that renders their music political regardless of intention. Take Beach House’s “Lover of Mine,” whose second verse opens with “Need more people to be satisfied / No fear of a God and a prayer for the night.” It’s just a love song, yes, but in its simplicity it implies a cultural hunger and flight from religion that astutely speaks to our modern condition. Things become more provocative still when we can’t even discern specific lyrics; many bands have taken to drowning out their words with reverb so that we hear only their wailing melodies, ghostly voices floating above the fray. The listener feels the world ache, but has to identify and address the problem for himself. It’s an unsettling and useful tactic, opening our experience of the music to include outside input (often political in nature) that might otherwise seem immaterial. We choose our own adventure.
Like Pitchfork, we can refer to James Murphy’s prescient lyric “Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s” (LCD Soundsystem’s 2002 “Losing My Edge”) in summarizing this case. This strain of music is less about nostalgia for an actual time and place than it is for something that never actually existed. What this really makes it is conjecture, futurism; it’s been mislabeled. Though there’s something inherent to the genre that recalls melancholic, sepia-washed memories, I’d argue that it’s very much a masterplan for what life could be — rather than what life already has been. Perhaps this is why we find something unshakably moving in these artists’ appropriation of old technologies: they’re intimating a hazy future whose sound isn’t necessarily divorced from our past.
