"My Chemical Romance is this generation's Nirvana"

xpost— Mark OTeponymous.

Of course, what do I know? I'm now the 35-year-old, so I'm hopelessly out of touch, right? But when I look back at my writing at 22 or 23 -- even my Kurt Cobain interview for a NYC magazine called New Route -- I cringe at its hyperbole. Today's music journos most definitely should stay respectful and plugged into music for "the kids." But they shouldn't be panicking about pandering to 16-year-olds who worship My Chemical Romance at Myspace -- at least if they're interested in writing for people who actually READ. And MCR's situation is NOT up for debate as was argued a dozen posts up. Comparing My Chemical Romance's cultural impact to Nirvana's is utterly laughable.

-- scott seward

Have you heard From the Muddy Banks of the Wiskah?

trent reznor has proven to be way more influential than just about anyone

Oh heck yes.

Maybe it was someone from the Roots.

1991 didn't happen in a vaccuum.

otmfm

(ps: destroy nyc)

"Well..."

"Wrong! They are, and you're a fool to argue!"

(As a sidenote, right after Cobain killed himself, my gramma heard Heart Shaped Box and declared that his voice wasn't going to last to 30 if he kept singing like that... 'Least of his problems, gramma.')

It's hard to bargle naudle zauss with all these marbles in my mouth...

http://www.shirt66.de/images/products/98009.jpg

I write this at someone who bought into the myth of Nirvana's exceptionalism at the time. I remember 1991 very well, and Nirvana's breakthrough did seem like a watershed moment to me at the time - but the more I think about, the more it seems like a watershed in terms of subcultures and scenes than it does in terms of music. Bands are being plucked from little subcultures and thrust onto the national charts all the time, but unless you are a part of that little subculture, this usually doesn't seem too remarkable. I think this is what physicists call the "anthropocentric principle". Nirvana seemed like a watershed moment to me because they came from a little scene that I happened to be plugged into, not because they really changed music that much.

oh, andrew, we sure can.
and if yr still listening to the same thing when yr in yr 20's as you did when you were 16, then you probably deserve to still be listening to MCR...
sorry, but what about drug abuse again??

OTM.

This MCR post is the clearest evidence yet that Sarah is willing to champion the tastes of whatever audience she has, so she can feel like she represents something more than she actually is. And not surprisingly, the audience she attracts is young, impressionable, and desperate to find an easily-defined social construct that allows them to feel part of something. Music genres were always that sort of construct, but blogs have turned them into cheap condos. If you see someone you want to be, hear a song you want to hear again ("How do you start, where do you go, who do you need to know..."), blogs are both the blueprint and in cases like Sarah's (Misshapes etc.) the roadmap to actually participating in the fantasy. Which would be great if everyone was 16 and honest and passionate and nobody was taking home half the bar and the door and telling people at major corporations they've really got a solid alpha-adopting demo under their thumb. But they are. This is New York City. Wake up.

When I first met Sarah, I think she was 23. I was 27. She did not know that New Order and Joy Division were related in any way. In the last year she has tried to tell people her "record label" (which has not amounted to anything, and won't) is named after a Joy Division song, and that she is deeply connected with their music - it's the same reductive Goth worship of Ian Curtis so many have fallen for. But Sarah's is not a geniune depth of feeling borne of burning their music into her mind alone at night when no one knows - it is the attempted cooption of the gravity she has discovered this music holds for so many others, the gravity associated with Joy Division. In short, she wants to be taken so seriously - at least as seriously as the stuffy 35 year-olds writing for other 35 year-olds...

I knew and breathed the relationship between New Order and Joy Division before I even turned 16, because music was important to me, and I wanted to know as much as I could about it. Because I wanted to talk about it with older, wiser people, and absorb as much of their knowledge as I could. Because I didn't want to ever end up looking like an idiot when someone asked me if I'd heard of this band or the other. Which is really a sad admission in a way. It's not a prequisite to know about bands, nor is it inherently cool. It's certainly nothing to base your self-confidence on, but the point is: Sarah does base her self-confidence on trading band names, without doing her homework. That is an untenable incongruity, especially at her age.

She wants the attention, the credibility and the authority she has always envied (cf. her sycophantic relationship with mentor Marc Spitz and redefining, Toni Basil hyperbole for every third band she sees in concert). She wants to be convincing, to enforce her taste (MCR = Nirvana, The OohLalalas are the future of music), and, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, walks around imbued with a sense of pride and/or ownsership over the success of a band she mentioned/got drunk with/texted once, or a slang word she tried so casually to insert in some post (Julianne Shepherd, here's looking at you). But there is nothing to support her opinions. They are billboards.

Like every other half-assed blog scenester out there, she carries her stats in her back pocket - "This many people love me." But she takes no responsibility for her failures, self-contradicitions, or her complicity in the promotional cycle she is so deeply and willingly embedded within, instead ignoring and deflecting those "icky bad thoughts" as cynicism and stagnation, barreling toward a brick wall with constant positivity and occasional "A Very Special Ultragrrrl" emo posts about the time the guy from Elkland crashed on her floor (OMG he was supercutetastichotttnesszz).

The harshest illustration that there was indeed an ordinary, unseemly face behind her rah-rah mask was when Sarah had her roommate IM me asking for a Top Ten Shoegaze songs, for her worthless iPod cash-in book. She didn't know anything about the genre and was too embarrassed to ask me herself (or worse, thought her roommate would have more pull with me). I declined to assist. I can't imagine what that list looks like, if it made it into the book.

(And for the record, Nirvana were the singlemost important mainstream rock band since the Sex Pistols, and just like the Sex Pistols, it had almost nothing to do with their music).

I was trying to pinpoint why the Ultragrrl phenomenon is so irritating to me, and this sums it up beautifully. I keep meeting 20somethings of both sexes whose music knowledge seems to exist for the sole purpose of bluffing one's way through a party conversation, and that's just fucking sad.