"My Chemical Romance is this generation's Nirvana"

"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.

No, not OTM. I'm 25 and I still listen to a lot of the music I liked when I was 16. Or am I missing the point?

BTW, I'm Not Okay (I Promise) is one of the greatest complaint rock songs in history and it manages to have a sense of humour as well.

FUCK OFFS!

when i was 16 one of my favourite albums was the miseducation of lauryn hill and i still listen to it, but not as much as i did. another of my favourite albums from then, boys for pele, i hardly listen to at all now, though i'll still defend it.

i don't think this in any way means that my love for those songs (and by proxy the band responsible for them) is less than that of a new order crate-digging obsessive, or that i'm less qualified to talk about them. and i'm pretty disgusted by the assertion that one can only have genuine feeling for the music if you've sat up all night alone with it. fucking indie kids.

i feel that privileging the "doing of one's homework", as if one's love of music can only be fully realised by approaching it as if it was an exam, is spectacularly wrong-headed.

but don't you think it is if you are basing your whole identity on the 'fact' that you are someone who, you know, does that homework? i mean, what's the difference between sarah's solicitation of chris' shoegaze list so she can put it in her book and look informed, or at least hip to the genres that the bands in the 9 pm slots at the mercury lounge are biting, and jonah goldberg's solicitiation of his readers' explanations of laws so he can put it in his book and look informed?

chris said pretty clearly that knowing about bands is neither required, nor inherently cool, but the problem is that sarah bases her whole identity on the 'fact' that she is discovering bands like louis xiv, mcr, etc. -- and then she hypes them to the moon, and name-drops certain 'trigger' acts to get the attention of, yeah, people like us. not to take the homework analogy too far, but there's definitely an amount of cheating going on there. do people buy it? i don't know. the world of blog comments is not exactly a scientific measure.

her f-list 'celebrity,' fleeting and blog-echo-chambery as it is, is sort of perfect for the gawker media/vh1-talking-head age -- 'we'll show you this item of popculture, please react to it on-the-spot and we'll totally put a chyron of your latest project under your face, we promise.' as long as she can babble on for long enough and keep up a good face, she's going to have her little slot as a faux expert sewn up.

I really don't think that someone who loved, say Joy Division, from the age of 16 is necessarily more credible than anyone who started listening at 23, other than the chance for reflection and the perspective that time allows. It's that annoying tendency to treat knowledge as some sort of credibility while obscuring your source ("Oh yeah, I've always listened to them," etc.) that really differentiates people who like music from people who think they can use it as social currency.

(Music Reviewer): This new band Y really sounds like old songs from X.
(Scene Kid listening to band Y): I have loved band X forever!

but don't you think it is if you are basing your whole identity on the 'fact' that you are someone who, you know, does that homework?

yeah, that's lame, but kind of DOUBLE lame - firstly for the lying/cheating and so on, though if this is what she does it's not as if she's anything like the only one among music hacks. but even if she HAD done her homework, had lived and breathed those bands she claims to love, and was trading off that - that's lame as well! unless she can write really, really well, and if you can do that you don't need to trade off anything else. (what, incidentally, makes people think that she doesn't love them deeply? there are several old bands i love deeply even though i only discovered them through a greatest hits, like, last year.)

but whether Current Song X sounds like Old Song Y is generally the least interesting thing about it - that sort of cross-referencing journalism can be interesting but it shouldn't be a template.

That is a world of difference from hearing a Joy Division song on the net, on the radio, or seeing the video for "LWTUA" on MTV, or reading about another band and finding out they were very into Joy Division, and quietly going about the business of finding out about this band because you like their music. To get to Joy Division from the Unknown Pleasures t-shirt you saw at Urban Outfitters (7 out of 10 kids do not know what that image is, by the way) or as an attempt to ally yourself with the band because of how they're viewed by your peers is vilely insincere.

We are not talking about some 15 year-old kid who doesn't know any better. And that's what you're saying with the "I have liked band X forever" rejoinder - that it's terrible and wrong to shit on someone who's new to something just because you're so invested in it. I completely agree, but for a person in her position, with her history, to post things like "OMG I LUV JOY DIVISION THEY ARE IN MY SOUL" is both shallow and vilely strategic. Stop taking her at her tone, it's a put-on.

or: people note that lots of other people, some of whom they may respect for their cultural knowledge or whatevs, are talking about Old Band X (eg joy div). so OF COURSE they will gravitate towards exploring that band, yeah partly because it's the in-thing but also because they want to hear the music. and if they already know that things which are dark/austere/cool/romantic appeal to them, and joy division seem to be all those things, it'd be kind of counter-intuitive NOT to check them out. basically: i don't see that getting into a band via a chain brand t-shirt is anything to be ashamed of. nor do i think that getting into them because you think it'll make you look cool is necessarily a bad thing, either.

and again, i don't know who this sarah person is, but 99% of arts journalists do things which are shallow and strategic.

Kidding aside, I was referring to people who are technically adults when I said "scene kid." It wasn't meant as a rejoinder at all, I was basically echoing some of your sentiments. I have, in fact, run into people who have claimed a long-term love of bands that they heard of literally a week ago when mentioned in the context of their new interest.

Nice Joy Division book, Chris. I'd ask you, though: If the reading that someone did to decide "..Joy Division seems to be dark and austere and unassailably cool" was from your own book and they walked around passing off knowledge from it without actually listening to the music, how vile is that? I've also heard people do that sort of thing without even being able to hum a few bars.

Don't get me wrong -- I realize you're talking about people who glom onto surface images and use them as some sort of shorthand of credibility. I just think that there is more than one type of misrepresentation that goes on.

But for Dog Latin— No, if you're still listening to exclusively the same music you did when you were 16, that's more likely a deficiency than something to be proud of.

Precisely. Close thread.

No, not OTM. I'm 25 and I still listen to a lot of the music I liked when I was 16. Or am I missing the point?

I enjoyed Nirvana a lot in middle school (92-94), was bored with them in high school, got really into them once again in college, and now post-college they are my favorite band of alltime. They seemed to make more sense to me after my tastes matured, I guess. I think MCR may have the opposite effect.

I think we would all agree that if your musical palate hasn't grown (both deeper and broader) from 16 to 25, then it's a problem. But all the original poster said was that he would still listen to MCR, not that he would only listen to them.

I had never heard of Ultragrrl before this post pointed me to her blog. But generally Chris seems OTM, if we're talking about her (as opposed to her argument). If you read more of her posts, you definitely get the sense that music is on one hand a fashionable accessory to her "beautiful life," and on the other, something that she's used to build/maintain that life.

And, nothing against Lex, I do think there is a difference between the love of New Order that you describe and that of the "crate-digging obsessive." Saying you love New Order because you love Blue Monday, True Faith, and Regret, is different from saying you love New Order and having five albums (or ever just a singles comp). Not that it's wrong, just different.