Encounterculture

From The Vaults

(NOTE: A while back, I went through my ill-advised I Wish To Write phase and threw this together, ostensibly as something to submit to some sort of publication for print [basically I'm trying to avoid saying that I'd probably have ended up submitting it to McSweeney's due to my forceful and profound hate for Dave Eggers, although in my elaborate fantasy I would get greelighted for publication and then revoke my permission to print it. Ah, envy]. I do plan on putting new stuff in this blog at a soon-ish point, but right now my life's kind of going to shit, so you'll have to be satisfied with some Old Hottness for the moment. Don't worry, I'm starting to like Belle & Sebastian an awful goddamn lot, so I'm sure there's some clever self-flagellation coming soon around the bend.)

At this moment, the lyrics "Time to fight the real war/Against racial inequality" are coming over my headphones, and they're pretty representative of both the song and the album that contains them. You would think, of course, that I would be hideously embarassed by such a mealy-mouthed BEPism, but in truth, I'm not, and here's why: the lyric in question comes from the Slackers' most recent album, Close My Eyes.

I will, as long as air continues to cycle through my lungs, give the Slackers an infinite number of chances, because they are one of the few bands to survive my awful awful teenage taste. I'd like to think that a part of the reason for both my notoriously catholic musical tastes and my dispiritingly forthright enthusiasm for a lot of stuff that gets me into trouble a little while down the road is due in part to how legitimately terrible my taste in music was when I was between the ages of, like 13 and 20. To wit:

I still don't know why ska music broke in Durham, North Carolina of all places during my tenure as a high-school student; Chapel Hill has always been the musical maypole for the region and pretty much all they've ever produced is Ben Folds and a whole bunch of shitty shitty pre-emo (premo?), none of which would lead you to expect something like ska music to gain such a foothold. And yet all of a sudden, everyone I knew had the first Regatta 69 album (although they all eventually sold it - its prevalence in local used CD racks rivals the Lo Fidelity All-Stars and the Breeders' in terms of proportionate omnipresence); all of a sudden everyone was talking about Otis Reem and the "satanic ska" stylings of Mephiskaphales (yes, really); all of a sudden everyone was trying to learn the saxophone and scouring local Goodwills for skinny black ties and (oh god oh god oh god) valiantly attempting to figure out skanking. Ska wasn't just a phenomenon; it was practically a tangible form of cultural currency among my set. Legends were born, most famously that of our friend Wesley telling everyone that Regatta 69 was going to play a show at Captured Live, only for everyone who showed up to discover exactly how deep Wesley's notorious gift for pointlessly-employed fiction could run. For a little while, ska really was happening in my hometown, as you could gigantic bands like the Toasters and the Pietasters and the Skatalites and Laurel Aitkin making Cat's Cradle a necessity on their tours.

Then ska died, and although I'm not really %100 on how it happened (at the time, it just seemed to be one of those amicable falling-out-of-love situations), I have my guesses. You may be thinking that it's all due to all those pop-ska bands - No Doubt and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish and etc. - rising to the surface like a swamp gas burp, but you'd be wrong; yes it was embarassing to suddenly hear the Young Life kids start talking abhout how they'd always loved The Ska Music ever since that "I'm Just A Girl" song came out, but considering that they'd then go right back to talking about Garth Brooks a tacit conclusion was pretty much reached that those bands weren't doing anything world-changing anyway. No, ska was killed by hip-hop music; Biggie really did break down a lot of doors with his unavoidable talent (even though yes, back then I had committed myself to hating it), and by the time my friend Jared (who wore a suit to school for nearly a year and a half to visually demonstrate his commitment to being a rudeboy) bought the Wu-Tang Killer Bees album used at Disc-Go-Round (and I wish he'd picked a cooler, more credible album to make The Leap with, something like Things Fall Apart or Reasonable Doubt, but historical facts are what they are), the damage had been done; the backbeat and horn section had been phased out in favor of the sample and the chest-crushing bass hit. I wish I could attribute the shift to something interesting, like drugs (although both ska and hip-hop had well-established pot cultures, not an insignificant factor) or rebellion (although both ska and hip-hop sounded nothing like what our parents listened to, until of course we got to college and discovered Napster and realized that maybe this jazz stuff and this soul music stuff had a little bit of influence), but if I'm honest, my best guess is that we all realized that the hottest girls didn't give a Fuck about Authentic Ska Music; they either liked killer beats (the proto-sorostitute set) or they liked painfully earnest, typically mopey pop (the theatrical Sylvia-Plath-poems-copied-on-the-soles-of-their-shoes set, although a few of them liked poppy punk like NOFX and Limp too) or we didn't much care. Laugh if you must, but again, you have to look at history right to learn anything from it; besides, it makes the eighteen-month lifespan of musical revolutions so much easier to understand if you keep in mind that it probably takes the scene's vanguards about eighteen months to fuck all the girls worth fucking.

And then, all of a sudden, we were confronted with all of the shit we'd accumulated over the course of the last few years, and it really wasn't pretty. When a musical split is in the process of occurring around you, and doubly so when it seems like you've got a chance to be right there at the front of it, which I have to admit that I did, you tend to lose your mind and start taking ridiculous chances. Thus, as I started slotting albums like The Bends and, yes, Wyclef Jean's The Carnival (again, being a pop music slut rarely belies consistently good taste) into my CD racks, I started to wonder what exactly the fuck I had been thinking when I'd bought a lot of this shit. All those goddamn Moon Ska compilations! Was Skinnerbox's music really worth having a CD in my collection with cover art of a woman fucking a dog? Did I ever listen to more than three tracks off a Skarmageddon double-disc set? Could two good songs and a still-active completist impulse really keep the first two CDs that the Pietasters put out on Hellcat in the racks? Were the Skatalites really worth listening to if you wanted to hear good music as opposed to instruments being played very, very, very well? Discovering exactly how stupid you can be - that's a real confidence-killer if you get it when you're young, and I suspect that a lot of Led Zepplin and Pink Floyd albums have been unfortunately kept from their rightful place in used CD bins due to a commitment to keeping that realization away. All of a sudden you have nowhere to go - you used to be able to judge whether a CD was worth buying if King Django was on a track since that guy made some real fuckin' ska music; now you don't give a fuck about ska music and you're standing there in the record store trying to figure out which magazine's review section is pointing you in the right direction.

But the Slackers always survived. Unlike most ska bands, I never heard their music as distinctively having a purpose; so much ska music was either propulsive dance music or, for lack of a better descriptor, psychedelia for kids who hadn't discovered acid yet, but the Slackers weren't like that. For one, they didn't seem to be making music for today, which is a rare find indeed among bands who, let's face it, were riding high on the wave of a trend; instead they seemed to be making music designed to ease the culture shock for people who'd been in cryogenic deep freeze since 1958, and while that may not sound all that impressive now, when you're seventeen and trying to reach a conclusion about whether or not there are any objective standards of "good" and "bad", it's enormously helpful to see people connect to stuff that came around years before you and make great, great stuff as a result. And the Slackers really did make amazingly great music, pretty much by any standards - songs like "Sarah" and "The Question" pretty much never left the rotation once we discovered them, and their first album, Better Late than Never, was pretty much my favorite album ever made (and still places pretty high if I'm being candid), and then they'd write these achingly beautiful songs like "Come Back Baby" which must have made it onto every mixtape that I ever made for girls in high school (again, I never laid any claims to subtlety or tact). And they all - ALL - knew how to play; there were like five hundred members and I could probably wax rhapsodic about all of them, and then just when I get done convincing you that, say, Dave Hillyard or Luis Icouldneverrememberhislastname were the greatest musicians ever, you'd throw on "Run Away" and find yourself stunned by Vic Ruggiero's magnificently oversmoked voice, probably my favorite voice of any singer that I've been alive for. The Slackers, in short, were never in any danger of receding into the past with your Selecters and Scofflaws and even the Toasters, because unlike all of those bands I thought of the Slackers as music first and ska music second.

And then, in 2000, they put out Wasted Days, their fourth full-length album, and I fucking hated it, or rather, I wasn't interested even a little bit. When I'd seen them live earlier that year (and yes it's significant that they were the first concert I ever went to in LA), a lot of their stuff sounded...different, more musically diverse, more musically accomplished, but less...well, less ska, if I'm being honest about it, and all of a sudden I rebelled because I WANTED THE GODDAMN SLACKERS TO PLAY SKA FUCKING GODDAMN MUSIC GODDAMMIT. I'm fully prepared to admit that genres of music are by nature artificial, that if it weren't for scheming record store colluders and snarky music publications and what-have-you there wouldn't be even a little bit of stigma about picking up a Gram Parsons album and a Lil' Jon single when you go in to look for a copy of Redlight to replace the one that you scratched to death by playing it so much, but God almighty, have human beings done nothing worth finding comfort in? Is the drive to prove yourself an individual so overpowering that you can't maybe enjoy something content to bend rules instead of break them? Is there no pleasure to be found in memories like riding around with Cesar and Jared in Jared's much-missed Mustang, getting high, talking about how much Durham sucks (something all of us recant on every occasion these days when we're all back in town), and singing along with "Mama, some old man is lookin' at your baby/And your baby, she's lookin' good..."? If the cutting edge means giving all that up, well, good thing I gave up all pretenses of being a trendsetter a long time ago, because that's worth way more than beating everyone else to the Shins and Trail of Dead. I mean, most of the songs on Wasted Days were friggin' rockabilly, and when you want to hear good ol' ska music, hearing the rockabilly sound is like seeing the foot swinging right at your nuts. I have made many, many mistakes in my life regarding music, and I always try to be forthright and accept the embarassment that I'm due(example: "Yeah I owned Spacehog's first album, and I loved it momentarily"), but forsaking the Slackers at that moment never, ever, ever felt like one of them.

But sometime last year, I remember driving around LA after graduating - I want to say that I specifically remember driving back from going to check out the apartment where I saw three people getting arrested right outside, but my memory's not clear enough to be conclusive - and suddenly the Slackers weren't leaving my stereo. All of a sudden, I was luxuriating in the instrumentals that opened and concluded Better Late than Never, and Doreen Murray's voice on "Our Day Will Come" had me wishing I was talented enough to write a screenplay of some sort just to include that song, and "Sarah" - oh, forGET it; it was still the motherfucking shit. Just like, as I soon found out, Redlight still was, and The Question, and, once I eventually decided to abandon all hope and subject my opinions to the possibility of change (an act which has only lead to pleasure for me since), Wasted Days, which actually is a cool little album now that I'm not so stupid. I'd just been asking for the wrong thing; I think that I'd wanted a reflex test to see if I could still react to ska music like I had when I was, what, two years younger (James Cobo: Forty-year-old man since 1981), and in that sense, I just got denied. But the Slackers were still the Slackers, irrevocably and unmistakably so, and God only knows that what they did was still something I wanted to hear; they still swung like they always did, they still used the same kinds of simple metaphors in their lyrics that they always had, Vic was still Vic - it was the same band doing new songs, and I was just stupid, and that's all there is to it.

My inner prose stylist desperately wants to connect this to some greater lesson, preferably one about the pleasure to be gained from re-examining your judgmement calls, but I can't find a way to write it because it isn't true; I like the Slackers in exactly the same way that I did in high school, albeit not as intensely, and that's really where I win. The carrot dangling from the stick of diving headfirst into culture by searching out things like good bands and movies and books is the promise of that electric sensory rush, but after a while, that sensation gets commoditized and you're Robert Christgau. I mean, think back to high school; the first few girls who you really fell ass over teakettle for, the ones who you stayed up nights torturing yourselves over their matchless beauty or effotless grace or whatever - how many of them did you end up with? Or, if you're really lucky, how many of them did you end up with for a good, long while? And here's the big one - would you be happier, right now, if you did?

Right now I am twenty-three years old, and while that may not seem very old to you, I can already tell that it's the beginning of the part of your life where you can't be a fuckup anymore, and as someone who's vigorously waved the fuckup flag with pride for a good long while, it's not an easy transition to make. The problem is that you've basically got to pull the ways that you fix your life out of your ass, since you realize that even people like Nick Hornby - great writer, truthful writer, helpful writer though he may be - aren't really talking about your life, they're talking about theirs and what they've experienced, and that if you look to their sentimentalized pasts or their present opinions, you're going to end up as someone that I'm going to want to kill. So you look at your own past, and if you aim for honesty it doesn't take very long before you start noticing all the really, really stupid awful embarassing stuff, and at a certain point I can't avoid denying that ska music was one of those things, especially when I try to look at it objectively instead of just in terms of being something I listened to with my friends. (Even today, I'm gun-shy about jumping into praising genres for fear of dredging up the memory of my mom point-blank asking me what ska music is. If you ever have a kid and want them to hate you very intensely for a second, ask them to describe something in which they place a lot of value). But in every life, there's got to be some good, and if I ever need a reason to love the Slackers, it's due in large part to the fact that they came from that rather than from some pseudointellectual aesthetic judgement. Plenty of music, after all, is all about the promise of a better or cooler life, and usually it's not hard to pick that stuff out. But the stuff that's actually about how you've got a good life right now, that's much harder to find, and in the end, it's much much much much much better.