Encounterculture

Things I Learned About Rock from the Cool People (or: Since We Last Spoke)

1. LCD Soundsystem @ the Echo, 10/28

So there I was. We (David & I) had shown up ass-early and started in on the Jack & Cokes with little hesitation or reprieve; following a truly shitty opening “band” (Los Angeles seems to be overflowing with shitty electroclash outfits stuffed to the gills with atonal screaming about boypussy, so I forget exactly which one we had to endure), we’d found ourselves in the company of a charming/cute/cool as fuck chick named Vivian. So we spent the second band out in the Smoker’s Pen out back, slam-commentating on the Killers and Mogwai and the looming, then-undecided election. We made it back inside right as some band was laying down a very familiar beat, and before I knew it, I was coming face to face with the delicious irony of the lyrics “Nobody’s coming undone/Everybody here’s afraid of fun”. We made our way up to the front of the stage, where David broke off and ran straight up for the pit while Vivian and I stayed right up by the drummer. And although I don’t quite have a rock-solid timeline or set list, I can definitely say that it was sometime in between “Give It Up” and “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” that I had to lean over to Vivian and say “Sweet Jesus, I am *exactly* where I’m supposed to be.”

How good were LCD Soundsystem live? I can’t really give you an explanation. I have give you three.

- A: They were so good that I sang. Loudly. And badly. But mostly loudly.
- B: They were so good that I danced. A lot. (Also, they were so good that I didn’t have to sit there figuring out what to do with my hands.)
- C: They were so good that, after the show, upon seeing James Murphy taking down the set, I had to torch my castle of I Am Not A Starfucker which has sheltered me well these last twenty-three years. And I mean motherfucking torched it, in true Dean Rasmussen at Wrestleforce America fashion. Naturally I don’t have an exact transcript, but it pretty much went like this:

Me: HOLY SHIT YOU’RE JAMES MURPHY THAT WAS INCREDIBLE I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW INCREDIBLE THAT WAS HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT
Poor James Murphy: Uh, cool, thanks.
Me: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW AWESOME THAT WAS
Poor James Murphy: Cool. What’s your name?
Me: JAMES. UH, JAMES COBO. I MEAN SERIOUSLY –
Poor James Murphy: Hey, cool, me too.
Me: I’VE BEEN WAITING TO SEE YOU GUYS SINCE COACHELLA
Poor James Murphy: Yeah, that was pretty fun
Me: I MEAN I DIDN’T GET TO GO BECAUSE I’M STUPID. BUT I’VE BEEN DOWNLOADING ALL THE LIVE STUFF I CAN FIND OFF THE INTERNET. SOULSEEK. THE INTERNET
Poor James Murphy. Uh, what?
Me: YOU KNOW, YOUR GIGS IN PARIS AND SHIT. DUDE, IT WAS SOOOOOOOO EXACTLY AS AWESOME AS I WAS EXPECTING
Poor James Murphy: Cool, thanks man.

Sure, sure, laugh at the drunken idjit – this is why I write about stuff in the first place. But, and I accept full consequences for saying this, I was there. I saw a room full of scraggly betruckerhatted hipsters who looked seriously allergic to a good time just Lose. Their. Shit. I heard the sounds of record store cash registers ringing in the morning to the tune of newly-sold copies of Nilsson Schmilsson due to LCD’s jaw-dropping cover of “Jump into the Fire”. I all of a sudden got what the big deal was with “Yeah”. I saw that at one point in time, Can had t-shirts printed up (due to Mr. Murphy’s possession of one. To cop a Peel, if hero worship were sex, James Murphy would be pregnant with like ten thousand of my babies). I saw through time back to what it must have been like when people first heard – no, saw – the Stooges live, and yes, that’s the comparison with which I plan on saddling LCD Soundsystem through to the bitter end. OF MY LIFE.

I saw the rockingest show that I’ve ever seen, and that actually kinda covers some ground. It was just the motherfucking best.

2. Les Savy Fav @ the Knitting Factory, 11/13

So I’ve been intermittently blasting Inches, or as I like to call it, Son of Singles Going Steady, for months now, and having seen them live, I can safely say it: They’re kinda overhyped. Yeah, the guy’s a big fat belligerent bearded guy (and yeah he came back out for the encore in a unitard and a dress), and yeah they rock like motherfuckers, and yeah the great songs are reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally great live…but, I mean, that’s it? Didn’t these guys get kicked out of Vegas for fucking shit up? (note: yes they did.) Well then where the hell was that energy – or, I mean, did the band just decide that they weren’t going to pass it on to the audience? Lord knows they were jumping around and, again, the unitard, but it all felt so very arranged, like we were all just waiting around for when shit was REALLY going to go off the format sheet. I couldn’t turn my head from left to right all the way without seeing guys (all guys) standing there looking for all the world what I must have looked like at Franz Ferdinand in June – nodding with INTENSE APPRECIATION and a faraway look in your eyes that only says “I am already at home writing the review of this show on my computer.”

I feel shitty about the above paragraph, because Les Savy Fav really is a kickass band – markedly better, for instance, at exactly whatever it is that Franz Ferdiand and the Futureheads do – and when they were On, evurrbody woke the fuck up and had six great minutes all at once. Please don’t be fooled into thinking that I had a non-great time; it was in fact a rockin’-ass show. Really, though, it’s just that the night was defined less by the music itself than by all the shitty stuff which the music wasn’t able to overcome. Allow me to make sense of this.

The key incident for the night was, to put it broadly, the unaccountable shittiness of the opening band, Smoke And Smoke. (I swear to God I’ve seen some good opening bands. Hell, I paid way too much money to see the Rapture do just that for the expletive deleted CURE back in August.) Basically, imagine the shittiest noise-rock band possible, flea-dip their lead singer in Emo Whinery, and turn the volume up way, way, way too loud, as in to the point where the floor was shaking, and you’re in the neighborhood of shittiness where this band lives. Bands like this are the bane of my existence; I harbor an unshakeable conviction that everybody I know in real life thinks I listen to dull, shitty, unappealing music on purpose simply because that way I can Be Doing Something That Nobody Else Is Doing *Ferocious Indie Snob Glare*. This is of course patently untrue. I like songs with hooks. I like catchy songs. I like songs that are fun. I like songs that make you go crazy. I like songs that require a passion for music that extends beyond the force used to actually make music come out of an instrument. Therefore, when I hear droning bullshit like this, my immediate impulse is to sneak up behind the one Indie Rock Ack-Torrrr trying conspicuously hard to rock out, clock him in the back of the head, and slink away to smoke a cigarette and complain about music. One-third of this actually happened.

But as we were standing outside, in walked The Mystery Girl looking for all the world exactly like Audrey Hepburn dressed up to audition for In The Mood For Love. The rest of the night was basically spent wandering around trying to figure out where exactly she’d gone so that pathetic game could be run upon her, an involved process which took our attention off the second opening band (who were pretty decent – imagine the Stills without that hideous veneer of pride that you only see when an acceptable pop band takes dead aim at rock idols through a Clear Channel night-vision scope) and dictated our positioning within the crowd when Les Savy Fav came up. Nothing, as you might imagine, happened; after the show, someone pulled the fire alarm, and David and I got hung up when he had to pay his tab, and so that happened.

Again, it’s not like Les Savy Fav were anything close to bad, but you’d think that rock should be able to overcome that kind of thing. I mean, if real rock music isn’t what you run to when the other music sucks and you can’t get the girl, then the terrorists really have won, right?

3. Various drunks @ a Silver Lake house party, 11/14

Which brings me to this. Kim, as is the custom, had a birthday (either recently or coming up soon), and to celebrate not dying, threw a party centered around people making art. Which basically broke down to some people sitting around and painting or drawing or whatever, and some other people sitting around somewhere else noodling around on various instruments, inhaling boxed wine all the while.

You might think that I’d be a bit out of place at a function like this. You would of course be right. I did basically exactly what I would have expected myself to do – smoke approximately eight thousand Parliaments, rotate amongst the six people who I actually knew, and contentedly retreat into my monstrous head and soak up the atmosphere. But JOKE’S ON YOU, FUCKER, as I actually ended up having a pretty good time in a post-college party kind of way. I met other people from Durham, ran into people who I’d previously seen dressed up as Christmas trees for Halloween, yammered briefly about music with people actually in the music industry for a change (without even slipping into James Cobo Lecturing People on the Unchallenged Genius of Richard X mode, a rare feat in recent weeks), saw people I haven’t seen since graduation - you know the deal. Good times. Living life. Rocknfucknroll.

I bring this up not because the music complemented the scene or anything, but rather because it was just there. I mean, it wasn’t particularly good or anything, but then again it’s hardly like anyone was trying to pull another “Virginia Plain” out of the ether or anything; everybody was just kind of playing some songs they liked. I heard some Weezer, and I heard “Yellow Ledbetter”, and I heard what can only be described as a valiant series of attempts at “Sweet Home Alabama” by a bunch of Californians who’d been drinking wine all day. And every time I’d recognize a song, I’d think “Hey, this song” and keep right on having a perfectly fine time.

I am starting to wonder if I’m going about rock criticism all wrong. It just seems like at this point, I’ve been there for some real rockin’ shit, and I’m not just talking about concerts, since I’ve watched rockin’ movies and seen rockin’ pro wrestling shows and even read some rock-ass books. It always did seem like the best rockcrits talk more about how to have a good time than the actual text being critiqued (viz. Nate’s long-lost mini-writeup of the Rapture live, which IIRC was the thing which pushed me over the edge into buying Echoes) – maybe the secret is to have a good time first and worry about good music second. Maybe (maybe?) Lester Bangs was right after all. Maybe that explains Brent DiCrescenzo.

I ramble. My point is this: The older I get, the less essential the music itself gets, even as I paradoxically find myself ahead of the curve in terms of my friends (admittedly, this is because I’m the only one lame enough to go looking for what’s out there). I’ve kind of had a hard time finding the motivation to just up and start writing about stuff lately (believe it or not), if only because I just catch myself writing this awful authoritative twaddle about technical perfection and lofty ideals and transcendence and etc. It just ain’t happening. This isn’t to say that that stuff never happens – go listen to Funeral by the Arcade Fire RIGHT THE HELL NOW for ample proof to the contrary – but rather that that shouldn’t be the goal of rock journalism. Hell, we have pop music for totally satisfying, totally self-contained musical experiences – shouldn’t rock music be doing something else? I mean, isn’t that why we have it?