As the 1990s came to an end, Fight Club became a cultural touchstone for disaffected Gen-X, particularly white males. Chuck Palahniuk's story of a DID-plagued white-collar worker touched a nerve with a generation that marked the split between the time when you could have a blue collar job and provide for a family, or not. Those who took the collegiate route to success were getting into condos and McMansions, filled with Bohemian Bourgeois trappings, while their lower-income peers seemed to disappear first from their lives, and then from any significance in popular culture altogether, once Roseanne was cancelled by ABC.
We had a metrosexual president who felt our pain and had notorious affairs, when he wasn't caught up in the humanitarian war on the Balkans and shepherding NAFTA and GATT, the trade agreements that took away so many well-paying blue collar jobs. The buffoonish masculinity of WWF was no longer the province of 12 year olds, big money cracked the demographic wide open.
In this atmosphere, Fight Club became a beacon; it offered a convenient and highly entertaining answer to the masculinity crisis without challenging its audience to rush out of the theatre and take action. In the end, the movie taught us, nihilism offers a solution that demands nothing and has no consequences.
Hearing the obscure Pixies song, "Where Is My Mind," as buildings fell and then over the end credits, that was just icing on the cake.
But from there, an odd thing happened: a song that pretty much no one among Pixies' fans ever considered to be among the band's finest moments, spent the next 10 years becoming the song that has come to define that band in today's music culture. If you asked a Pixies fan in 1988 to name their favorite songs, they might tell you about "Gigantic," "Bone Machine," "Cactus," or "Nimrod's Son." If you asked them again, in 1990, they'd add "Velouria," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Debaser," and "Here Comes Your Man." Ask again in three more years, and "U Mass," and "Alec Eiffel" would have been additions.
If you asked anyone prior to Fight Club what their favorite Pixies songs were, "Where Is My Mind" barely pinged the radar, even among huge fans. Could have been any number of reasons but for my money the most likely one is that people who came to the Pixies anywhere between 1987 and, say, 1994 weren't there for the drone, and they certainly weren't there for the traditional rock structure this song incorporates more of than most of their other work. Speaking for myself and what I can recall of my friends' opinions, we were there for the twisted pop. We were there for Black Francis' shrieks, his and Kim Deal's delicious vocal interplay, the helter-skelter surf-punk guitar work, and occasionally, like on "Monkey Gone to Heaven," Joey Santiago's premo leads.
And we were there to release joy. Which is why it bothers me, and some others, that revisionists have made "Where Is My Mind" so heavy on the scale that it threatens the band's legacy of subversive pop.
In 2012, Stereogum published a list of "The Best Pixies Songs." 5 of the 10 were never high on anyone's radar and 6, if you took the Fight Club factor out of the equation. The #1? "Tame."
"Tame" was an okay tune. The best part of it was the line, "Lips like Cinderella," and the staccato guitar lick, fine. But honestly? Nothing else about it was very memorable. For most people, "Tame" was the short interlude between "Debaser" and "Wave of Mutilation," and that's pretty much it.
In the comments to the article, the list was challenged, especially by people who thought it was nuts that songs like "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Here Comes Your Man" weren't on the list. I thought this response was interesting:
Due to the huge financial success of rock music — 40 years ago — the part of the music industry that serves young white males doesn't want to let go. The catastrophic error could not have been made more clear to me than it was one beautiful Sunday morning when I was kayaking on the Duck River in Normandy, about 90 minutes Southeast of Nashville. As I came around a bend in the river, I passed two young men, probably in their early 20s, in a fishing boat. Poles out, the iPod on, and they were listening to hip hop. In the middle of outer-bumfuck, Tennessee.
And because we've got a music industry that refuses to let go of rock, in spite of today's piss-poor record sales, we've got a group of young'uns (that segment that didn't find hip-hop) are identifying with music that's 4th or even 5th generation spin cycle. No matter how talented some of these artists might be, they aren't using those talents to come up with a single original idea. And we've been stuck here ever since Nevermind was unleashed and Alternative's turn to the left was effectively killed.
So the only thing for millennials and younger to do to hear something that actually was kind of, sort of, brilliant, they're stuck going back to 1989 — and trying to make it their own. It's no wonder some people might have a problem with that. To draw a comparison, imagine some '80s hipster writing in Rolling Stone or Musician magazines and creating such a list for ... say, the Doors. And listing "Maggie M'Gill" as the best Doors song, ever. You know damn well their editor would laugh them out of the room.
Where do we go from here? The current folk revival offers some promise, but there's a lot of it that's simply Rock music with Bluegrass instruments.
Oh, wait. Guess the show I was at the other night ...
But from there, an odd thing happened: a song that pretty much no one among Pixies' fans ever considered to be among the band's finest moments, spent the next 10 years becoming the song that has come to define that band in today's music culture. If you asked a Pixies fan in 1988 to name their favorite songs, they might tell you about "Gigantic," "Bone Machine," "Cactus," or "Nimrod's Son." If you asked them again, in 1990, they'd add "Velouria," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Debaser," and "Here Comes Your Man." Ask again in three more years, and "U Mass," and "Alec Eiffel" would have been additions.
If you asked anyone prior to Fight Club what their favorite Pixies songs were, "Where Is My Mind" barely pinged the radar, even among huge fans. Could have been any number of reasons but for my money the most likely one is that people who came to the Pixies anywhere between 1987 and, say, 1994 weren't there for the drone, and they certainly weren't there for the traditional rock structure this song incorporates more of than most of their other work. Speaking for myself and what I can recall of my friends' opinions, we were there for the twisted pop. We were there for Black Francis' shrieks, his and Kim Deal's delicious vocal interplay, the helter-skelter surf-punk guitar work, and occasionally, like on "Monkey Gone to Heaven," Joey Santiago's premo leads.
And we were there to release joy. Which is why it bothers me, and some others, that revisionists have made "Where Is My Mind" so heavy on the scale that it threatens the band's legacy of subversive pop.
In 2012, Stereogum published a list of "The Best Pixies Songs." 5 of the 10 were never high on anyone's radar and 6, if you took the Fight Club factor out of the equation. The #1? "Tame."
"Tame" was an okay tune. The best part of it was the line, "Lips like Cinderella," and the staccato guitar lick, fine. But honestly? Nothing else about it was very memorable. For most people, "Tame" was the short interlude between "Debaser" and "Wave of Mutilation," and that's pretty much it.
In the comments to the article, the list was challenged, especially by people who thought it was nuts that songs like "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Here Comes Your Man" weren't on the list. I thought this response was interesting:
I really don’t think that “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is a no-brainer to make the list, though. It’s a good song, but I would not consider it one of my top 20 favorites. That song and “Here Comes Your Man” are two songs that seem to belong more to that moment in time, whereas some of their other songs have a strange weirdness that is timeless.Now, this isn't the response of the journalist who put the list together, but I find it highly typical of some millennials I've worked with in radio; they have a hard time differentiating between their personal favorites and quality that's going to have a broad appeal. I think a huge part of that has to do with "serious" popular music failure to evolve or, more directly, serious popular music promoters' failure to do their jobs when it comes to youth.
Due to the huge financial success of rock music — 40 years ago — the part of the music industry that serves young white males doesn't want to let go. The catastrophic error could not have been made more clear to me than it was one beautiful Sunday morning when I was kayaking on the Duck River in Normandy, about 90 minutes Southeast of Nashville. As I came around a bend in the river, I passed two young men, probably in their early 20s, in a fishing boat. Poles out, the iPod on, and they were listening to hip hop. In the middle of outer-bumfuck, Tennessee.
And because we've got a music industry that refuses to let go of rock, in spite of today's piss-poor record sales, we've got a group of young'uns (that segment that didn't find hip-hop) are identifying with music that's 4th or even 5th generation spin cycle. No matter how talented some of these artists might be, they aren't using those talents to come up with a single original idea. And we've been stuck here ever since Nevermind was unleashed and Alternative's turn to the left was effectively killed.
So the only thing for millennials and younger to do to hear something that actually was kind of, sort of, brilliant, they're stuck going back to 1989 — and trying to make it their own. It's no wonder some people might have a problem with that. To draw a comparison, imagine some '80s hipster writing in Rolling Stone or Musician magazines and creating such a list for ... say, the Doors. And listing "Maggie M'Gill" as the best Doors song, ever. You know damn well their editor would laugh them out of the room.
Where do we go from here? The current folk revival offers some promise, but there's a lot of it that's simply Rock music with Bluegrass instruments.
Oh, wait. Guess the show I was at the other night ...
2 comments:
Where is my mind obscure? It was in two movies before Fight Club!
Two movies that, themselves, fit the very definition of obscure.
Post a Comment