Indie Trends: Playing With Age (September 2011)
By Chris Polley
Age is but a number, they say. And by “they” of course I mean bullshitters. Anyone who has experience trying to either a) interview for their first full-time gig fresh out of college while still frustratingly growing out of a baby face or b) convince a member or five of the younger generation that you truly are wiser, rather than merely crankier, due to your exorbitant amount of experience being, you know, alive knows that the second someone sees your acne or your wrinkles that they’re judging the crap out of you. Prejudice against races, religions, and sexual orientations aren’t going away anytime soon, even if a gay Muslim were to somehow get elected to office someday, so why should ageism be continually sidestepped as a real problem in the world? Sure, maybe me feeling nervous in a job interview as a 22-year-old white guy isn’t as scarring or serious as a hate crime against one’s culture, background, or identity, but it’s still a thing. It is a thing that exists and that people feel.
Musicians, fragile beasts that they are, definitely feel it. Take guitar virtuoso Marnie Stern, for example, who was rather bluntly (and in my opinion, derogatorily) asked by Pitchfork once whether or not she thought it was weird that she didn’t debut as an indie rock artist until she was 30 years of age. Of course since she’s awesome she played it off like it was no bigs, but what kind of question is that? Should the instinct or desire to create music (or, really, get that music out there) automatically inject into everyone like a synchronized clock for the entire species? Likewise, the notion that musicians make the best or most vital or most energizing art when they’re younger pervades, suggesting that sure it’s okay that Stern didn’t start until she was 30, but that was quite daring of her to make music that was edgy or brilliant or unnerving at such an age. On the much less controversial end of the spectrum, but still worth noting, are those kids from high school that listened to their parents’ record collections and thus ended up picking up an acoustic guitar and approximating melodies and an aesthetic belonging typically to that of an older soul. Whether it was in an attempt to pose as mature, knowledgeable, classic, or just because that’s what they happened to dig is irrelevant; norms tell us that it’s strange for someone with such vigor in their youthful bones to be calm, retro, or wise (without adding the required “beyond their years” as a mindless caveat).
Featuring former members of 90s indie rock stalwarts Sleater-Kinney and Helium, you can guess which side of the equation Wild Flag sit on. Their debut self-titled album quickly became one of the buzzed about records of the month, if not of 2011 as a whole, not only due to its high quality pedigree but also because of a certain kind of expectation. Being a group of ladies in their mid-to-late-30s was tough to compute not because that’s unheard of (though to a certain degree it is) but because these are ladies who are not known to exactly sound settled down, ethereal, or singer-songwriter-y. They reacted more than they reflected in their respective raucous outfits of yore, and so when people first heard of Wild Flag’s formation, it would be nearly impossible to imagine anything to come out of our speakers come its release date besides emotive and rugged guitar rock. Yet we still had to note that they had indeed aged, so surely something about them had to mature or grow or [insert vague verb that hastily implies an oxymoronic combination of progress and giving up].
But then we got the album that our first gut feelings demanded and we were satiated. They fucked not with our immediate expectations as fans giddy for more material from Carrie Brownstein’s affected yelp and Mary Timony’s fuzzed-out head-bopping rhythms, but with the ones that the analyzers and the second-guessers and the leave-behind-the-past-ers portended. They won righteously, if you can’t tell by my tone, and we have been given a rock record that cares just as much and wants to move just as much as you and they did when we were all a little closer to our high school years. This is one of the most beautiful things about music, to put it plainly. You don’t have to do jump kicks in the air or write about angsty break-ups to sound like you’re doing both with your fastidious guitar licks and increasingly world-critical lyrics. That’s the whole point of getting older, after all, right? You don’t get worse at stuff – you get better. And so for the women of Wild Flag to both harken back to what made them alluring in the first place while simultaneously hone their craft further is a gift to music fans everywhere, not a head-scratcher.
If you want to spend some hours head-scratching, however, just sit with Wilco’s discography for a few days and try to make sense of it. Here’s a band that is undisputed in its genius amongst the majority of music critics and middle-upper class white dudes between the ages of 20 and 40 and yet also a majority of those very people would also assuredly agree that there’s at least one utterly boring and/or unmentionable Wilco album that’s been released in the past decade. What’s not flummoxing about this band, though, is that it does make sense that finally, after nine years of scrutiny by their most adoring fans since their quasi-experimental breakthrough record Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, they have finally decided to give into a similar impulse that made those songs so indelible in the first place. Their newest, entitled The Whole Love, seems to be named as such for a reason. In their elder state, it sounds like they want to remind us of the enormity of fandom. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that they’re trying out blips and bloops, elongated track lengths that aren’t sleepy, or eclectic jumps of style between songs again.
For singer/bandleader Jeff Tweedy, this is him recapturing glory. It’s particularly fascinating because he’s clearly tried to withhold scratching this itch since the massive success of Foxtrot, only to rely steadfastly on the tropes of an aging rocker (even if he’d always had a folk/country swagger in his step) and give us soft and slight albums like A Ghost is Born and Sky Blue Sky. Then there’s also the whole issue that Tweedy and co. weren’t exactly spring chickens (by conventional standards) when they made their biggest hit record either. But the reason it resonated so fully is precisely because the band decided to go against the grain in the first place as they headed into a phase in their careers as musicians, especially with that new-ish label “alt-country” floating around them for so long. And so while it wasn’t really a surprise that they then nosedived finally after that a bit, it’s a joy to hear them come back what the optimistic fans assumed was going to be their new trajectory in the first place. Sure, it doesn’t sound as lean and amped as Wild Flag, but I really don’t take it as posing either. They put in their due trying to do what the world at large expected them to do, but now they’re giving back the love that they got in 2002 finally, and having fun with sudden wipes of odd distortion, peppy choruses, and the like.
This leaves us with Laura Marling, the doe-eyed 21-year-old who is already on her third full-length and sounds like she’s been recording music since at least the mid-80s, but could also be mistaken for a long-lost folkie of the 60s by the untrained ear. Her latest, A Creature I Don’t Know, is almost the exact antithesis of Wild Flag in a number of ways, and yet it also could be a kindred spirit in a number of other, more meaningful ways. On the one hand, she, as a singer, seems to positing that she’s been born with a golden voice of a world-weary wanderer, someone who’s been on the road for eternity and just now coming home to record some sad songs about her travails. This is almost dead opposite from a group sounding like they’re rushing out of the gate for the first time, hungry for what the world has to offer them. On the other hand, they’re both desperate to share their gift, they’re both confident in their gifts, and they both clearly have a lot to say, acting as if there’s only so much time with which to say it.
And for those of us (points to self) who tend to hold on tighter to the more modern and visceral way of communication, Marling’s talent could easily go unnoticed. I can’t say I get swept up in its grandeur like I do with a good electric hook or even a rambling refrain from a more familiar aged voice (see above), but I could see parents around the world falling in love with the facts that their sons and grandsons are crushing over someone like Marling, whose elegance and old-timey aesthetic are easy to eat up with the right spoon. There’s something in recognizing this, too, even if you can’t really dig on the fact that she’s broadcasting with a banjo without the coy sincerity of Sufjan Stevens or the rustic timelessness of Iron & Wine. She’s got a voice and it doesn’t matter whether or not the face matches up with it. It’s her, just like Wild Flag is Sleater-Kinney, just like Wilco circa Summer Teeth is Wilco circa The Whole Love. There’s no end and there’s no start; there are just days and records and the way we are during any given one.
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[Header photo by Jessica Amaya via Brooklyn Vegan]