Music is good. Music about music is not so good.
Some people believe art is more than a job, but some people believe in a very specific white-skin Jesus, and I don’t see why one sort of self-regard should be less dopey than the other. I mean, believe in angels or believe you’re special; it does no harm as far as that goes.
That being said, like people who brag about their IQs, the harm only comes when shit gets said out loud. While the fine-art world has seemingly resigned itself to largely being an endless circle jerk of commenting on its own existence, therefore keeping its audience limited to, well, fine artists and those who make money off it, music is still happily only, like, 20 percent living within its own asshole.
The 20 percent I’m talking about is the worst rock genre there is (worse even than crabcore, though maybe not as bad as crunkcore): Songs About Being in a Band. Those songs that operate from the premise that there’s something inherently more interesting about playing three chords than being a carpenter or locksmith. Songs like The Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” and Paramore’s “Looking Up.”
Now, I’m not claiming that being in a band isn’t more fun or easier than those occupations. I’m not insane. But the only thing less cool than bragging is making that brag a whine.
The purview of the singer, to me, is sex and/or death. That covers a lot of ground, from political ranting to score-settling with contemptuous parents/teachers/gym coaches. But the ground it shouldn’t cover is the gig itself. That’s not interesting and it’s not fair to the fan to force them to pretend it is, to ask all the teens to sing along to verses about bad A&R brunches as if it were their own deep-rooted pain.
To make the point finer: If pornography was about pornography, half the fun would disappear (though — cough — I imagine the remaining half would still get the job done). In the same way we want, say, Riley Reid to be a neighbor or an astronaut or whatever, we want a band to be something else, something either relatable (like a Bon Jovian working stiff) or aspirational (a Bowie spaceman, a Cobain Hamlet, a Freddie Mercury… Freddie Mercury).
Rock songs about performing rock songs (not be confused with rock songs about rock songs, like “Land of 1,000 Dances” or even Bob Seger’s “Drift Away” — to me the worst rock song ever recorded) are just too self-aware, and then not self-aware enough. They’re what happens when a band decides that the fan owes them their empathy, that they no longer need to use metaphor to get the listener engaged because the listener is so dense as to want to sing along to “We’re an American Band,” doing all the heavy lifting, while the band just describes what was included in their rider.
Why do rock bands do this? With hip-hop, well, hip-hop throws the whole thing off. It’s a form with discussion of process baked in at its inception. Rappers have always talked about The Show and, having learned either something or nothing from the history of blues and soul exploitation, they’ve always bitched about the industry. Rock bands share the same sense of grievance, though, unlike rappers, they’re far more likely to extend their complaints to feeling misunderstood by their fans.
Fall Out Boy have forged an entire career talking about how they perceive their fans, and somehow convincing said fans to pigeonhole themselves. Pete Wentz might be the first man in history to beat the monkey’s paw at its own game. He wishes for success, and gets richer complaining about it. Arguably, he’s just following the template set by grunge mopers and their immediate corporate pop-punk descendants; we were misunderstood as teens and now we’re misunderstood as 30-year-olds who dress like teens.
If you spend most of your time in a tour van/bus, playing shows, it’s understandable that you want to write about your life as it’s happening. And there have been some great songs that prove the exception to my petulant broad-sweep irritation. To my mind, the good songs about being in a band are the ones about being unloved and/or hopeful. Songs like “Formed a Band” by Art Brut, and “One Chord Wonders” by English punk band the Adverts, operate as calls to arm, letting the eternal kids know that anything and everything is possible.
But eventually, even the punks end up like Rancid, ignoring the whole “no gods no heroes” thing and indulging in the most egregious kind of self-mythology. The singer can cloak his/her nostalgia in fatalism, but if they’re complaining about the open road being long (it’s paved, baby, you should write a thank-you note to city hall, or at least the Romans) or their amps in any capacity, then I’m checking out.
Of course, my crying may be moot, like complaining about dinosaurs or moderate Republicans. History has largely wiped out the guitar band and, to be honest, most of the new breed are ladies who write songs about bastards and the state — two topics I get down with. But the flip side is that, while the rich get richer, the niche has grown nicher.
I worry that so many of my peers love Pup’s “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You I Will” because, besides it being an undeniable jam, rock is in the same popularity rut that fine art is: its fans are mainly its practitioners.
Maybe, in a time when selling a few thousand records will put you on the charts, fans aren’t fake-relating — they’re listening from their own vans, writing their own songs about listening to Pup in said vans, passing other bands in vans on their own way to play for whatever musicians or publicists or label owners live in the next town, everybody pissing in the same bottles and calling it art or, worse, interesting.
