Losing My Edge

Hello and welcome to the Rinse for this week. As we have for the past few months, we’re going to go into the time machine and revisit a previous year. The lucky year this time around is 2005.

When I went to look at the charts for 2005, I was at a loss. I did recognize some of the artists like Destiny’s Child, Madonna, and Paul Wall. But there were more whose name I recognized but I couldn’t tell you what the music sounded like. Included in this category are Disturbed, Gretchen Wilson, and Omarion. As I read over the charts, it showed me how much the shift had become permanent.

The shift that I am talking about is the prevalence of the Internet in music. This was a real plus/minus situation at the time—and still now, if we’re honest. The plus side of it all was that it became easier to find music. In the pre-Internet days, finding music was complicated. You could listen to the radio, which was how pretty much everyone did it. The local stations had not been bought by Clear Channel, so you could turn them on and hear the taste of the local DJs. Although these tended to blur together in major cities if the stations programmed similar music, there was always the possibility to find something interesting if you went to the left of the dial. 

If you were luckily to live in a city or town with either college-run or member-supported radio, your chances were higher of running into something truly interesting. If you heard something you liked, you could go to your local record store and buy it or you could go to the local dive venue and hopefully make out a band through the thick layer of smoke that covered the bar. (Even when I did smoke, I was really glad smoking indoors got banned. Fucking sucked having to wait days for my coat to stop reeking of cigarettes.) Took a little work, but it wasn’t too hard and you could get into some really cool shit.

If you lived in a small town or a place that didn’t have these kind of stations, you had to work hard to find the punks or weirdos in town so that you could figure out what the local music scene was. If you succeeded in this, it was a 50/50 on (a) whether it was any good and (b) if they could put you on to anything at all. It was really taking a roll of the dice.

The other way that you could find out about music in those days was through the press. Music magazines abounded. Culture magazines loved to talk about musicians, especially if they were particularly stylish or interesting. If those punks in your town were really about that life, they probably made a fanzine that you could read. Honestly, this was how I found out about a lot of stuff. You read the magazines and go to the record store to see if you could find it. You usually could, but there were definitely times when you couldn’t.

While none of these methods is particularly hard, music fandom became even easier with the Internet. In the pre-Internet times, if you got into something (let’s say shoegaze for example), you would have to check the record stores regularly to see if anything new had come or if a record that you wanted to hear (e.g., Ride’s Nowhere) appeared in the used bins. If you wanted to learn more about the genre, you’d either have to talk to a condescending record store guy (because, let’s be real, it’s probably a guy) or know someone in your town who was also into shoegaze. This wasn’t impossible, but to say it was easy is a challenge.

With the Internet, if you watched a My Bloody Valentine video during 120 Minutes or constantly saw Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” on MTV, rather than find someone in your town who was into this, you could fire up your copy of Netscape or Internet Explorer on your dining room PC and search the web. If you were like me, you ended up in Blisscent on Yahoo Groups, which focused explicitly on dream pop and shoegaze.

Once there, you’d read about those bands but you’d also learn about the Swirlies, Catherine Wheel, and All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, among many, many others. Hopefully, someone had uploaded an MP3 or put a link into the post, but if they didn’t, that wasn’t the end of the world either; you could fire up your filesharing service of choice (mine was Audiogalaxy), and in 95% of situations, you could get your hand on a copy of the album that you would then burn onto a CD-R.

Obviously, this is a great thing. It democratized music listening. It took away some of the gatekeeping that surrounded indie music and made it easier for everyone to find. The history of music became easily accessible to anyone who was interested. These are not fundamentally bad things on their face. The problem however is the obvious one: filesharing doesn’t get the artists any money. As became clear by 2005, artists were losing money hand over fist, whether from their albums being pirated before their release or being pirated more generally.

In addition to the monetary issues, the Internet brought about something more odious: the hype machine. Hype has always been a part of music. That’s how people gain their legends. To use a perpetual reference on this newsletter, go listen to some early Bruce Springsteen live albums from the 1970s. On those recordings, you can hear him sweat. The band is playing every chord as if their lives depended on it. People saw that and got on board. He got hyped, but the hype was completely earned by recorded work and by live performance.

This was how it was supposed to work. You started playing shows and attracting some attention. A label would check you out and sign you to make an EP or an album. You make the album, release it, and then hit the road. Between the label pushing the record out to radio stations and playing shows, your quality would come through: you’d be in rotation at stations from Albany to Yakima and your shows would sell out if you had the juice.

The Internet changed this. No longer were radio stations or the press the tastemakers. Bloggers and people posting on message boards started pushing acts that they liked and wanted to be the next big thing. This isn’t a fundamentally bad thing: people should be able to express their opinions. However, there are two problems with this.

The first is whether the band is truly good enough to warrant the amount of hype are they getting. Have they been around for a while, cutting their teeth, or have they released a couple of singles and never played a live show? This seems like a small difference, but the expectations for an album can be extremely high. So, when the hype is great, the expectations on the LP can be far too immense. As you will see below, these expectations can crush an otherwise decent album.

The second part of this is whether the band is truly ready for the hype. A band can be great, but it could have only been together for a year or two. How do they deal with the increased amount of attention and the expectation that they are to be the savior of rock and roll or whatever else the hype machine has deemed them to be? Even if they succeed with their album, can they match the public’s expectations on their next album? This is a true challenge. It’s not called the Sophomore Slump for nothing.

2005 ends up becoming an excellent year to consider the role of the Internet on the music industry. The effects of filesharing were clearly being felt by artists across all genres save country. In addition, the hype machine was at its absolute strongest. Genres like dance-punk were being resurrected, and cult heroes were being developed. In this particular year, I think that we got three albums that show the double-edged nature of the Internet for music. They are the self-titled album from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the self-titled album from LCD Soundsystem, and Bang Bang Rock & Roll by Art Brut.

We’ll start with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. When anyone thinks back to this particular era of the Internet hype machine, this is the band that will immediately come to mind. This is because everyone was calling them the next saviors for rock and roll music. People talked about this band breathlessly, like no other bands existed in the world. They got massive, starry-eyed write-ups from tastemakers like Pitchfork (which gave their album a 9.0/10, an extremely high score from them). They had high-profile hipster fans like David Byrne and David Bowie. Everything was aligned for them when their album came out.

The album arrived and it was everywhere. All of those write-ups on music blogs did their job. This stridently DIY band made a ton of noise, selling over 100,000 copies without a label. But there is an important question to ask here: is the album actually any good? The answer is sort of. Living with this album for the last week, the hype was not completely without merit. The songs are decently written and sound pretty good. They have a slightly dreamy, fun vibe that radiates a certain joy. I thought I would be madder listening to this album than I actually was. That being said, there are several problems for me.

I personally find the high-pitched, Isaak Brock-adjacent style of Alec Ounsworth to be grating, making this a generally unappealing listen to me. When we start to dig into that songcraft a bit more, it feels like playing a game of influence whack-a-mole in a boring way. There’s a little bit of Stereolab repetition, Elephant 6 whimsy, Cars-style synths. The lyrics on the songs are a bit pedestrian. There’s a good image here or there, but the lyrics are not particularly memorable in any way.

In the end, this is an absolutely mid listen. Honestly, if it hadn’t been overhyped, it would be a perfectly solid debut album. While they did not nail everything, they show promise for the future. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened. They were proclaimed to be the best thing ever. And, when your album doesn’t maintain that standard, the future is going to be rocky.

Another band that came in on a wave of hype was Art Brut, a British post-punk band that was operating around the same time as Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party. They had all of the hallmarks of a solid band: cool, angular guitar sounds, talk singing, crisp rhythms. Now, their peers delivered the goods. Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party made really strong albums that hit hard when they were released and are still listened to now. (I watched the Bloc Party Tiny Desk and it ruled. They still sound really good.) But what about Art Brut? Did they do it?

I’ll save you the suspense: they did not. Bang Bang Rock & Roll lacks the charms of its compatriots. While it has the angular guitars and tense post-punk style of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, Art Brut feels like a softer version of those bands, like a safety-scissors version of post-punk. You can feel the space where the snottiness and/or confrontation is missing. I know that they are aiming for an arch/ironic thing, but it fell flat for me. While a fun trick, Eddie Argos’s talk singing would have been more effective if the lyrics were more interesting and/or actually funny. I found the attempts at humor on songs like “Good Weekend” and “18,000 Lira” to be wanting at best.

While the actual musicianship on display is actually pretty good—the songs were clean and professional, punchy and spiky in respectable amounts—I couldn’t get past the overly ironic and/or pedestrian lyrics that strained at my patience. I found that, especially towards the end of the album, the songs began to get a bit repetitive; I knew when songs ended, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you the differences between them.

The hype was strong on this album, and the band was rewarded with decent sales, but hype can only last for so long; there has to be more there to keep you around. Time has shown that there isn’t. Before reading this dispatch, when was the last time you thought about Art Brut? When was the last time you or one of your friends listened to Art Brut? I know the answer: not recently, because Art Brut has fallen into the slush pile of hype bands from 2005. Is this totally their fault? No, but the Internet is a cruel place and they could never fully live up to the hype.

The last album I wanted to think about from 2005 is LCD Soundsystem. This album is maybe the platonic ideal of how the hype machine can actually be a positive. So, to start, LCD Soundsystem is the band of DFA Records co-founder James Murphy. In the years prior to this album’s release, dance-punk, a subgenre that was originally popular in the 1970s and 1980s, had been making a comeback with a lot of supporters on the Internet. The band that was at the forefront of this revival for many people, myself included, was The Rapture. Ask any indie kid of my age about this band, and they will stare wistfully into the distance as they remember “House of Jealous Lovers.” Those same people probably can’t tell you what the band did after Echoes, but that is for a reason: The Rapture didn’t have a lot of range and they aren’t particularly good live (I should know; I’ve seen them twice).

With the renewed attention on the style, there was an audience for the singles coming out from the bands in the revival, one of which was LCD Soundsystem. In 2002, LCD Soundsystem released “Losing My Edge,” a eight-minute song about how Murphy fears he is losing his cool status as young people start biting his style. While this sounds sad, it’s, on the contrary, extremely funny. Over the runtime, Murphy tries to establish his bona fides by talking about all of the cool places he’s been (e.g., the first Can show in Cologne) and cool shit he’s been involved with (e.g., the first Suicide practices). He also acknowledges that those young kids that are taking over are really nice and interesting.

With this, other singles, and a well-established live reputation, the groundwork was laid for LCD Soundsystem. While this is not a perfect album (a couple of tracks are only OK), it is hands down the best of the three being discussed here. A fusion of disco, electronica, post-punk, new wave, and no wave, LCD Soundsystem goes by in a blur. It is a smooth, extremely enjoyable listen. It’s like drinking an ice cold beverage on a warm day: it hits just right. Standout tracks like “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” “Movement,” and “Disco Infiltrator” show how seamlessly he has blended all of that music he references in “Losing My Edge” into his own potent mix. It is an album for everyone: music nerds, rock kids, club kids, basement hipsters, ravers. If you want to play spot the influence, you can, and it will only make you more impressed that LCD Soundsystem still sounds distinct. Furthermore, if you don’t know a lick of any of that music, it is still great and extremely danceable.

As a result of this universality, LCD Soundsystem has stayed relevant for all of these years. Because they were ready due to the slow rollout and the established reputation, they weathered the hype and made Sound of Silver, an album that takes the strengths of the first album and builds upon them. They did not fall prey to the Sophomore Slump. Twenty years on from this album, they are playing residencies, and there are rumors (as of yet unfounded) about a fifth album.

As I noted at the start, the Internet is a double-edged sword for music. On the one side, it can help you find out about things that you would have never heard in a million years and access it quickly. Furthermore, with a couple of good breaks, a crew of kids playing in a basement somewhere in the Midwest can generate a fanbase, something unfathomable in the pre-Internet music scene. This can lead to a record deal and the chances to live the dream: living off your music.

On the other hand, filesharing and streaming have made making music a less and less desirable activity, as the royalty rates are paltry at best. In addition, the hype machine can be lethal to a band that isn’t ready for the attention.

To frame the bands in this article, all three of them got to a much larger audience than they otherwise would have with the help of the Internet. Art Brut would have probably broken out through the regular British press, but I feel more skeptical about the other two. However, LCD Soundsystem was the only one to weather the hype. Art Brut and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were never able to reach the same level on subsequent releases. This isn’t to say that their later releases are bad, but it is true that they never reached the same level of public awareness. There’s a certain sadness in this, but then again, that’s the Internet.

Next week, strap yourself in. It is a Spins week, and I’ve got three weeks of albums to write about. It has not been a slow time at all. Until then, take care of yourselves and others. And, as always, pet a dog or a cat if they’ll allow it. Also, help a neighbor if they need it.