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Traitor to the Cause

Recently, I've been getting back into indie-pop music.

No, really.

See, the thing is, I've heard almost no enjoyable indie-pop since about 1996, when our local alterna-station (93.9, the River, out of Windsor) changed to a hideous easy-listening format. It was also around that time when Counting Crows, Dave Matthews Band and Blues Traveller all flashed in the pan, and my boyfriend-at-time and I physically chucked our copy of Cracked Rear View from overplay. REM's best years were long behind them, and there wasn't anything folkypop left on the scene to replace them -- though a bunch of solo artists tried (Tracy Chapman, Shaun Colvin, Michelle Shocked), no one could fill their 900-lb gorilla shoes. After that, pop music started this horrible slide into way-too-young-girl singers and boy bands, or hiphop so lewd as to be unlistenable. Indiepop seemed to go the opposite direction, becoming more and more forcibly ironic.

I dunno about all of you, but forcible pretentious irony bores the shit out of me. I see these hipster kids running around in polyester pants and plaid shirts, and I want to say, "look, that stuff sucked the first time around, and your wearing it now because it sucks, ironically, does not make it suck less, but more. Now there's some irony for ya." But most of the hipster kids I know are pretty nice, smart folks, so I just kinda look past it. Hell, I owned enough flannel in 1992 to clothe a camp full of lumberjacks, and I often wore said flannels with combat boots and a skirt, so I can't exactly talk about dressing obnoxiously.

Oddly, several of the bands that I love dearly tread a fine line between art-house pretentious irony and self-realizing-silliness, like They Might Be Giants, but they -- at least in my opinion -- come off far more as acid-trippy nerds with huge brains and too much time on their hands. And OK Go, who are firmly in the irony camp -- but dude, anybody who can choreograph dance routines with treadmills gets a free pass.

So imagine my surprise when, last year, Becky Cooper and my buddy Shaun at work gave me a huge pile of new alternamusic to listen to: Belle and Sebastian, Hayden, Iron and Wine, Beta Band, Nick Drake, Sufijan Stevens, the Ditty Bops, Flaming Lips -- Wow. Yeah. This is good stuff. Some of it, like Iron and Wine, is so sincere it makes me cry with its beauty and poetry and reverence. God help me, I even like Death Cab and Postal Service. I got the Feist album Let it Die the other day, and I've been listening to it constantly. So good. So pretty. "Mashaboom" is burrowing into my brain, but in a good way. It's also helping that Kalamazoo has WIDR, an outstanding indie radio station, playing appropriately good college alternapop, world, hiphop, jazz, ska (Skalamazoo!) and other sundry wonders, like the Saturday Morning J-pop show. But I digress.

All of these bands, with their hooky, folky music, sing to that part of me that once bought Tracy Chapman and Indigo Girls and Edie Brickell albums, seeking out what, in essence, is poetry set to music. Smart, competent lyrics with good solid instrumentation behind. Ambiguous wordplay. Odd chording. Gimme gimme.

The absence of good indiepop in past years, I'm certain, is what drove me headlong into the world of Irish / Folk music. There simply wasn't anything else worth listening to, at the time. I would hate to think that Irish music was a phase for me, but since I've stopped playing regularly, I've been slipping away from listening to it as much as I did. Good, favorite bands like Dervish, Lunasa, Altan and Steeleye never fail to make my heart skip a beat, so the love is obviously still there. I hope someday I can have the time to go back to music full tilt, as I once did. But now -- now my life's slipping back into indiepop, it seems. In some ways I feel like a traitor, giving up on the celtic stuff... sigh. Still, it's what's got my ear right now.

Yeah. I've spent the last week finally purchasing a bunch of my bogarted albums, getting legit. Thanks to some giftcards and a trip to the used record store, I've got ten so far, and need to get another ten to get up to speed. Then I can start buying new stuff.

Recommendations?

UPDATE: Sonovabitch. As of last week, The River's back. Am I freaking psychic or what?

This entry was posted Wednesday, 09/13/2006.
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