A Reflection on Music in a Moment of Mishap
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Scott 1 Liam Scott 1 May 2020 A Reflection on Music in a Moment of Mishap Hunched over in the new living room on Hoffman street in the Bronx this January, having just returned from a semester abroad in Ireland, I was vehemently trying to register for Spring semester courses. I spent my days in Ireland meeting friends from around the world, wandering cobblestone streets, exploring towns and wistfully filling notebooks with lyrics and idle thoughts. I had made the decision to change what was then a major in Computer Science to a minor, and add a second minor in American Studies – a summer in Harlem, the presidential primary, and the months in Europe had left me with pages of questions about what constituted the United States of America, and I wanted answers. Little did I know as I sat in that living room on Hoffman that it was about to be my lucky day, a spot in a class about hip hop and rock music had opened up, and I was about to launch myself on a journey of becoming familiar with the last seventy years of American music and a quest to understand why I like what I like today. In this paper I will be talking about some artists that inspire me, make me think, make me question, and foster hope in me of someday being able to construct meaningful music. In addition to this being my cumulative submission to this class, I also want this paper to be a time capsule of how exactly music is striking me right now, as a twenty-one-year-old during as misfortunate a time as coronavirus. Some of the artists I will focus on in this memoir I have, many times, listened to in the darkness and quiet of my thoughts; their stories I have gawked over on long subway rides from ‘Bx’ to ‘Bk’ and back. Pensively, I have made note of their lyric substance, their song structure, and have spent hours learning to recite them on guitar, then drums, and vocals all throughout. I have filled my head with doubts many times about how I Scott 2 could never amount to writing a song like that, could never pen lyrics like hers, could never construct progressions like his. Eventually, and many times with the help and inspiration of this class, those walls of doubt can be knocked down. The first time I heard of the band Car Seat Headrest was the spring of my freshman year. My new college friends were adamant about buying tickets to see them at Brooklyn Steel in September. Unfortunately, come that September I had to give my ticket to a friend for some other engagement, something I regret to this day. Luckily, I still had my chance to see Car Sear Headrest that winter at Madison Square Garden, opening for the venerable indie rock group Interpol. I was greatly looking forward to seeing them in the coming months, but their June performance in Brooklyn has been canceled due to the pandemic.1 This band has become incredibly important to my view of music, specifically their album Teens of Denial.2 The first song I fell in love with on that record was “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” for its belting, heart- pouring vocals and windows-down, max volume guitar mix. But now, backstory. A big influence on my relationship with music and where I attribute my soft spot for modern folk is Vermont. For almost a decade, I have been going to and later working at a small rinky-dink summer camp in central Vermont called Camp Downer. That place has watched me grow up in a way no other place has, and it has given me a network of some of my absolute closest friends. Being on staff at camp is wildly fun, what with the weeks on end of dealing with hilarious fun-loving kids, and the mischievous nights where our spirits turned into ghosts and trampled through the trees by firelight. It was these nights wherein I 1 Car Seat Headrest – Canceled, The Bowery Presents. https://www.bowerypresents.com/shows/detail/393923-car- seat-headrest-cancelled 2 Jeremy Gordan, “Teens of Denial Review”, Pitchfork. 20 May 2016. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21673- teens-of-denial/ Scott 3 learned to play guitar, self-teaching and learning through peers. There were some bands that were sacrosanct to that space: The Avett Brothers, The Lumineers (in their early days), The Head and the Heart, Wild Child, Neutral Milk Hotel, Dispatch, and many other various tracks that no one knows the real origin of, but were passed down by generations through scratched CDs and etchings on the wall. This subgenre of mountainous alt-folk can trace its origins back recently to albums like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,3 the bombastic record from Neutral Milk Hotel that reverberated far into the 2000s, and more distantly back to acts of the 1960s counterculture like Peter, Paul & Mary. While on the subject, I would be remised to not mention earlier names like Woodie Guthrie who laid the groundwork from this and, with songs like “This Land is Your Land,” carried over culture form the American Transcendentalist movement.4 This is the tradition of music that is seeped into the culture of the wooded summer camp, each new generation bringing with it new music. We would practice our own contributions to share around the fire. The songs that people loved best were the ones with emotional swells where singing became yelling, swaying became stomping, and tears were drawn. Of the discography of Car Seat Headrest, “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” was that song. But it is far from my favorite on that record, I would place tracks like “Fill in the Blank.” “Not What I Needed,” “Cosmic Hero,” and “Destroyed by Hippie Powers” as some of my favorite songs of the past few years. Their new record, which was just released this week, is pleasing so far as well. The third track, “Deadlines (Hostile),” is the first song to come out in 3 Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Aeroplane_Over_the_Sea 4 Richard Kahn, Environmental Activism in Music. See attached, also: https://www.academia.edu/1395159/Environmental_Activism_in_Music Scott 4 2020 that I could conceive of Kurt Cobain genuinely listening to. Ok… maybe at least Brandon Flowers5. These songs all deal in vocals that are relaxed at times and feel like distant cries at others, their heavy, reliable chords met with vocals landing so delicately in resonance. This soft vocal resolution is something that I really appreciate in music. Take the section of “Not What I Needed” that begins at 0:30: E A F#m C#m Hello my friend, we’ve been waiting for you for a long time A B F#m We have reason to believe that your soul is just like ours E A F#m C#m Did you ever get the feeling you were just a little different? A B F#m Well, here’s our web page, you’ve finally found a home 6 These finely constructed lyrics speak for a generation battered with desolate feelings and mental health struggles – a generation that are effectively guinea pigs for a life cemented online. But the musicality of these lines is what really strikes me. In a simple yet emotionally packed chord progression, the vocals rise above and fall below midrange bellowing of the electric guitar, landing gracefully at the end. Will Toledo, the vocalist, places his vocals delicately on a bed of raging guitar, and it works so well. The chord transition from A to B here is especially idyllic, with the vocal melody remaining on the same note during the transition and resolving at the end. It is these kinds of musical moments in rock that can singlehandedly bring goosebumps, the subtlest of movements with vocals just relaxing enough to ignite fireworks. Soft, delicate resolutions like these are consistently something that I am drawn to in music, no matter the time 5 Sami Rahman, “Car Seat Headerest – Teens of Style” Review, 29 October 2015. https://www.earbuddy.net/60872/car-seat-headrest-teens-of-style.html/reviews 6 Teens of Denial Album Chords by Car Seat Headrest https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/car-seat-headrest/teens- of-denial-chords-1847841 Scott 5 period or genre – and they can happen in really any genre. Young Thug’s ‘Just How It Is’ 7 is as good an example of this as any, pulling it off with melodic raps and a strong, simple 808 bass. Car Seat Headrest is simply one of the bands that I will associate this part of my life with, being young and trying to figure out New York City, navigating Europe and sinking into my headphones when I needed comfort. Their lyrics are simple, funny, pithy, just specific enough to tell a story and just ambiguous enough to relate on an underlying emotional level. Their music pays homage to historic rock and hardcore; it seethes with a cool, calm, measured devotion to norm-rejecting and there is a distinct ease to its musical excellence. They sound so good because they don’t overcomplicate trying to. My rock predilections were originally passed down from my mother. Even when I could barely talk, I would ask her constantly in the car and at home to play me some of her music. Throughout my early childhood, she and my father would play through their expansive CD collection. We would listen to The Beatles, The Stones, Coldplay, Sting/The Police, James Taylor, Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel, The Cure, Elvis Costello, Joan Armatrading, Bob Marley, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Indigo Girls, Sarah McLaughlin, Carole King, and eventually The Killers and Franz Ferdinand with mid-2000s suggestions from my older cousins.