Sounding Off: The Fiery Furnaces’ Matthew Friedberger On Making, Marketing, and Listening to Music
interview by Marek Denisiuk
July 2, 2010
Songwriter and multi-intrumentalist Matthew Friedberger is one-half of the indie rock band The Fiery Furnaces. Since their 2003 debut Gallowbird’s Bark, The Fiery Furnaces have released eight albums and become a critically lauded fixture on the contemporary music scene. In 2006, Friedberger also released a solo double album, Winter Women/Holy Language Ghost School.
The following passages are excerpts from an interview conducted in the winter of 2010.
THE ALBUM VS. THE PLAYLIST
Whether they notice it or not, people are more active now in making the context of how they hear their music. They’re not interested in how the makers of the music are presenting the music, or what they want the music to be like. Before, people would listen to records with their friends and they would listen to the whole album.
Now people don’t even listen to individual tracks—they just listen to some long stream of randomly put-together playlists. That’s how they experience music: their friend’s playlist that they copied and it’s four hours long. It would be easy to imagine that they hear even less, even though they listen to it for four hours. It just disappears into this stream—the context of which is nothing. It’s not a mix-tape like “My Fun Summer Mix Tape” or “Rainy Day Mix Tape” and all of the songs had to do with being sad, or some nonsense like that.
People will say, “Oh, this is potentially good, this means the single is back.” It’s this watered-down, dumbed-down punk rock thing where it’s like, “Yeah, singles—they’re good. Singles, that means Bo Diddley and the Sex Pistols and whatever your favorite supposed feminist pop icon singer is, whereas albums means Styx and Kansas.” But when you make an album with a structure in mind, this concerns you, you think about it all the time. As someone making music you have to face squarely that your tastes are obsolete, your practice is obsolete structurally, or however you want to call it. Non-synchronous development . . .
But it doesn’t really affect how you think of the songs you write, or the next album, and it surprises you. You think you’re adaptable; but with rock you’re supposed to do what you think is good.
ROCK & ROLL REGIONALISM
In the ’90s, in the U.S., every town had a free weekly paper, and that was where the action was. That was what determined the terms of the debate. But their influence stopped at the city limits. So you had a totally regional rock music culture across North America through the mid-’80s into 2000. Chicago and D.C. were really emblematic of this. Generally bands didn’t move to new cities. Respectable bands, they stayed where they were, and the first thing you wanted to know about a band was, “Where are they from?” The connection you had, seeing a band, like for example The Jesus Lizard, was very tied into where they were from. It was a more complicated thing than just, “You’re going to have a good time at the show.” You were going to have a good time at the show, but you weren’t going to just get drunk and dance. It was more self-conscious, complicated and more satisfying than that.
Now, bands, they all move. Online, it’s the opposite of this regionalism. People have one opinion that goes immediately to everybody. Something that’s reviewed on Pitchfork.com is immediately on BBC6. The regionalism is gone, and presumably that’s bad.
Rock music, which takes its interests from the processes of vernacularizing commercial music, is not being able to function regionally in the U.S. for the first time. That’s a problem. I think it’s bad since people feel like they’re swimming against a tide, wondering what it is that they should sound like.
TASTE
Music is still a “prestige” item. The music you like is now more important for first impressions both for the way you’re formulating yourself and the way you interact with people. Music is still educating people about whether they’re cool or not. Now people have more anxiety about this stuff, about status and the music they like. There’s more anxiety related to it than to some of their other consumer or lifestyle choices.
People are just as happy with the talk about the object, or the talk about the processes making the object, being interesting. They don’t mind that the object or the processes themselves aren’t interesting. There’s no difference to them. They’re very happy with having Vampire Weekend in place of Elvis Costello. As the media gets smaller and smaller, because of closer small-worldness I guess, success is the only thing that’s interesting.
There’s a philosophy professor, Bernard Gendron, who says much more cogently what I just said. People don’t need elite objects anymore. According to Gendron, there’s very little difference between elite and non-elite objects anymore, it’s just that the discourse around the “elite” object is quite different from the discourse around the “non-elite” object. There isn’t any difference between the objects themselves, only difference between the talk and consumption of them, and that’s probably bad in the long run.
M.I.A. would be the best example. It’s meant to be good; she’s attractive; it’s political, somehow, maybe. And it’s a new form, it’s up-to-date. It’s not a fuddy-duddy-ism. So in this case, so you can be proud of that, that you like this stuff that comes from hip-hop. From a certain point of view, you could analyze her performance and talk about all of these incredible complexities in it, and how “the sample is manipulated.” You can talk and write like that—it’s how people write. Of course you can do the exact same thing with a commercial. It’s a method that doesn’t admit any difference between the objects it applies itself to. It can valorize anything, that kind of an approach.
People are very happy with the object that isn’t very thick—it’s not very rich. It’s only rich in terms of having a process to talk about. But you really have to bring all of that in to the object to have anything. With M.I.A., things like British immigrant culture and things like that, you have to bring all of that in for there to be anything to be interested in.
Bands become popular because they’re providing something people want, and often it has very little to do with the music. The music itself is not as important. It’s still important, but it doesn’t have the same force. It has something like that prestige and people can get agitated about it, but it doesn’t have that force in the same way.
MUSIC REVIEWS & POPULARITY
I know somebody in a band—a very good, worthwhile band—and they said to me, “I don’t know how to become popular unless you win the lottery on the Internet.” Of course this person meant one Web site in particular [Pitchforkmedia.com]. So becoming popular had nothing to do with playing a million shows or anything like that. It had to do with this nearly perfectly random process that people—the music industry and its army of publicists—don’t have any power to intervene in. What she said made a lot of sense; that is how it seems.
We [The Fiery Furnaces] benefited from this at first. Pitchfork gave our second record, Blueberry Boat, a rave review. Then all of a sudden we had fans. I knew what Pitchfork was—I knew that they were a Web site that reviewed music—but I didn’t know they were special. But I remember a friend of my girlfriend’s at the time saying about the review, “That’s such a big deal!” She’s the person who told me it was a big deal—this woman who’s a serious painter, not someone from a record label.
So we had fans, but at the same time, we had, “Oh, they’re just a band—they’re liked by those dipshits, or pussies, on the Internet.” So instantaneously, that’s why we were popular and that’s also why we were unpopular (besides the fact that people did or didn’t like the band). We would meet people playing at shows or festivals who were interested in us because we were one of “those bands.”
In Britain, their scene has its own dynamic—NME and those magazines are still important for bands. When we started, it was like you were going to go to Britain, and all the magazines would write about you because they wanted to write about you first. It’s done quickly; it’s a quick cycle. Then you have those pieces of press and that’s what you show to the people in New York. They’ll write about you, and then you have your fans. That’s what it was like with The White Stripes and The Strokes. And that was still going on when we started. Our first record, in Britain, was pretty positively reviewed, and we were another band from New York and all this bullshit.
Our second record was a big failure for the people in London. Whereas in the U.S. it was this big success—you could say, arbitrarily. The person who gave the review at Pitchfork liked it and was willing to champion it. They liked the album because it was prog-rocky in a way that wasn’t too prog-rocky for people, and they wanted to find a record that they were clever to like. I think it was very arbitrary that people liked Blueberry Boat, because that record doesn’t have much use except to listen to it—it doesn’t set your mood very well, it’s not very usable in the normal ways that records are usable. People were really going to have to like it because they’re told that it’s okay to like. There’s no way they’re going to like it unless socially they felt safe.
Now it’s this tiny, tiny group of people whose opinions are disproportionately important for a certain type of affluent, leisure culture.
In the past, you would have two bands that really were the same, had the same clothes and everything, and usually the difference would be who had more money spent on them. The best example of a band breaking out the old-fashioned way, but in this totally new climate, is MGMT, because there was money there. It used to be if you liked the look and sound of these kids, sign them up and spend a huge amount of money on them, draw up how to market them, and they’d be successful. With MGMT, it was a matter of money, the record company spent a huge amount of money. So, there’s a huge poster of MGMT in an airport in Paris, people like them there, there’s no mystery about the way it works. Seeing that almost makes you feel better because you can understand it—you understand how it works.
When it seems more arbitrary, it makes you more worried. Now it’s a media situation where people theoretically should have an easy time intervening but actually have a harder time intervening, so that makes it a lot more worrisome.
USE AND APPRECIATION
The fun of making this kind of music is you do have to give it up to people who are not going to listen to it in the same spirit that you made it or listened to it—that’s a given. And that’s the good thing about it; you get to put it out in the world and people make other things with it, and you get to benefit from that. You get the benefit of that experience, and it’s a very interesting experience personally.
You want a rich misinterpretation. Sure it’s more gratifying when people say what you want to be said about you in the way you want it to be said. But that’s not how it works, and so that’s why negative reviews are more satisfying to read sometimes; because in positive reviews they like it in ways that you don’t, that you think make it ridiculous, and sometimes in negative reviews they dislike it in a way that makes you think, “Oh yeah, that’s what you are trying to do, that’s right.”
It goes out there in the world and you have no control over it, and you have to keep that in mind. That’s the way it is with any artifact, I suppose, but that’s more explicitly the case when it comes to art, mass-produced art. I think Glenn Gould said something like, “Recording is a mix of the autocratic and the democratic.” I get to do whatever I want making the record—I get to manipulate it and strangle it and do whatever I like to it—and then it goes out there and people listen to it in circumstances or in ways that I have no control over and that I can’t fathom. That’s the way it works. But for people to put it to their own ends, you can’t just give them an empty vessel or a blank canvas. It needs to be full of your marks and of your intentions for it to be anything that they’re going to be able to manipulate to their ends.
That’s the excitement about popular music: it’s a “use” music, but it’s something that’s made for no specific purpose by definition. It might be dance music, but people are going to use it to drive down the road or use it to relax, sitting and reading a book. You have no idea what people are going to do. The objects you make have no authority. These aesthetic practices—there’s no font of legitimacy.
I don’t personally listen to music as a soundtrack to my life. I like to listen to this music, whatever it may be, and I think about it. I didn’t think about myself and my ex-girlfriend, or the time I struck out in baseball in Little League, or the time I hit a grand slam, or more important things than that.
But other people, they do use it that way and that’s how it was supposed to be. So a couple will say, “It’s our song! They’re playing our song!” It’s not “their song” because they had their own music appreciation class to it together after their date. It’s because they noticed it and it has some significance to their lives for who knows what reason. They took a sad song and made it better because they used it to their own ends, or a song comforted them for some weird reason. That’s just the way people are supposed to use pop music. Or maybe that’s the way people think they’re supposed to use pop music when they don’t also play it.
Rock music, it was music that you used to say you weren’t going to take the same old shit anymore; it was music that you used to say you weren’t going to be bound by the pressures and values of your parents or your bosses anymore. It was something you used as a tool very explicitly. That doesn’t have anything to do with sitting there listening to a Charlie Parker record or sitting there with the score out, listening to a Stravinsky octet or something.
But to me, this second way of listening to music is totally normal. When I was nineteen, I was at somebody’s party and they put on a James Brown record. I went to the corner and listened to it because it was such an interesting piece of music. Then this guy—a very suburban white guy—started dancing around. I remember being horrified, and I glared at him. And he caught me glaring at him, and he’s like, “But it’s James Brown, man, it’s for dancing!” [laughs] and I remember thinking, “It’s for damn dancing? What are you talking about?” My attitude was as bizarre as his behavior was uncool.
SONGWRITING
You have to be different but it can’t just be a grab bag. There has to be some synthesis involved. A lot of artists are good at analysis: they know what they like, they know what things they think are cool, and they like to have their own artistic interventions be marked by those things. But they don’t know how to do that except just to mention those things, or quote them. But with rock music you can’t just have plain eclecticism—there has to be some synthesizing.
You have an obligation to attract people to the forms that you like, and if you can’t attract people to those forms, then you lose. You have to have a way to understand what you’re doing, and it needs to be made in constant reference to that, in both a critical and a fun way.
THE END OF SUBCULTURE?
Social identities associated with music are both less and more segregated. I mean, what are the categories people use? People use the term “hipster” but they do it to be dramatic. It’s so vague. “Hipster” is used to mean someone who is forty years old and makes $160,000 a year, and people use it to mean seventeen-year-olds from Great Neck.
As cultural opposition in a very modest way, indie rock did make sense in the ’90s and in the ’80s, for sure. Now it’s more confused. Before there was such a huge divide in music. I mean, The Jesus Lizard didn’t sound at all like Pearl Jam. But now, The Shins—an indie act—there’s no difference between them and a “non-indie” band. So The Shins are an indie band and Modest Mouse sounds a little bit edgier than The Shins, but it doesn’t function as an oppositional background.
There aren’t those categories like “punk” or “goth” that you can assign to people anymore. People aren’t interested in figuring out new categories that they can organize themselves around and that’s very bad for the understanding of rock music. Rock music very much involves a social element of scenes and groups that have some kind of sociological impact or import, and the music is an expression of that. At the same time, the music organizes people to move them through to some kind of new expression. For example, you think of Bob Dylan moving people in one direction, and The Who presenting themselves at that time as reflecting an audience and the crazy impulses and attitudes of the youth of their day.
“Indie” is totally meaningless. Now it means “different from jock or frat boys.” It’s a category term which people don’t feel the need anymore to define more clearly, or think about defining. Maybe it’s because that’s not how it’s operating. People aren’t consuming music and it’s not being disseminated by means of those categories and with that type of information preprogrammed into it.
TWITTERING MUSICIANS
Twitter, it’s a type of performed intimacy. I mean, it’s not to say that those aren’t the real personas that are Twittering, whether it’s John Mayer or Kim from Les Savy Fav. It’s not like that’s not their real personality; it’s not phony per se. But it’s such a shock, because so much of the performance of being in a rock band—which used to be important to people—was about obscurity, so much about “too cool for school.” Now it’s the opposite, it’s so much about this performed openness.
A FUTURE FOR THE MUSIC INDUSTRY?
I think rock music done with serious intent in a marketplace model is over, it’s going to be over with. I think that without institutional support, it’s in trouble.
The label model is over. Record labels were the banks for music. It used to be the labels, they funded everything. But now the bands have to fund everything—but the bands can’t fund everything. Who has the money to pay for the Internet viral marketing people company—to pay them two grand a month—who has the money? Successful bands don’t even have the money for that.
The way different things get known to people, all things being equal, is through access to whatever is the relevant media. And there’s the way to have access to the relevant media, is by being connected or having money. Now you can say, “Well the old thing of being connected, or being so-and-so and having power and distribution” is made irrelevant, because you can be on your Facebook or social networking and all this . . . but that’s just absurd [laughs]. It’s not absurd for one nugget of information, but it is impossible to get people interested and accustomed to new sorts of music or writing. For that you need the financial, institutional support, which isn’t there anymore.
So if you’re a band that isn’t successful, what can you do? You can all of a sudden be liked by Pitchfork. It might be because you’re good, but it’s also something that has to do with fashion. I don’t mean fashion in a bad sense, necessarily, but it’s going to be a process that doesn’t have to do with anything intrinsic or worthwhile, or even with you being right for the zeitgeist. If nobody can spend money on it, it has to mesh itself in very well to social need. But it’s very hard to see a social need for new music or art forms.
LAST WORDS
Music is more interesting when you’re playing it than when you’re listening to it. When you’re playing it, there’s lots more to appreciate. I think it’s in some movie, like 24 Hour Party People, there’s a line that jazz music is more fun for the people playing it than the people listening to it. The character meant that as a very negative thing, and of course that’s true: it’s music that you understand more when you’re playing it. But even for simple songs, a lot of people will pick up a guitar and play a song they like, and that’s good. The most rudimentary musical activity is worth more to general musical culture than everyone having a million amazing recordings on their iPhone.
Sounding Off: The Fiery Furnaces’ Matthew Friedberger On Making, Marketing, and Listening to Music
Songwriter and multi-intrumentalist Matthew Friedberger is one-half of the indie rock band The Fiery Furnaces. Since their 2003 debut Gallowbird’s Bark, The Fiery Furnaces have released eight albums and become a critically lauded fixture on the contemporary music scene. In 2006, Friedberger also released a solo double album, Winter Women/Holy Language Ghost School.
The following passages are excerpts from an interview conducted in the winter of 2010.
THE ALBUM VS. THE PLAYLIST
Whether they notice it or not, people are more active now in making the context of how they hear their music. They’re not interested in how the makers of the music are presenting the music, or what they want the music to be like. Before, people would listen to records with their friends and they would listen to the whole album.
Now people don’t even listen to individual tracks—they just listen to some long stream of randomly put-together playlists. That’s how they experience music: their friend’s playlist that they copied and it’s four hours long. It would be easy to imagine that they hear even less, even though they listen to it for four hours. It just disappears into this stream—the context of which is nothing. It’s not a mix-tape like “My Fun Summer Mix Tape” or “Rainy Day Mix Tape” and all of the songs had to do with being sad, or some nonsense like that.
People will say, “Oh, this is potentially good, this means the single is back.” It’s this watered-down, dumbed-down punk rock thing where it’s like, “Yeah, singles—they’re good. Singles, that means Bo Diddley and the Sex Pistols and whatever your favorite supposed feminist pop icon singer is, whereas albums means Styx and Kansas.” But when you make an album with a structure in mind, this concerns you, you think about it all the time. As someone making music you have to face squarely that your tastes are obsolete, your practice is obsolete structurally, or however you want to call it. Non-synchronous development . . .
But it doesn’t really affect how you think of the songs you write, or the next album, and it surprises you. You think you’re adaptable; but with rock you’re supposed to do what you think is good.
ROCK & ROLL REGIONALISM
In the ’90s, in the U.S., every town had a free weekly paper, and that was where the action was. That was what determined the terms of the debate. But their influence stopped at the city limits. So you had a totally regional rock music culture across North America through the mid-’80s into 2000. Chicago and D.C. were really emblematic of this. Generally bands didn’t move to new cities. Respectable bands, they stayed where they were, and the first thing you wanted to know about a band was, “Where are they from?” The connection you had, seeing a band, like for example The Jesus Lizard, was very tied into where they were from. It was a more complicated thing than just, “You’re going to have a good time at the show.” You were going to have a good time at the show, but you weren’t going to just get drunk and dance. It was more self-conscious, complicated and more satisfying than that.
Now, bands, they all move. Online, it’s the opposite of this regionalism. People have one opinion that goes immediately to everybody. Something that’s reviewed on Pitchfork.com is immediately on BBC6. The regionalism is gone, and presumably that’s bad.
Rock music, which takes its interests from the processes of vernacularizing commercial music, is not being able to function regionally in the U.S. for the first time. That’s a problem. I think it’s bad since people feel like they’re swimming against a tide, wondering what it is that they should sound like.
TASTE
Music is still a “prestige” item. The music you like is now more important for first impressions both for the way you’re formulating yourself and the way you interact with people. Music is still educating people about whether they’re cool or not. Now people have more anxiety about this stuff, about status and the music they like. There’s more anxiety related to it than to some of their other consumer or lifestyle choices.
People are just as happy with the talk about the object, or the talk about the processes making the object, being interesting. They don’t mind that the object or the processes themselves aren’t interesting. There’s no difference to them. They’re very happy with having Vampire Weekend in place of Elvis Costello. As the media gets smaller and smaller, because of closer small-worldness I guess, success is the only thing that’s interesting.
There’s a philosophy professor, Bernard Gendron, who says much more cogently what I just said. People don’t need elite objects anymore. According to Gendron, there’s very little difference between elite and non-elite objects anymore, it’s just that the discourse around the “elite” object is quite different from the discourse around the “non-elite” object. There isn’t any difference between the objects themselves, only difference between the talk and consumption of them, and that’s probably bad in the long run.
M.I.A. would be the best example. It’s meant to be good; she’s attractive; it’s political, somehow, maybe. And it’s a new form, it’s up-to-date. It’s not a fuddy-duddy-ism. So in this case, so you can be proud of that, that you like this stuff that comes from hip-hop. From a certain point of view, you could analyze her performance and talk about all of these incredible complexities in it, and how “the sample is manipulated.” You can talk and write like that—it’s how people write. Of course you can do the exact same thing with a commercial. It’s a method that doesn’t admit any difference between the objects it applies itself to. It can valorize anything, that kind of an approach.
People are very happy with the object that isn’t very thick—it’s not very rich. It’s only rich in terms of having a process to talk about. But you really have to bring all of that in to the object to have anything. With M.I.A., things like British immigrant culture and things like that, you have to bring all of that in for there to be anything to be interested in.
Bands become popular because they’re providing something people want, and often it has very little to do with the music. The music itself is not as important. It’s still important, but it doesn’t have the same force. It has something like that prestige and people can get agitated about it, but it doesn’t have that force in the same way.
MUSIC REVIEWS & POPULARITY
I know somebody in a band—a very good, worthwhile band—and they said to me, “I don’t know how to become popular unless you win the lottery on the Internet.” Of course this person meant one Web site in particular [Pitchforkmedia.com]. So becoming popular had nothing to do with playing a million shows or anything like that. It had to do with this nearly perfectly random process that people—the music industry and its army of publicists—don’t have any power to intervene in. What she said made a lot of sense; that is how it seems.
We [The Fiery Furnaces] benefited from this at first. Pitchfork gave our second record, Blueberry Boat, a rave review. Then all of a sudden we had fans. I knew what Pitchfork was—I knew that they were a Web site that reviewed music—but I didn’t know they were special. But I remember a friend of my girlfriend’s at the time saying about the review, “That’s such a big deal!” She’s the person who told me it was a big deal—this woman who’s a serious painter, not someone from a record label.
So we had fans, but at the same time, we had, “Oh, they’re just a band—they’re liked by those dipshits, or pussies, on the Internet.” So instantaneously, that’s why we were popular and that’s also why we were unpopular (besides the fact that people did or didn’t like the band). We would meet people playing at shows or festivals who were interested in us because we were one of “those bands.”
In Britain, their scene has its own dynamic—NME and those magazines are still important for bands. When we started, it was like you were going to go to Britain, and all the magazines would write about you because they wanted to write about you first. It’s done quickly; it’s a quick cycle. Then you have those pieces of press and that’s what you show to the people in New York. They’ll write about you, and then you have your fans. That’s what it was like with The White Stripes and The Strokes. And that was still going on when we started. Our first record, in Britain, was pretty positively reviewed, and we were another band from New York and all this bullshit.
Our second record was a big failure for the people in London. Whereas in the U.S. it was this big success—you could say, arbitrarily. The person who gave the review at Pitchfork liked it and was willing to champion it. They liked the album because it was prog-rocky in a way that wasn’t too prog-rocky for people, and they wanted to find a record that they were clever to like. I think it was very arbitrary that people liked Blueberry Boat, because that record doesn’t have much use except to listen to it—it doesn’t set your mood very well, it’s not very usable in the normal ways that records are usable. People were really going to have to like it because they’re told that it’s okay to like. There’s no way they’re going to like it unless socially they felt safe.
Now it’s this tiny, tiny group of people whose opinions are disproportionately important for a certain type of affluent, leisure culture.
In the past, you would have two bands that really were the same, had the same clothes and everything, and usually the difference would be who had more money spent on them. The best example of a band breaking out the old-fashioned way, but in this totally new climate, is MGMT, because there was money there. It used to be if you liked the look and sound of these kids, sign them up and spend a huge amount of money on them, draw up how to market them, and they’d be successful. With MGMT, it was a matter of money, the record company spent a huge amount of money. So, there’s a huge poster of MGMT in an airport in Paris, people like them there, there’s no mystery about the way it works. Seeing that almost makes you feel better because you can understand it—you understand how it works.
When it seems more arbitrary, it makes you more worried. Now it’s a media situation where people theoretically should have an easy time intervening but actually have a harder time intervening, so that makes it a lot more worrisome.
USE AND APPRECIATION
The fun of making this kind of music is you do have to give it up to people who are not going to listen to it in the same spirit that you made it or listened to it—that’s a given. And that’s the good thing about it; you get to put it out in the world and people make other things with it, and you get to benefit from that. You get the benefit of that experience, and it’s a very interesting experience personally.
You want a rich misinterpretation. Sure it’s more gratifying when people say what you want to be said about you in the way you want it to be said. But that’s not how it works, and so that’s why negative reviews are more satisfying to read sometimes; because in positive reviews they like it in ways that you don’t, that you think make it ridiculous, and sometimes in negative reviews they dislike it in a way that makes you think, “Oh yeah, that’s what you are trying to do, that’s right.”
It goes out there in the world and you have no control over it, and you have to keep that in mind. That’s the way it is with any artifact, I suppose, but that’s more explicitly the case when it comes to art, mass-produced art. I think Glenn Gould said something like, “Recording is a mix of the autocratic and the democratic.” I get to do whatever I want making the record—I get to manipulate it and strangle it and do whatever I like to it—and then it goes out there and people listen to it in circumstances or in ways that I have no control over and that I can’t fathom. That’s the way it works. But for people to put it to their own ends, you can’t just give them an empty vessel or a blank canvas. It needs to be full of your marks and of your intentions for it to be anything that they’re going to be able to manipulate to their ends.
That’s the excitement about popular music: it’s a “use” music, but it’s something that’s made for no specific purpose by definition. It might be dance music, but people are going to use it to drive down the road or use it to relax, sitting and reading a book. You have no idea what people are going to do. The objects you make have no authority. These aesthetic practices—there’s no font of legitimacy.
I don’t personally listen to music as a soundtrack to my life. I like to listen to this music, whatever it may be, and I think about it. I didn’t think about myself and my ex-girlfriend, or the time I struck out in baseball in Little League, or the time I hit a grand slam, or more important things than that.
But other people, they do use it that way and that’s how it was supposed to be. So a couple will say, “It’s our song! They’re playing our song!” It’s not “their song” because they had their own music appreciation class to it together after their date. It’s because they noticed it and it has some significance to their lives for who knows what reason. They took a sad song and made it better because they used it to their own ends, or a song comforted them for some weird reason. That’s just the way people are supposed to use pop music. Or maybe that’s the way people think they’re supposed to use pop music when they don’t also play it.
Rock music, it was music that you used to say you weren’t going to take the same old shit anymore; it was music that you used to say you weren’t going to be bound by the pressures and values of your parents or your bosses anymore. It was something you used as a tool very explicitly. That doesn’t have anything to do with sitting there listening to a Charlie Parker record or sitting there with the score out, listening to a Stravinsky octet or something.
But to me, this second way of listening to music is totally normal. When I was nineteen, I was at somebody’s party and they put on a James Brown record. I went to the corner and listened to it because it was such an interesting piece of music. Then this guy—a very suburban white guy—started dancing around. I remember being horrified, and I glared at him. And he caught me glaring at him, and he’s like, “But it’s James Brown, man, it’s for dancing!” [laughs] and I remember thinking, “It’s for damn dancing? What are you talking about?” My attitude was as bizarre as his behavior was uncool.
SONGWRITING
You have to be different but it can’t just be a grab bag. There has to be some synthesis involved. A lot of artists are good at analysis: they know what they like, they know what things they think are cool, and they like to have their own artistic interventions be marked by those things. But they don’t know how to do that except just to mention those things, or quote them. But with rock music you can’t just have plain eclecticism—there has to be some synthesizing.
You have an obligation to attract people to the forms that you like, and if you can’t attract people to those forms, then you lose. You have to have a way to understand what you’re doing, and it needs to be made in constant reference to that, in both a critical and a fun way.
THE END OF SUBCULTURE?
Social identities associated with music are both less and more segregated. I mean, what are the categories people use? People use the term “hipster” but they do it to be dramatic. It’s so vague. “Hipster” is used to mean someone who is forty years old and makes $160,000 a year, and people use it to mean seventeen-year-olds from Great Neck.
As cultural opposition in a very modest way, indie rock did make sense in the ’90s and in the ’80s, for sure. Now it’s more confused. Before there was such a huge divide in music. I mean, The Jesus Lizard didn’t sound at all like Pearl Jam. But now, The Shins—an indie act—there’s no difference between them and a “non-indie” band. So The Shins are an indie band and Modest Mouse sounds a little bit edgier than The Shins, but it doesn’t function as an oppositional background.
There aren’t those categories like “punk” or “goth” that you can assign to people anymore. People aren’t interested in figuring out new categories that they can organize themselves around and that’s very bad for the understanding of rock music. Rock music very much involves a social element of scenes and groups that have some kind of sociological impact or import, and the music is an expression of that. At the same time, the music organizes people to move them through to some kind of new expression. For example, you think of Bob Dylan moving people in one direction, and The Who presenting themselves at that time as reflecting an audience and the crazy impulses and attitudes of the youth of their day.
“Indie” is totally meaningless. Now it means “different from jock or frat boys.” It’s a category term which people don’t feel the need anymore to define more clearly, or think about defining. Maybe it’s because that’s not how it’s operating. People aren’t consuming music and it’s not being disseminated by means of those categories and with that type of information preprogrammed into it.
TWITTERING MUSICIANS
Twitter, it’s a type of performed intimacy. I mean, it’s not to say that those aren’t the real personas that are Twittering, whether it’s John Mayer or Kim from Les Savy Fav. It’s not like that’s not their real personality; it’s not phony per se. But it’s such a shock, because so much of the performance of being in a rock band—which used to be important to people—was about obscurity, so much about “too cool for school.” Now it’s the opposite, it’s so much about this performed openness.
A FUTURE FOR THE MUSIC INDUSTRY?
I think rock music done with serious intent in a marketplace model is over, it’s going to be over with. I think that without institutional support, it’s in trouble.
The label model is over. Record labels were the banks for music. It used to be the labels, they funded everything. But now the bands have to fund everything—but the bands can’t fund everything. Who has the money to pay for the Internet viral marketing people company—to pay them two grand a month—who has the money? Successful bands don’t even have the money for that.
The way different things get known to people, all things being equal, is through access to whatever is the relevant media. And there’s the way to have access to the relevant media, is by being connected or having money. Now you can say, “Well the old thing of being connected, or being so-and-so and having power and distribution” is made irrelevant, because you can be on your Facebook or social networking and all this . . . but that’s just absurd [laughs]. It’s not absurd for one nugget of information, but it is impossible to get people interested and accustomed to new sorts of music or writing. For that you need the financial, institutional support, which isn’t there anymore.
So if you’re a band that isn’t successful, what can you do? You can all of a sudden be liked by Pitchfork. It might be because you’re good, but it’s also something that has to do with fashion. I don’t mean fashion in a bad sense, necessarily, but it’s going to be a process that doesn’t have to do with anything intrinsic or worthwhile, or even with you being right for the zeitgeist. If nobody can spend money on it, it has to mesh itself in very well to social need. But it’s very hard to see a social need for new music or art forms.
LAST WORDS
Music is more interesting when you’re playing it than when you’re listening to it. When you’re playing it, there’s lots more to appreciate. I think it’s in some movie, like 24 Hour Party People, there’s a line that jazz music is more fun for the people playing it than the people listening to it. The character meant that as a very negative thing, and of course that’s true: it’s music that you understand more when you’re playing it. But even for simple songs, a lot of people will pick up a guitar and play a song they like, and that’s good. The most rudimentary musical activity is worth more to general musical culture than everyone having a million amazing recordings on their iPhone.
Interview has been edited and condensed.