Remember that awesome movie, Almost Famous? Remember that scene where Patrick Fugit tells Kate Hudson that he has to go home? And then she plants a jazz-hand in his face and tells him that he is, in fact, home already? Wasn’t that great? That was a great scene. It underscored the kids’ dwindling sense of traditional family values while giving us all a great reason to go out and have sex with rock stars. If we get attached enough to them, then we will experience the grandest of all transcendences; we will find our true home. Shit, that was a good movie.
Here’s the thing. For all of Cameron Crowe’s philosophical meanderings, he was completely right with this one. With the right music, with the right environment, and with the right amount of self awareness, we can find our true home. It might be on a completely different plane than the one we are on now, but it’s there, and all it takes is, at the very least, a truly transcendent artist that will see the trip through with you. Today I’m going to talk about the artists that we call ‘home’.
It’s one thing to call some band ‘the greatest thing ever’. That sort of BJ compliment is thrown around more than (insert current easy actress) at a Pdiddy partay. It’s something else entirely to say that a band or artist is ‘home’ for you, that no matter what, they were there for you then and they’ll be there for you forever. They were there at the beginning; they’re often one of the first bands you ever hear, and they’ll be there at the end. Hell, maybe you’ll get one of their songs played at your funeral. Wouldn’t that be something? Perhaps not if your ‘home’ band is Porno For Pyros, but you get the idea. They’re your standby, always. If you’ve got to run, but you need a CD to pop into the car real fast, they’re going to be the ones you pick. They’re probably the band you’ve seen most live, or wished you’d seen most live. Or perhaps they’re the band you don’t ever want to tell anyone about, since you’re a giant indie music snob and the thought of all your friends knowing that you secretly love Hootie and The Blowfish more than Radiohead is too much to bear.
Mostly, this band is something you heard as a kid because your parents weren’t complete dorks and played some good shit back in the day. Something about the sound caught your tiny little ears and stayed there for good. There was no way for you to explain it then and maybe not even now, but it was there and you were a fan for life. For someone like Gloomchen it appears to be Madonna, but that’s just the thing. These artists are oddly rarely spoken about from the folks that call them ‘home’. I asked Sara, a good friend of mine, to take part in this column, and she proved my point pretty soundly:
“For someone like myself, music has been a necessity. I have spent years cultivating my own personal tastes. In some ways it has been like defining myself, and my own personality. It’s been in my blood in ways moreso I think than most people, who merely see it as background noise. However, it wasn’t always there. There’s a moment, a subtle one, where you hear something that tells you that’s where you need to be. An epiphany I guess, where you see who you are, and you start to become who you will be. And music of all things can do that for you. It’s that one band, or group that no matter how old you get will always be there, telling you how far you’ve come. They are like a comforting blanket, or the North Star calling you home.
For me, that moment came when I was a small child (earlier, than most I would say) and I heard the song “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys on the radio. All I knew at that age was that I liked it. Eight year olds don’t care how large the band’s following is, who writes their songs or whether they can play their own instruments. They only know what sounds good and I loved that song. My dad loved it too and he would play me other songs of theirs, telling me stories about how they came about. I loved those moments because I felt part of something I had not known previously existed. I remember asking my dad one day a couple of years after Kokomo’s popularity had faded why they no longer played the song on the radio. He explained to me that once a song’s initial popularity has waned, then radio play becomes scarce. I remembered being afraid that I would never hear the song again and thought that to be fundamentally unfair for the radio to do that.
Afterwards, every time I heard any of their songs it was an enormous treat for me. I would get dad to turn up the radio and we would sing along to their music. My first CD that I ever received was the Beach Boys album “Still Cruis’n”. To this day every time I hear Kokomo on the radio I am taken back to that place, that security, that warmth. I’m taken to where music has no conditions and where a melody is the most important thing in the world. I am excited beyond all measure. I saw the Beach Boys in concert for the first time last summer and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. They will always be my epiphany, my introduction into that world and I will never forget that.”
‘Home’ bands are more personal than any other because you forgive them for everything on account of them touching you in ways regular life simply can’t. Like Sara said, it doesn’t matter if maybe they don’t write their own material or play instruments; the music and the band itself are good enough. It’s often feeling and little else that does the job. While it may come to the point where you know the address and phone numbers and list of ex girlfriends of these bands, you never become jaded. This is why U2 is the biggest band in the world. There are so many millions of people out there who don’t give a shit if Bono doesn’t pay his taxes and never takes off his glasses. They are touched on a great level by their music, and that’s all that matters.
It comes to a point where the band melts in with other memories and becomes inseperable. Ever wondered just how you still enjoy those cliche classic rock songs? It’s likely because they’re tied to something that happened to you when those songs were playing. Maybe you scored a goal and ‘We Are The Champions’ played in your head. Maybe you scored and ‘Ramblin Man’ played over the speakers at a party. Maybe you got drunk outside your girlfriends’ house as a teenager and her Dad was a big Queen fan and would blare it from the house all night. Whichever the case, it’s love by association as much as it is genuine. With memories tied to songs, these bands create soundtracks to your life that stick with you through all your fleeting moments of nostalgia.
David, a reader of mine, chimed in with the artist he considered ‘home’:
“Mine is a bit of a two-edged sword, as while it helps pick me up when I’m feeling down, it was also one of the leading causes of a big down period.
Don’t hold it against me, but mine is Mariah Carey. The first CD i ever got was ‘Music Box’ for my 11th birthday. Back then, everybody loved her because of ‘Dreamlover’, since they could imagine what’d they’d do with her in that big wheat field. But I was young then, and such thoughts didnt occur to me then. Cuteness ruled all, and that she was.
Was infatuated with her until I was about 15. Sorta tailed off after that, think I was protesting her changing from the innocent girl with the big operatic voice into the ‘grown-up artist’ that is still all the rage.
When one guy found out about this, he told all his friends. And I got ribbed incessantly about it for two years. Imagine hearing the same ribbing for two years, was not fun at all.
Still listen to her now, as I always find one song from each album that kicks ass. In between my current trance phase, ‘Make It Happen’ from her ‘MTV Unplugged’ CD is a good picker-upper and makes you want to go out into the world, with the knowledge you can do anything you set your mind to.
Her music is a reprieve for me, as it takes you back to those carefree days when paying the mobile bill, working a 40+ week and all the bad things in the world were irrelevant.
Look forward to hearing who your ‘go-to’ artist is.”
Because you almost always have your ‘home’ artist chosen long before you’ve experienced the full world of great music out there, it’s always chosen before the lines of ‘cool’ are drawn. This is why our ‘home’ artists are often private; you like them whether others do or don’t because you chose them long before anyone told you what to chose. It’s a very unique circumstance as a fan of music. One artist in everyone’s selection of bands is chosen completely free of peer pressure. It’s not free of media pressure because you likely first heard it on the radio or on television, but even then, television and radio certainly don’t know that you’re going to create that connection. It’s a beautiful little situation, really. One person choosing one band completely free of any forms of pressure. I don’t see how purer the music industry could get.
And perhaps this is why we connect with this artist more than any other; It’s one of the few individual choices we get in this world. The cynic in all of us will always question other music. As music lovers, we do what all lovers do. We fall in and out of love with so many bands, and every aspect of their art affects our love. We forgive them far less than we do our ‘home’. And this is where our real homes come into play to the metaphor. Whether it be one’s parents or whoever raises us, the place we call home in life is forgivable for so much. We may not always want to be there (and hence you may not always want to listen to the Goo Goo Dolls) but when we do, it doesn’t disappoint. The music you call home is just as much a part of the idea of home in your mind as the place where you store all your shit.
And really, don’t confuse this with freakish fandom. It certainly isn’t necessary to like every song by your ‘home’ band. Hell, theoretically you don’t have to like any of the songs in particular. Just the idea of the artist can be enough. This is another reason U2 is the biggest band in the world.
I know so many people who hate the Tragically Hip. My step brothers can’t stand them. My girlfriend is the same. Several folks at school think they’re worse than Gordon Lightfoot and Celine Dion combined. I also know that just about nobody outside of Canada knows who the hell they are. I, however, hang my hat on them rather comfortably. They’ve been there for me since my dad began buying their albums and playing them loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
Just about every Tragically Hip song resonates something within me that I can’t fully explain. Maybe it has to do with growing up in the praries. It’s ironic, because as a music journalist my job is to put to words feelings conveyed about music (and you’ll see me sort of successfully do that in my part of the ultimate summer mixes this week) but I can’t do it with the Tragically hip. I can’t fully convey what they mean to me, because they’re my home in music, and what can anybody really say about their home? It’s home. There’s no greater compliment you can give a band.
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NEWS
Stone Roses reunite for Glastonbury
IAN BROWN appeared onstage with former bandmate MANI at the end of a GLASTONBURY set packed with STONE ROSES classics.
At the end of his headline show, Brown returned to the stage with his old bass player, who himself had earlier played the Pyramid Stage with Primal Scream, and apologised for the curfew preventing him from playing on.
Brown also called on the crowd to give a big hand for the Eavis family, and told the crowd of “keep it organic and don’t panic”.
The singer performed to a huge crowd, playing a number of Roses songs including ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, ‘Sally Cinnamon’, ‘Waterfall’ and ‘Made Of Stone’.
In the early part of the set, he joked about the weather and urged the crowd to start dancing.
Brown’s hit ‘FEAR’ was the last song to be played on the stage for two years.
Credit – NME
The End of File Sharing?
The Supreme Court (surely a computer-savvy bunch) ruled today, unanimously, that internet file-sharing services are to take the blame if their intended purpose is for users to illegally download music and movies. In the court’s opinion, Justice David H. Souter wrote, “We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”
We all know that the RIAA and other such groups are claiming losses of millions of dollars to illegal downloads. This obviously affects larger artists more than smaller ones: Britney more than Annie, for example.
While this is good news for record companies and movie studios, it is most certainly bad news for the consumer electronics industry, which has seen great growth recently with burnable CDs/DVDs and MP3 players such as Apple’s iPod. With devices that can store over 10,000 songs, it would be difficult to find an iPod user that has paid $10,000 to the iTunes Music Store for each song.
Now the case will return to a lower court, which previously ruled in favor of Grokster Ltd. In previous hearings, two lower courts had ruled in favor of Grokster, based on the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision that Sony could not be held responsible if its customers used VCRs to illegally copy movies. The original rulings argued that the peer-to-peer services can indeed be used in legal ways and that the files were not hosted by the services themselves.
Justice Souter also said he believed that the file-sharing services could be found guilty by determining whether or not they marketed the product in a way that promotes illegal sharing.
This ruling also raises issues of what other mediums can be held liable under this legalese. Can Memorex be sued if their blank CD-Rs are used to pass music back and forth? What about AIM and e-mail services and their ability to transfer files?
By the way, today the Supreme Court also decided to continue to allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed on government property. But we’re Pitchfork, not CNN.
– Credit – PitchforkMedia
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LINKS
Gordi Whitelaw goes first in IP’s Ultimate Summer Music Mixtape feature. I go second. Yeah, I’ve got to follow THIS GUY, who wrote such an amazing column on jazz and classical that now I have to book a one way ticket to Italy just to swim in the water and play horn in the street.
Jeffrey R Fernandez doesn’t agree, but also doesn’t technically disagree with Spin’s top records of the last 20 years list. I personally think it’s f*cking lazy journalism to make such a list. Music is too subjective to be confied to any number other than sales, and since we can all agree that sales does not equal quality, then absolutely no list can be made about such a topic. The only things I like about Spin are Chuck Klosterman and Dave Eggers, two phenomenol writers who put out excellent columns. The rest is just blither.
Tom D’Errico puts out a small mid-year report on the world of metal, and I feel so uneducated on the subject.
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Lyrics To Live By
Third Planet – Modest Mouse
Everything that keeps me together is falling apart, I’ve got
this thing that I consider my only art of f*cking people over
My boss just quit the job says he’s goin’ out to find blind
spots and he’ll do it
The 3rd Planet is sure that they’re being watched by an
eye in the sky that can’t be stopped
When you get to the promise land your gonna shake that
eyes hand
Your heart felt good it was drippin’ pitch and made of wood
And your hands and knees felt cold and wet on the grass to me
Outside naked, shiverin’ looking blue, from the cold
sunlight that’s reflected off the moon
Baby cum angels fly around you reminding you we used
to be three and not just two
And that’s how the world began
And that’s how the world will end
A 3rd had just been made and we were swimming in the
water, didn’t know then was it a son was it a daughter
When it occurred to me that the animals are swimming
around in the water in the oceans in our bodies and
another had been found another ocean on the planet
given that our blood is just like the Atlantic
And how
The universe is shaped exactly like the earth if you go
straight long enough you’ll end up where you were
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Next week, I’m talking about Broken Social Scene and The Arcade Fire, two bands that are changing the face of pop music one party-on-stage at a time.
Party On, Garth.
