We Used To Wait #3: I Wish My Cat Could Talk

September 3rd, 2010 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

The other day a funny thing happened. I had just parked my car in the Meijer parking lot and I was ready to run in and grab the pints of ice cream that I came for, but then a song started playing and it was so good that I re-settled in my seat, lit another cigarette, and turned it up. I felt like a bit of a douche, listening to Best Coast by myself late at night in a parking lot. But, seriously:

We talked about Crazy For You, Best Coast’s debut full-length, a little bit on the most recent episode of Audio Assault (gratuitous plug), but I wanted to talk a little more about it here. I was a casual fan of the band’s pre-CFY output but, on the whole, somewhat unimpressed -- didn’t Vivian Girls do this, and a bunch of other bands that sound like Vivian Girls? Isn’t this washed-out style of lo-fi grrrl-pop a little played out by this point? I still think it is, but what Best Coast do is pretty far removed from what the cool kids are doing in Brooklyn. There’s a tangible sadness to these songs, a melancholy so deep that it becomes totally compelling if you let it envelop you.

Part of me feels like I’m cheating by listening to Best Coast -- I stole this record. Should I go pay $12 for it at Best Buy? I had a very difficult moment this week when I found out the new Jenny Lewis record (Jenny and Johnny, actually, but we all know what the people are paying for, right?) was released on Tuesday. I barely miss fishing Pirate Bay and pulling in ten records a week; I never had time to listen to all that, and it was distracting. What I really miss is the actual theft; getting a new record the day it comes out (or, realistically, a few weeks prior) when my bank account is distinctly short in the bones department. Getting music free like that -- consuming it like a normal consumer, sans the one commercially important part of the process, removes all the stress from being a music fan. I have a much easier time accepting an album for what it is when I don’t have anything tangibly invested in it. I know that’s lazy and wrong, but I’m poor. And I love music.

In the end, there are just too many options to ever be satisfied with any choice -- this is, coincidentally, what I think will actually be the undoing of our civilization. I was researching barbarism last night and one of the key traits of barbarism is increased leisure time. If you log on to Twitter in the middle of the workday, you will discover very quickly that all anybody has these days is leisure time. All of this luxury has made us barbaric again, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing -- not doing much of anything allows us plenty of time to go all deep-focus on our personalities and cultivate the eccentricities that make us individuals. That is the awesome part of the modern age. The drawback is that the things most people are naturally interested in are trivial and stupid.

To wit: I have the free time to write a weekly column about not listening to music. But I feel like this is the only way to truly rebel against a society that prizes infinite options; instead of grabbing handfuls of everything in sight and sorting it out later, I’m forcing myself to ask questions (of, uh, myself) and deciding what is important enough to spend money on. Money is everything; without money, we quite literally die. Capitalism is trying to destroy us by offering so much fare to spend our hard-earned sawbucks on; cherry-picking the best stuff, the stuff that’s actually worth engaging with, is equivalent to brewing a pot of coffee at home instead of spending three dollars on a cup of joe at Starbucks. The most satisfying word in my vocabulary is “no,” and I’m finding a lot of honest joy in using it hundreds of times a day.

But, wrapping up on the Best Coast tip: I don’t like Beth Cosentino’s music despite the references to weed and talking felines. I love Best Coast because of that stuff -- because it’s personal, and feels fragile. And, what the fuck -- who among us here hasn’t gotten high and tried to communicate with our pets? This recent wave of lo-fi stuff reminds me of what I loved about singer-songwriters when I was going through my singer-songwriter phase, and it’s also the stuff I love about watching stand-up comedy or bullshitting with my friends over a case of beer. With all of our major problems so far out of reach (the war, the oil spill, the Tea Party) and so impossible to correct in any way from an individual stance, we’re forced to examine the mundane details of life -- the stuff that frustrates us every day that we know we’ll never be able to change.

For instance, the employee bathroom at my workplace has an exposed sewer drain in the floor, and from that hole the smell of ripe feces rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the last ten dumping crimes to occur there. The bathroom always smells terrible, and my ten-cup-a-day coffee habit forces me to visit this wasteland on an extremely regular basis. The smell will never leave, regardless of how much bleach I pour down the drain or how many air-fresheners the cleaning crew installs; I wake up in the morning and I know I’m going to smell everybody’s excrement multiple times during the day. I have no control over the situation, short of quitting my job and getting evicted from my apartment. If somebody wrote a song about a shitty-smelling bathroom, that would become my favorite song, and I would pay money to own it. I would listen to it everyday. Sometimes I wish that drain could talk.

Records I enjoyed the “old-fashioned” way:

The Beatles -- Let It Be*
Led Zeppelin -- II
The Police -- Synchronicity

Records I wanted to download:

Jenny And Johnny -- I’m Having Fun Now**

*Let It Be will serve as the primary focus of next week’s WUTW installment -- I have a lot to say about my favorite Beatles record.
** I will purchase this when funds become available next week and probably discuss it.