Traditions and Nostalgia

If nothing else, I’m a nostalgic person. I played through the entire Mass Effect series over the course of several whirlwind months a few years back, and one of the things that stuck with me the most, out of the hundreds of hours of gameplay, was a single conversation with one of the characters. The character, Thane, was a member of an alien race who had the ability to relive any moment of his life with perfect clarity. I remember watching this scene and genuinely thinking ‘that would be pretty cool’ until the character continued talking and convinced me otherwise. I find it worrying that “cool!” was my initial reaction to what is ultimately a curse.

I catch myself waxing poetic things that happened mere months ago. And it’s not a ‘aw, wasn’t that nice?’ kind of feeling, it’s more of a crippling ‘I WANT TO GO BACK’ kind of feeling. I’m 23, and I don’t feel like I should be that nostalgic over something that happened a couple months ago. To make things worse, this nostalgia compounds on itself and becomes more powerful as the events become further and further away. The plus side to this is that I am often the centerpiece of my own nostalgic tendencies. That sounds incredibly absorbed and self-centered, but it’s actually just a side-effect of how much I love to be alone.

Because the feeling can be so overpowering, I prefer to think of my nostalgia trips as self-imposed traditions. Whether you like it or not, everyone has tradition forced upon them. Every Christmas we collectively experience the same traditions as a society. The same music is being played in the stores, the same specials are being aired on TV, and even the fronts of buildings change to reflect the candy cane color scheme. Hell, we spend time, money, and natural resources wrapping our trees in little lights just because it’s a specific month. Christmas is the only time we collectively change our environment, and more importantly, these changes are all completely out of our control. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Wiccan, or a Scientologist, you’re gonna hear those tunes over the course of those two months whether you like it or not. And this isn’t some “war on Christmas” rant, the point is sometimes seasons carry traditions which overpower everything else around them.

Sometimes traditions don’t make sense, but we do them because they make us feel good. As Community pointed out in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” Christmas isn’t about presents, or food, or even Jesus: Christmas is about family. Christmas is about literally and figuratively getting closer to your family and using them as support to get through the coldest, darkest, harshest time of the year. Christmas isn’t for Christians, Christmas is symbolic: it’s is about what your family does. Now, what your family does may entail presents, food, or Jesus, but in the end, it’s human connection that carries us through what would otherwise be the most unforgiving season of the year.

Because I spend so much time alone, music is often the key element to my own nostalgia. My iTunes contains a worrying number of playlists tied to specific years, seasons, and even days. As a 23-year-old I’m accustomed to viewing life in school-like quarters (I guess normal people call them seasons?), and the changing of the seasons always comes with a new rotation of music on my iPhone. I feel like that’s relatively normal, but the problem is that I often reinforce my own nostalgia by recreating the circumstances the following year.

I’ll waste dozens of hours listening to a specific podcast, revisiting a specific album, or even playing through an entire video game just because it brings back a fraction of what I had felt at a previous time. Why am I so obsessed with recreating the past? It’s not like I have any regrets. I’m not trying to make things better, or take back what I’ve done… It just feels good.

I don’t think nostalgia trips are necessarily a bad thing, but I worry that this zealot-like commitment to recreating the past may be holding me back from missing opportunities in the present. 2016 has been the best year of my life, and I owe that entirely to the new experiences I’ve had this year. The people I’ve meet, the things I’ve done, all the amazing things I never thought I’d be a part of… See? I’m already getting nostalgic about a year that’s not even over yet. The point is I’ve had a great year, and I owe it all to trying something new. There’s something to be said from learning from the past, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with revisiting your personal history, but I suppose it’s all a matter of not falling into it completely.

Over the next several months I’m sure I’ll make specific posts dedicated to individual pieces of my nostalgia, and I’m starting to realize that’s the point of this blog. I think if I can document this all somewhere I’ll be able to get these nostalgic demons off my chest and move on to bigger, better, and newer things. There’s so much beauty in the world, and I just want to share some of what I’ve found. Sometimes it’s as simple as a week over winter break that I spent shut in with a video game. Sometimes it’s an album whose opening chords are so powerful that I can’t help but be transported back to a specific time and place. Even if no one is reading this, I think it will be a great exercise to document my personal traditions and show how these things far in the past still impact me to this very day.

I feel like these personal traditions, the things you do by yourself, aren’t something people talk about openly a lot. But they’re important. I believe personal traditions are some of the most unadulterated experiences we have as humans, something that shows who we are and what we find important. We’re all a collection of favorite albums, this is just mine.

The Name of This Blog

In November of 2006 two of my loves came together in a way that I never could have expected. After another grueling day of middle school, I rode my bike over to a friends house for (what I assumed would be) yet another innocuous afternoon of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This was a game that my parents had expressly forbidden me from playing, so I already had a bit of an adrenaline rush going as I turned down his street. I arrived ready to help him joyfully commit drive-bys and outrun the cops, but I arrived to find something completely different: Guitar Hero II.

Guitar Hero became my obsession. That plastic guitar represented an object that combined the two things I cared about most in life: music and video games. It also mixed these two passions with my then-burgeoning hobby of (real) guitar playing. All of these things came together and took the form of one convenient package that tickled my brain and became the main topic of conversation among my group of friends for the next year. As we all practiced our plastic shredding it quickly became a race to see who could work their way from “Easy” all the way up to “Expert” first. There was something epic about being the first one within our group to have completed “Free Bird” on the next difficulty before anyone else.

While the competition was certainly a key factor in the game’s longevity among my group of friends, the primary reason that I kept playing was music discovery. The game turned me onto literally dozens of classic rock acts, most of whom I’d never listened to before. There were major bands like The Police, Iggy Pop, and Deep Purple who were all exposed to me first through this game. The songs included in Guitar Hero II’s soundtrack offered forays into these artist’s extensive discographies, and in some cases, the songs featured are still my favorites by the artists.

But it wasn’t just legacy acts, Guitar Hero II also included a fair number of smaller, more obscure acts and up-and-comers who I had absolutely never heard of. Bands like The Toadies, The Sword, and The Living End all became obsessions of mine over the next several years of high school. These licensed songs were all part of the “career mode” you had to play though as a part of the game’s natural progression. Guitar Hero also included “bonus songs” from lesser-known indie artists that you could purchase with in-game money that you earned from playing gigs (just like a real rocker!)

I could probably write a page (or at least a paragraph) about what each one of the songs in Guitar Hero II means to me, but one song in particular “The Fall of Pangea” by Valient Thorr stuck out to me. What the fuck did ‘the fall of pangea’ mean? I didn’t know, but it sounded wicked.

A year later in 2007 my Guitar Hero obsession had died down and I had moved back to traditional video games. In the winter of 2007 I was playing a game called skate. which had a similarly kick-ass soundtrack. Within its 40+ song setlist was a song by Valient Thorr curiously enough. “The Man Behind the Curtain” was the band’s first breakout hit, a song which centered around a blistering guitar riff that frequently (and abruptly) pauses allowing for the booming drums and manic vocals cut into the track. The song was so infectious that I was compelled to download it in addition to the rest of the band’s second album Total Universe Man.

Within Total Universe Man there are several tracks consisting only of spoken dialogue over subdued instrumentals. One such track is “Intermission: Thesis Of Infinite Measure” which is a rambling paranoid stream of consciousness on love, humanity, and music. I think that the track speaks for itself more than a lyric sheet ever could, but the ending phrase “swim into the sounds” is something that has stuck with me ever since I first listened to the album. The fact that it’s repeated five times makes it feel all the more haunting and important.

While the line is poetic on its own, I’ve always read it as something deeper. The song’s “structure” is loose at best, but it’s ending is crystal clear: it is a plea. Using the analogy of swimming, our narrator repeats the final line five times for emphasis. He wants the listener to shut off their mind and be absorbed by the music. Swim into the abyss of the melody and be consumed by the sound. Lose yourself in the songs and become surrounded by nothing but music. Swim into the sounds.

I think that’s a beautiful notion. Sometimes it’s all you want to do, just float on your back out to sea, or in this case, float into a space where the music is focused on so wholly that nothing else matters. It represents the ideal way to experience music, with a blank mind and an open heart. Like the tide, you need to let music carry you wherever it needs to. You can’t fight it, and you can’t stop it.

I chose this phrase as the name for my blog because it not only depicts this beautiful, poetic, trance-like way to experience music, but also because it represents so much. It represents a formative time in my life when me and all of my friends were bonded together over a plastic instrument. It represents all the music that that game (and its sequels) turned me onto. It represents a time in my life I’ll never get back, but that I wouldn’t trade in for anything. Guitar Hero represents one of the most important moments of in musical journey, and it turned me onto an embarrassing number of bands.

On some level, there’s a weird stigma to admit that you “discovered” something as basic as “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin'” through a video game (much less one where you press colored buttons and pretend to play along with it), but hey, I was 13. I’d heard maybe 10% of the songs on the soundtrack before playing Guitar Hero II, but I came out of it knowing more about classic rock than I ever would have otherwise. It educated me on old classics and turned me onto new bands I’d never heard of. I gained a greater appreciation for the guitar as an instrument. It led me down a musical rabbit hole that informed my taste and impacted the way I think about music for the rest of my life. It was the first time I’d ever been so invested in a video game because I was getting out of it as much as I was putting into it. From a snobby “music fan” standpoint, it’s hyper-embarrassing to admit how much I got out of these games, but sometimes you just have to not care. Sometimes you just have to let the music take over and gently float you downstream. Sometimes you have to let the music take you on a journey and let it lay you aground wherever it pleases. Sometimes you just have to swim into the sound.

Hip-Hop and Musical Adventurousness

I never thought I’d be a hip-hop guy. I first became musically-conscious in my early teens and pledged allegiance to “rock” early on which, in my mind, meant swearing off everything that I perceived as mainstream. The classic rock that was so revelatory in middle school expanded my horizons and led me to grunge, metal, and stoner rock phases throughout my late teens. By the time I entered college I’d never genuinely been a fan of a single hip-hop artist apart from the now-defunct comedic hip-hop duo Das Racist… I suppose I did like Eminem, but being a white suburban teen, that was more out of obligation than undying fandom. I was still aware enough to realize I was missing out on something, but the juvenile punk rock mentality I had developed kept me from “giving in” to what I perceived as a lesser form of music.

It wasn’t until I saw a reddit thread announcing the premature release of Kanye West’s Yeezus that I realized I was missing out on something. The excitement was palpable, and the title (“So uh… Yeezus leaked.”) was intriguing enough to lead me to search the album out. I was so out of the hip-hop loop that I didn’t even realize this was a Kanye West album until I Googled it. I figured what did I have to lose? I downloaded the album, listened to it twice and didn’t get it. I knew Kanye was one of the biggest artists in the game (especially after his monumental 2010 album), but Yeezus on its own didn’t reveal to me to see what others saw in him.

Ironically, that same summer I had also gone down the rabbit hole that is Ween and discovered the beautiful insanity that is John Frusciante. Perhaps through those two artists I’d built up a tolerance to “dissonant” music because I ended up revisiting Yeezus during a vacation later that summer and fell in love with the record. The song “Bound 2” specifically hooked me early on and ended up being replayed constantly over the course of the trip. Everything from the sample, to the delivery, to the punchlines, to the way that Kanye twisted his words over the beat was amazing to me… and it was something that only that song did. Everything else on my iPod was rock, Yeezus was the only album within those 120 gigs that sounded anything like that. That same trip I heard “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and took it as a cosmic sign I needed to give Kanye a chance and check out the rest of his discography. I downloaded the rest of Kanye’s studio albums and figured that would be that. He was the only good hip-hop.

A year and a half later at the beginning of 2015 I found myself balls-deep in college, chipping away at a handful of remaining courses as I entered one of my last years of school. While I’d enjoyed my trip through Kanye’s discography, that journey didn’t lead me any deeper down the rabbit hole of hip-hop, instead I’d thrown myself deeper into rock and the genre was beginning to lose its luster as I found myself listening to more and more podcasts. Ironically, inspired by two separate reddit posts: one for Lil Wayne’s mixtape Sorry 4 the Wait 2, and a second (now deleted thread) for Drake’s surprise album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late both inspired me to give those releases a listen. Once again the excitement and experiences of complete strangers led me to albums I never thought I’d be listening to. Both Lil Wayne and Drake were artists which I had previously written off as musical fast food, yet they were both single-handedly inspiring hype and excitement the likes of which I had rarely seen online.

Between the epic history of Wayne’s Tha Carter V and the thinly-veiled shots both he and Drake seemingly took at Birdman on these releases, I realized I was missing out on something. That’s not to mention all the excitement, hype, and inside jokes that comes with the territory of hip-hop. These two releases opened the floodgates.

Based on how pumped Sorry 4 the Wait 2 got me in the gym, I was led to Young Thug, one of many rappers heavily-inspired by Lil Wayne. I’ll never be able to articulate why I love Young Thug as well as some of the articles written by professionals and music journalists, but things like this Instagram and this website speak for themselves. Young Thug is a creative force who has dismantled the previous boundaries established by the genre of hip-hop and created a sound rooted in upending the listener’s expectations. He’s a gangster who wears dresses. He’s a cold-blooded killer who calls his best friends “bae.” He’s a man who has written absurd lyrics like “I'mma ride in that pussy like a stroller” and made it sound so fucking natural.

If Lil Wayne and Drake opened my personal floodgates to hip-hop, then Young Thug removed the hinges and turned me into the type of hip-hop head that there is no coming back from. A month later, Kendrick Lamar dropped To Pimp a Butterfly, an album widely-considered one of the best since Kanye’s MBDTF. On the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum Travis Scott released Rodeo which quickly became one of my favorite “less lyrically substantive” releases of the year. Both of these releases showed me that hip-hop can’t be placed in a single box, it’s more than drugs and women (though they are still discussed often). That summer Vince Staples released Summertime ‘06 and Future released DS2. These releases ended up serving as a perfect “sample platter” of what the genre could do. These albums along with the infamous Drake/Meek Mill Beef made me feel like I was a part of something not only bigger than myself, but more exciting than any other genre I’d ever been a fan of.

2015 represented a sea change in my musical perspective. Hip-hop is now my primary genre and I visit boards like /r/hiphopheads every day. It’s a scene that’s ever-changing in the most exciting ways. I’m just glad my eyes were opened when they were and that I’m now no longer missing out on an entire world I didn’t even know existed. It was childish to withhold an entire genre of music from myself, and I’ll never make that mistake again. As much as I wanted to pretend that I was musically-diverse, you’re still only as adventurous as you want to be, and if a lack of adventurousness means missing out, then you’re doing music wrong. Music should be fun, enjoy what you enjoy, but don’t ever close yourself off to something, because it just might be your next obsession. That’s a lesson I’ll carry forward for the rest of my life, and I owe that all to a guy who compared his teeth to toilet paper. Sometimes brilliance can come from the most unexpected places.

Decisiveness and Consumption

I’m starting to realize that being an adult means being more decisive. Sure, there’s paying bills, and grocery shopping, and making sure your toothbrush is charged, but on a conceptual level, being an adult often comes down to knowing what you want and going for it. I do not feel like an adult. I know what I want in a general sense, but the problem is that I need a concrete way to get there. I want to write (hey, I’m doing that right now, mission accomplished) but even that is fraught with opportunities to be indecisive. I feel like there is almost always a better way to say what I’m trying to say. I second guess every word and feel like there is always room for improvement. I’m paralyzed by choice in life and in my profession.

Aside from that indecisiveness, it’s also easy to get distracted. I can apply myself. I can go like a workhorse, but as soon as I hit a wall (which could be as minor as a single word) my mind fades to other things. Can’t figure out the next word in this sentence? …. time to browse reddit. Not sure how to wrap this up? … time to update the metadata in my iTunes library. I can distract myself with the most menial tasks because they are easier than trying to tackle that frustration.

No that a single word ever stops me in my tracks for an extended period of time, but it’s more that it’s so much easier to consume than to create. It’s so easy to create something bad. Or corny. Or fake. Or untrue. So why not sit back and get fat mindlessly consuming the work of others? Failure is frightening, as is the future. I don’t know what comes next, but I hope I’ll be figure it out soon.

Mogwai – Come On Die Young | Album Review

Mogwai are not of this world; they are an entity that was created by a spiritual force and delivered to us in the form of five Scotsman. The band has undeniably evolved over the course of their 20 year career, but at the same time they fall victim to something inherent in the post-rock genre: predictability. While they’ve crafted some incredible albums in their two decades together, Mogwai also tend to “play it safe” by writing music based off a template that they created. Though their albums are never a shot-for-shot recreation of this template, the music instead borrows broad thematic elements from it in a way that allows each album to mirror the others. With the release of their second full-length album Come On Die Young, the band’s template fully-revealed itself. Once listeners connected the dots and discovered the band’s recursive nature, it begged the question: does this predictability negate the beauty of the music?

By the time that Come On Die Young was released in 1999, Mogwai had already been around for nearly half a decade. Over the course of the years since their 1995 formation, the band had been through quite a bit: after the release of two EPs, a remix album, and their critically-acclaimed Mogwai Young Team LP, the band also endured the loss of combo keyboard/guitarist Brendan O'Hare. All of this happened within the space of a few years, and this informed the band’s perspective heavily when making their follow-up. Their second album takes an even darker and more introspective view that attempts to grab listeners by the shoulders and violently shake them into paranoia.

The opening track of Come On Die Young is centered around a sample from a 1977 interview with Iggy Pop, and it accurately describes Mogwai’s views on music:

“I’ll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts, and the souls, and the time, and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it. It’s a term that’s based on contempt, it’s a term that’s based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism and everything that’s rotten about rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t know Johnny Rotten but I’m sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius, myself. And that music is so powerful that it’s quite beyond my control and ah… when I’m in the grips of it I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Have you ever felt like that? When you just couldn’t feel anything and you didn’t want to either. You know? Do you understand what I’m saying sir?”

Though Mogwai aren’t a punk band, you don’t have to play punk to be punk. You also don’t need to be punk to appreciate what Iggy Pop is saying. The DIY punk spirit can take many forms, and it doesn’t require a battle jacket or a mohawk, just motivation and music. At the same time “punk rock” is a term used by people who don’t understand it, people who wield the word as a means of categorization. Written out it sounds far less confrontational than it comes across in the interview, but when backed by Mogwai’s subtle instrumentals, it feels like a pure wave of power. This track is letting the listener know what this album is really about.

Come On Die Young is an album that I received from a friend sandwiched between hundreds of other songs ranging from Hoodie Allen to 31Knots. It took me a while to get around to this album initially because I could tell from the cover that I’d need to be in a certain headspace to listen to it.

Immediately following the Iggy Pop-infused opening track is the lullaby-like “Cody.” This song lulls the listener into a relaxed state that the band then repeatedly disrupts over the course of the next ten tracks. This type of mellow, quietly-sung track appears on nearly every one of Mogwai’s albums. Whether it’s “R U Still In 2 It” on Young Team or “Blues Hour” on their most recent LP Rave Tapes. This is the first element of Mogwai’s “template” that reveals itself through the course of Come On Die Young. Repeating the same musical theme is something Mogwai often gets criticized for, the argument is that for a band who has been around two decades, one would hope that their style has morphed more noticeably than it has. To that I ask 'why?’ Having a track like “Cody” on most of their records gives their discography a common thread. It’s a Cloud Atlas-esque repeating of themes that gives their entire career noticeable touchstones. Aside from the fact that “Cody” is beautifully sung, I don’t think that this repetition of having a “hushed song” detracts from any one of their albums.

The song “Kappa” represents another Mogwai staple I’ll call “peaks and valleys.” The song starts with a single jangly guitar. After a few seconds of acclimating to its melody, a deep overwhelming drum beat kicks in that overwhelms the soundscape. The drum sounds like a deep, dark well, something that the girl from The Ring would crawl out of. From there a second guitar enters seemingly just to provide long stretches of distortion. By the halfway mark of the song, all of the instruments have morphed together into one massive wall of sound that come together for brief moments, then suddenly fade leaving the initial guitar and drums alone again. The song peaks for brief moments of harmony, then immediately falls apart for valleys of lonely guitar. The song eventually culminates in one final peak, then crashes into a fade of distortion. This yin and yang of chaos is something that appeals to me in nearly every genre.

“Christmas Steps” is another beautiful example of the mood that Mogwai can slowly build. The song starts out at zero and introduces a simple but towering riff that slowly builds up steam leading to a full-on explosion complete with tight drumming and a memorable guitar melody.To me, it exemplifies the band’s ability to introduce a progression then transition that into a groove in a way that comforts and then jars the listener. The track begins with a solitary guitar seemingly playing into the void of space, the band then slowly and gradually builds up to absolute chaos as they slowly fill the space with more instruments. The guitar that was playing into blackness is now surrounded by other instruments eventually that fill the world with more color. First a subtle drum tick, then another guitar, and a bass. From there the music speeds up into an oppressive riff that consumes the entire song. It’s a thing of beauty.

One of the reasons I love Mogwai so much is because it’s perfect reading music. As a college student so much of my life is spent nose-down in a textbook or knee-deep in an essay, and I’m the type of person that gets easily distracted by vocals (or even melodies.) Mogwai is perfect background music, and while that may sound like an insult, it’s actually one of the highest compliments I feel that I can give music. Come On Die Young is musical enough to stand on its own, but it’s melodic and instrumental enough to be put on in the background and fade into the environment. I listen to a lot of post-rock and instrumental music, but Mogwai is the one constant. They are the one group that I keep coming back to, and Come On Die Young is the perfect entry point to the band.

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Miscellaneous Thoughts:

-How badass is that title? Come On Die Young sounds like something you’d find in the hardcore punk section of the record store. It’s almost anthemic. It’s something you want to hear yelled from the rooftops, or get carved into your skin.

-Even without a set of traditional vocals to accompany the instruments, this album does an excellent job of depicting an extremely dark, bleak atmosphere. It’s not completely hopeless, but it feels pretty damn close.

-“Christmas Steps” is an incredible song, possibly my favorite from the band. I linked to “Xmas Steps,” an early version of the song from the band’s No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EP that I prefer.

-The song “Ex-Cowboy” is another great early example of the band playing a song, then taking it down to near-inaudible levels only to then bring it back up into a disruptive, volcanic eruption of noise.

-Bookend: Come On Die Young ends with a sad, moody trumpet and echo-laden guitar played over warped and reversed bits of the Iggy interview from the opening track “Punk Rock:”