Pastiche - Kids These Days
Editor's note: Pastiche is an occasional column exploring the diversity within the Austin music community. The views expressed in Pastiche are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.
BACK IN MY DAY it was common for us teenagers to demarcate - in typical, small-minded fashion - what kind of person you were by the music you enjoyed. It took a great deal of effort to be a fan back then, and yes, I know I sound like a geezer. But it’s true! You had to have access to numerous albums, many of which you purchased sound unheard (an extremely dubious proposition if you liked Sonic Youth), you had to have the money to purchase said albums and band-endorsed clothing (uniforms, as the Wu-Tang put it), etc. And previous to that, before home taping and portable music, cliques were even more rigidly defined. As the book Our Band Could Be Your Life or the short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot reveal, genres of music that seem at least tangentially related (punk and hard rock) were deemed at odds by fans in the ‘80s and late ‘70s. People who listened to AC/DC didn’t care for the type of people who liked Hüsker Dü, and never the twain shall meet…at least until thrash arrived, thank Satan.
Cut to the present day. In 2010, what was once a thick border between musical acts and genres is now a blur. Thanks to an unfettered access to information, a disregard for copyright laws, and a declining number of “PUNKS NOT DEAD” type purists monogamously attached to a fading genre, music today is informed by a staggering amount of genres that owe very little to the dividers once set in place by race, class, and sex. And really, who foresaw crunk-screamo hybrids? Or a song called “Stick Stickly,” which is somehow heavier and wussier than anything else I’ve ever heard, complete with auto-tuned emo vocals, metal chugging and a dance breakdown at the end? And they’re Christian? Attack Attack! is either unaware of musical history or are just perfectly comfortable flaunting it. And the fans aren’t into borders, either. Right this second, a fifteen year old with his hat titled just so is downloading the entire discography of your favorite band (that includes those prized bootlegs), and then he’ll put it on in the background while he plays Xbox live against a pimply girl in Slovenia - and all without leaving the den! We had to make the trek to mall record stores and arcades (in snow, hail, pig's blood and sleet) to enjoy one-fiftieth of that access; to spend our allowance money on front-loaded, overpriced records, sixteen-bit graphics, and three-person games of NBA Jam with kids whose stink you could smell across the console. It’s fucked up.
Ahem. Anyway, my curiosity about today’s emergent artists got the better of me, and when I saw that Emo’s was hosting a huge show featuring nu-school bands, I just had to see it for myself. I bugged my patient editor about getting me in, and at 6:30 on Wednesday night I found myself in a line outside of the venue with my girlfriend, a few assorted parents, and 500 tweens. Small drama unfolded in front of us. “What are the rules?” hissed a concerned parent to his clearly mortified daughters as they sputtered, “Don’t. Drink.” in monotone unison. Dad was clearly nervous. He waited in line with the girls until they gained admission, and kept handing them money, as though an influx of cash would keep their noses clean. The pied piper that wrangled all these teens to Emo’s on a weeknight was a touring mini-festival called “The Summer Camp for the Dope Awesome Kids Tour,” featuring headliners Forever the Sickest Kids and four opening acts. And summer camp it was - I realize Emo’s is an all ages venue, but I’ve never seen it like this. Walking into a club so proud of its tough and nasty veneer to be greeted by a world of barely-pubescence, side ponytails, garish neon and a sea of purple X hand stamps was, in a word, jarring.
The first band up were the pretty boys in Phone Calls from Home, a Boston-based four piece who “play music with the intention of helping people.” Fresh-faced sincerity (the new New Sincerity?) will become a theme of the evening, as will guerrilla marketing. In line, we were approached by Dougie Harvey, Phone Calls from Home’s “Australian Merch Guy,” who was carrying around a laptop and signing people up to receive texts the next time the band was in town. The flyer he handed out had the smiley boys on the front, Harvey’s own visage on the back, as well as a plea to “Friend me on Facebook!” Inside, merch dudes were hawking shirts, albums, and even bracelets. Pretty brilliantly, Phone Calls From Home created their own burnt orange band t-shirts for their Austin trip, the back of which declared, “Texas!” Harvey came out modeling one of the shirts, and then stripped it off and threw it into the crowd - much to the screaming delight of the female fans (and it was almost all female fans). Musically, the band hews close to the positive pop punk of Fall Out Boy, all “Whoas!” and big riffs and, to start things off, a cover of Akon’s “Don’t Matter” performed without even a trace of irony. The boys flashed magazine ad smiles, spent a good chunk of time standing on the monitors, and asked for fans to clap along during almost every number of their short set.
A Cursive Memory play bright-eyed, happy and lovelorn pop tunes (“Everything,” “Summer Soul”) that could easily make Tim Kasher - you may have some Memory of the band Cursive - upchuck onto his flannel. Vagrant records (School of Seven Bells, The Hold Steady) released A Cursive Memory’s last two albums, but I couldn’t find a trace of the band on the label’s website. The following act, A Scene Aesthetic, also gushed hearts and rainbows and puppies; mid-set, one of the two lead singers announced, “This is a new song. It’s about love.” Then he asked, twice, if the crowd had ever heard of their band before tonight, and mentioned that their merchandise could be purchased with debit and credit cards in addition to cash.
The next band The Ready Set best exemplified the genre-fuck I alluded to earlier. Led by singer Jordan Witzigreuter and his intense pompadour, the music is a freeway crash between various strains of Top 40 - snap hip hop careens into Kidz Bop techno, pop punk and boy band crooning. The Ready Set’s show also has live instrumentation butting up against prerecorded tracks, and while Witzgreuter was obviously singing live, he had about three other canned Witzgreuters lending him support. The infectious, “Love Like Woe” is The Ready Set’s lead single, and fans could purchase an all-over print t-shirt featuring the punny lyrics in broad colors. Forever the Sickest Kids cleaved to the same formula as the rest of the bands - assorted genres pummeled together into a confectionery swirl.
Between sets, a small group of us would congregate at the inside bar, set apart from the throng by our birthdays and preferred distance from the spectacle. The parents who attended confused me; they looked wary and bored, but evidently were not comfortable enough to leave their kids alone for a few hours. And then there were the rest of us - the door staff, bartenders, visiting journalists and patient +1s, all of whom seemed unmoved but not entirely untouched by the show. In particular, the experience brought out some conflicting feelings for yours truly. Phone Calls From Home weren’t my thing by a country mile, but I easily thought of at least ten other shows I willingly paid to see at that same venue that were much worse. Indie rock, god love it, clings to self-effacement no closer than these young bands to their marketability. And in the end, after all the talk about how music brings us together, maybe age separates us more than we realize.
Thanks to Paige Maguire for the assist, and Danielle Bardgette for the photography and patience.
