In a World of Cacophony, Experience for Sharing
Division Day, one of the 1,000-plus bands playing the New York area over the CMJ Music Marathon. The rock critic Robert Christgau gave an interview last month to the Web site popmatters.com. Mr. Christgau, who was recently dismissed from The Village Voice after 37 years, talked a little bit about recent history. But he also talked about an old obsession of his: the decline of truly popular music.
“When I grew up, there was a monoculture,” he said. “Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it’s good for people to have a shared experience.”
This week especially, the old musical monoculture seems more obsolete than ever. The annual CMJ Music Marathon started on Tuesday and runs through Saturday. Attendees can — or, more accurately, can’t — see more than 1,000 bands crammed onto stages in Manhattan and Brooklyn, along with the usual unsanctioned events. Even more than usual downtown Manhattan is full of bands most people have never heard of, hoping to emulate the success of other bands most people have never heard of.
This mess isn’t quite as messy as it first appears. The explosion of music Web sites has had a surprising effect: the CMJ festival seems more coherent than ever. There are a few outliers, rappers and metal bands and D.J.s. But much of the week is dominated by earnest young indie-rockers, and many of the names will be familiar to anyone who follows MP3 blogs. Annuals, Birdmonster, Cold War Kids, Division Day, the Little Ones, Oh No! Oh My!, Ra Ra Riot, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, the Silent Years, Voxtrot: they’re all here.
And if you’d like to sample their music, all you need is an Internet connection and 20 minutes. Aggregator sites like elbo.ws (which publishes a useful blog popularity chart) make it easy to figure out exactly how many blog links a band has; MySpace makes it easy (and free) to hear four songs from just about any band at CMJ. At this festival indie-rock looks less like a wide-open space and more like a well-organized market.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Only a few years ago, the Internet threatened to blur boundaries of genre and culture making it easy for listeners to fill their iPods with whatever caught their fancy.
But listeners of all sorts like having what Mr. Christgau called a shared experience. That’s why the old monoculture flourished in the first place. And today’s indie-rock fans have something that’s smaller yet similar: a mini-monoculture. That is, a robust infrastructure of Web sites and blogs, along with a (necessarily vague) consensus about what indie-rock sounds like.
After Robert W. Pittman and others invested in the indie-rock blog Stereogum, The New York Post quoted an anonymous source who promised that the site would become “narrower and deeper.” That phrase is a pretty apt description of online indie-rock culture, and of this year’s CMJ too. And it’s not necessarily a criticism.
You could catch a glimpse of this “narrower and deeper” world at Piano’s, on the Lower East Side, on Monday night, during a pre-CMJ showcase featuring Division Day. The members came together in Santa Cruz, Calif., and eventually moved to Los Angeles, home to one of the country’s most productive indie-rock scenes. And the band’s Web site, divisionday.com, helpfully categorizes all the “blog love” bestowed on Division Day so far, with links to every quotation. (There are dozens and dozens.)
It was an all-right set with some better-than-all-right moments. A dreamy, gusty version of a song called “Tigers” began with the singer, Rohner Segnitz, murmuring, “I want your blood inside my head.” Soon enough he was yelping those words as a drummer thrashed behind him. There will be plenty of crashing indie-rock climaxes this week, many worse than this one and (here’s hoping) many even better.
There will also be, as always, a handful of heavyweights: bands like the Shins (Bowery Ballroom, tonight) and the Decemberists (Hammerstein, tomorrow) that have gotten about as big as indie bands can get. The Decemberists now record for Capitol Records, but they aren’t exactly Coldplay. In this deep-and-narrow world, lots of young bands seem to envy the career of Tapes ’n Tapes (Bowery, last night), a proficient but somewhat dull Minneapolis band that made a splash at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex. That’s a modest goal, and certainly, for at least one band this week — maybe Annuals, with their grand, disheveled songs? — an achievable one.
Mr. Christgau is right: the days of the monoculture are gone, if they ever existed. And much of the old goofy optimism is gone too; most bands at CMJ don’t aim to change the world, or even to irritate it. They can survive, even thrive, in their own mini-monoculture.
That’s the mixed blessing of a “narrower and deeper” age. For listeners willing to dive in, CMJ is probably easier to enjoy than ever before. And for listeners who don’t take the plunge, it is probably easier to ignore.
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