Anti-Anti - Snowden - Anti-Anti - 2006

I remember reading an article on Pitchfork sometime towards the end of 2006. The article itself was not about Snowden, but rather some newer Dan Deacon/Girltalk kinda album, but this record was mentioned of as an example of an album that was not particularly innovative but simply decent. I'm paraphrasing but I believe it said something like "If Snowden's Anti-Anti was your favorite album of last year then you are still stuck in the rockist era of 2002, old man!"

I have an uncle, my mother's youngest brother who is only 17 years older than me. When I was a baby, he was frequently my sitter...and later on, as the oldest child, he was frequently my "big brother". He spent his entire life with severe diabetis that eventually caused him to go blind at 27.

During my Junior High School days, when I was a weird, too-smart, and obnoxious teenager he was frequently my best friend...and one of the things he passed on to me was his love of rock music and thus my encyclopedic knowledge of 60's and 70's classic rock.

The thing is, my uncle had always been a charmer. When I watch the movie Dazed and Confused, one of the reasons to love it, is how much my uncle seems to have been almost exactly like Randy "Pink" Floyd...the smart jock that everyone liked...so going blind at 27 was crushing to him. His life, in effect, stopped. And his only friends were the members of the crazy church he attended, hoping to be cured of his blindness (Note: He didn't just go blind, he had his eyes removed), and a tubby 13 year old without a positive male influence in his life.

I was able to keep my uncle in touch with music for a bit and my brother picked up where I left off...but gradually it became unavoidable that he was stuck in his own heyday. He could take things that were close to his own experience, the obviously 70's influenced stomp of grunge, or the Pink Floyd-isness of Perfect from Now On era Built to Spill, but the glitchy post-Kid A Radiohead and it's ilk were a bridge too far.

I tried making him mixes with bands that were obviously still mired in the music he loved, the southern boogie of My Morning Jacket or the Neil Young thrust of Magnolia Electric Company, but in the end I'd return to see my uncle obsessing over the latest Allman Brothers bootleg he'd found at the Karma. Even a man without kids, without a job, who gets most of his pleasure from sitting in a garage, chain smoking, and listening to rock music, still experienced that same paralysis in time. For him, the best music would always be the music they made in 1976.

The point is, I live in fear of this...the point at which my tastes atrophy. I can already feel it happening, that my tastes have basically locked down somewhere between 2003-2005 with the sweet spot actually being 1998. I continue to like new albums, but I find that the ones I like the best are those steeped in what I'm familiar with. Too much of what is being made now is too referential, too reliant on juxtaposing pop culture I find disposable without really adding anything to the equation...or worse, too gentle and inoffensive, rife with the softness of a suburban generation, and without the nihilist urges I feel to burn to this irreperably flawed world to the ground and start from scratch.

The battle to stay young and relevant permeates our botox ridden society. It's a fight that everyone loses, but I think it's the manner in which you go down fighting that matters. It's all about the manner in which we face our own mortality, I suppose.