Born Dead Icons
We’ve all dated boring people, and justified this to ourselves in various ways. The death sentence is to say that someone is merely “nice,” meaning: not interesting, not funny, just… pleasant. But mostly what it is like to date a boring person is to wait, and wait, for the light switch to be turned on. One becomes a real observer: is he/she going to say something smart? Was that a joke? Maybe he/she meant something clever by this innocuous remark!
More likely, we repeat to ourselves (as a tormented soliloquy) what we disingenuously pawn off as the experience to onlookers: “Oh, you just have to get to know his/her sense of humor. He/she is actually really funny. You all will get along.”
Putting on a mediocre record in any genre is a lot like this. It’s the opposite of falling in love, which just grabs you and doesn’t wait for rationalization. Instead: we wait, we listen, we make excuses, we become critics. Nothing could be more dissimilar than the experience A) of putting on a record and sitting down in front of it to ask, “Is this good? How am I going to review this? Does it get a pass? How am I going to rank it on a scale of 1-10?”—compared to the experience B) of catching some tune in the background, and asking the clerk, “What is this!?”
Obviously we *have* to do this former thing. We have to give records a 7/10 or a 6/10. For me, this is work that no one else can do for me, actually. I want to hear as much music as possible, at all times, and even universal acclaim is no guarantee that something will be worthwhile. Nothing gets a free pass. And so the experience of a life within culture is one long slog through mediocrity.
This blog and my taste has an apparent Platonic bias: “Only the absolutely good!” The mistake would be to imagine that this is something that could be positively given, as though every record doesn’t come to us with the same credentials and PR and hype. Finally, everything has to go through the same tiresome procedure of being listened to. I am not in some ivory tower waiting for an “obvious masterpiece” to come walking through a tiny, gilded door. (Anyways, this is the real meaning of Platonism, which is an endless parsing.)
On the other hand, when this does happen, it is completely obvious.
Example: Born Dead Icons are decent enough. I just listened to two of their albums to write this post, and if you stare directly at their music, giving the experience all the “space” it requires, there are all the necessary parts to convince oneself that the band is not making any missteps, that they are executing their chosen genre well, that they are consistent, etc. etc.
The problem is that there was a contemporaneous band (Inepsy) from the same place as Born Dead Icons (Montreal) doing the exact same thing (Motorhead-influenced apocalyptic crust-rock) as Born Dead Icons…only much better. ANY classic Inepsy song blows away EVERY Born Dead Icons song. It’s as though BDI had all the parts, and just forgot to add the final ingredient: being an interesting band. But none of this is evident when I am just intently “being a critic” and trying to evaluate the record. But it is ludicrously obvious when an Inepsy song is thrown into juxtaposition.
Born Dead Icons: plagued by bad vocals, a lack of catchy choruses, a “rock” style that never really gets down to rocking, embarrassing lyrics as far as I can make out (whereas Motorhead have great lyrics, and Inepsy’s are at least charming), an absence of blazing leads or really anything attention-grabbing. It’s not over-the-top, it’s not arty, it’s not melodic. Non-hit follows non-hit. Some huge hook always looms on the horizon but never materializes. Big Motorhead chord-progressions serve as placeholders instead of actual “moments.” They turn plaintive at all the wrong times.
My point here: all of this would be enigmatic and curious, and worth peering further into, to see if there were artistic depths to be mined here… if Inepsy did not come along and demolish BDI at *exactly the same thing.*
We’ve all dated boring people and talked ourselves into believing that something else is happening. But this difficulty in knowing what to call our experience (being bored? or mildly amused? or are we “still getting to know” the person?) is our own damn problem. The critical brackets we have thrown up around the object are simply waiting to be demolished by the very real fecundity of life, art, and love.
