In my hometown, as I'm sure it is done all across the country, people gather at the local bowling alley and catch up with each other and get really plastered.
Both of these anecdotes have a point, so stay with me.
At one particular Wilco pre-Thanksgiving show at The Riviera I was stuck towards the back of the crowd, near the bar. No one seemed to be paying much attention to the show and were instead chatting away, no doubt catching up with old friends now returned to Chicago for the giving of thanks the next day.
Obviously it really pissed me off. This was a really good band, my favorite at the time (probably still), and people were acting like they were at the fucking bowling alley.
My point is this: I hated those people as much as I claimed to hate the college hippies who spend their summers getting toasted at various outdoor music festivals.
It's not like the cool people hang in the city clubs and the losers go to outdoor festivals. There are plenty of both at both.
I say this not because of any negative reaction to my previous post about Coachella (there wasn't any that I know of), but because I was very unsatisfied with what I wrote last week. It was a rushed, cranky essay that was more about me relieving some job-related stress and less about a legitimate critique of a music concert.
After I wrote it and hit publish, it nagged at me and it wouldn't go away, especially after I turned out a much finer piece of writing about my late-night b-boy visitor. That felt good; the other entry just felt like amateurish writing, an immature rant, a reminder of my early writings on here where a complaint about a bad commercial felt worthy of a post. Plus it probably did piss off a few people who perhaps liked being a college hippie who attends/attended large outdoor festivals.
But it brings up a larger problem I have come across: the near-impossibility of writing about music, or offering up any general criticism of it, positive or negative.
I've been wanting to write up a quick something about how good The Shins were on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, and was searching for some video, and along the way read various comments and reactions to the performance.
Pick a few of the following phrases and splice them together any way you want and you'll come up with a general idea of what fan reaction was, and what amounts to any typical internet discussion about indie/alternative music:
indie fanboys sellout awesome nervous corporate Sub Pop rule sucked balls heart Garden State overrated beautiful I was into The Shins way before that! pussies newalbumkicksassthey'renotasgoodastheholdsteady.
It's the same with movies or books or tv shows and any other mention of pop culture on a message board or comments section. We're all part of the discussion and we all have our opinions and people get so passionate about their loves and hates and it all starts sounding the same after a while.
There's the "first" guy, the girl who absolutely loved it, the snarky guy who just quotes Family Guy episodes, and the person who thinks it was pretty bad and is a clear sign that there is no hope left for American culture.
So are all opinions equal, all viewpoints the same? Should we just not take a critical eye at anything and instead say "I love it all!!!" Somehow that doesn't seem right to me, but the past few days I've been really preoccupied with the idea of opinions and criticism and how it all goes down on this worldwide internet community we've all created.
There is good shit, and there is shit. And there is some good shit that other people think is shit, and vice versa. And rarely is there a thing any more that many, many people consider to be awesome and wonderful. Instead you have little pockets of taste that are constantly at war with each other, each hoping that their version of what's cool will get to the top of the pop culture pyramid.
So, to sum up: outdoor festivals still suck, but if you like 'em, by all means enjoy yourself.
And The Shins were really good on Saturday Night Live.
