Author Topic: Nick Hornby is God  (Read 2451 times)

Bags

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Nick Hornby is God
« on: May 21, 2004, 08:27:00 am »
Because Nick Hornby is so f*ckin' cool.  And he knows why I love music, and what it is to be my age and such a huge fan.  And the man friggin' refers to "Ulysses" and postmodernism.  I am in love.  Aahhhhh..........and it's like he knows I may be 37 but I have the Von Bondies in my CD player right now.
 
 May 21, 2004
 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR,  The New York Times
 Rock of Ages
 By NICK HORNBY
 
 LONDON
 
 It's just before Christmas last year, and the Philadelphia rock 'n' roll band Marah is halfway through a typically ferocious, chaotic and inspirational set when the doors to the right of the stage burst open and a young man staggers in, carrying most of a drum kit. My friends and I have the best seats in the house, a couple of feet away from Marah's frontmen, Serge and Dave Bielanko, but when the drummer arrives we have to move our table back to make room for him. He's not Marah's drummer (the band is temporarily without) but he's a drummer, and he owns most of a drum kit, and his appearance allows the band to make an even more glorious and urgent racket than they had managed hitherto. The show ends triumphantly, as Marah shows tend to do, with Serge lying on the floor amid the feet of his public, wailing away on his harmonica.
 
 This gig happens to be taking place in a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, in Kentish Town, north London, but doubtless scenes like it are being played out throughout the world: a bar band, a pickup drummer from an earlier gig, probably even the table-shifting. It's just that three or four months earlier, Bruce Springsteen, a fan of the band, invited the Bielanko brothers to share the stage with him at Giants Stadium for an encore, and Marah will shortly release what would, in a world with ears, be one of 2004's most-loved straight-ahead rock albums, "20,000 Streets Under the Sky." These guys shouldn't be playing in the Fiddler's Elbow with a pickup drummer. And they shouldn't be passing a hat around at the end of the gig, surely? How many people have passed around the hat in the same year that they appeared at Giants Stadium?
 
 Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Jon Landau published his influential, exciting, career-changing, and subsequently much derided and parodied article about Bruce Springsteen in The Real Paper, an alternative weekly â?? the article that included the line "I saw rock 'n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." I had never read the rest of it until recently, and it remains a lovely piece of writing. It begins, heartbreakingly: "It's four in the morning and raining. I'm 27 today, feeling old, listening to my records and remembering that things were different a decade ago." I'm only guessing here, but I can imagine there are a number of you reading this who can remember what it was like to feel old at 27, and how it bears no resemblance to feeling old at 37, or 47. And you probably miss records almost as much as you miss being 27.
 
 It's hard not to think about one's age and how it relates to rock music. I just turned 47, and with each passing year it becomes harder not to wonder whether I should be listening to something that is still thought of as more age appropriate â?? jazz, folk, classical, opera, funeral marches, the usual suspects. You've heard the arguments a million times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being young, and if you're not young and you still listen to it, then you should be ashamed of yourself. And finally I've worked out my response to all that: I mostly agree with the description, even though it's crude, and makes no effort to address the recent, mainly excellent work of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Mr. Springsteen et al. The conclusion, however, makes no sense to me any more.
 
 Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. (And not all young people are lucky enough to be young. Think of those people at your college who wanted to be politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I'm not talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined faces, the washboard stomachs, the hair. The young are welcome to all that â?? what would we do with it anyway? I'm talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated these feelings, and now that I'm older it stimulates them, but either way, rock 'n' roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn't need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it's only now and again?
 
 When I say that I have found these feelings harder and harder to detect these last few years, I understand that I run the risk of being seen as yet another nostalgic old codger complaining about the state of contemporary music. And though it's true that I'm an old codger, and that I'm complaining about the state of contemporary music, I hope that I can wriggle out of the hole I'm digging for myself by moaning that, to me, contemporary rock music no longer sounds young â?? or at least, not young in that kind of joyous, uninhibited way. In some ways, it became way too grown-up and full of itself. You can find plenty that's angry, or weird, or perverse, or melancholy and world-weary; but that loud, sometimes dumb celebration of being alive has got lost somewhere along the way. Of course we want to hear songs about Iraq, and child prostitution, and heroin addiction. And if bands see the need to use electric drills instead of guitars in order to give vent to their rage, well, bring it on. But is there any chance we could have the Righteous Brothers' "Little Latin Lupe Lu" â?? or, better still, a modern-day equivalent â?? for an encore?
 
 In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of "David Copperfield," the novelist David Gates talks about literature hitting "that high-low fork in the road, leading on the one hand toward `Ulysses' and on the other toward `Gone With The Wind,' " and maybe rock music has experienced its own version. You can either chase the Britney dollar, or choose the high-minded cult-rock route that leads to great reviews and commercial oblivion. I buy that arty stuff all the time, and a lot of it is great. But part of the point of it is that its creators don't want to engage with the mainstream, or no longer think that it's possible to do so, and as a consequence cult status is preordained rather than accidental. In this sense, the squeaks and bleeps scattered all over the lovely songs on the last Wilco album sound less like experimentation, and more like a despairing audio suicide note.
 
 Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, "that high-low fork in the road" is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool â?? a stranger to all notions of postmodernism â?? but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well.
 
  Marah may well be headed for commercial oblivion anyway, of course. "20,000 Streets Under the Sky" is their fourth album, and they're by no means famous yet, as the passing of the hat in the Fiddler's Elbow indicates. But what I love about them is that I can hear everything I ever loved about rock music in their recordings and in their live shows. Indeed, in the shows you can often hear their love for the rock canon uninflected â?? they play covers of the Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," or the Jam's "In the City," and they usually end with a riffed-up version of the O'Jays' "Love Train." They play an original called "The Catfisherman" with a great big Bo Diddley beat, and they quote the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the Who's "Magic Bus." And they do this not because they're a bar band and people expect cover versions, but because they are unafraid of showing where their music comes from, and unafraid of the comparisons that will ensue â?? just as Bruce Springsteen (who really did play "Little Latin Lupe Lu" for an encore, sometimes) was unafraid.
 
 It was this kind of celebration that Jon Landau had in mind when he said in his review that "I saw my rock 'n' roll past flash before my eyes." For Mr. Landau, the overbearing self-importance of rock music of the late 60's and early 70's had left him feeling jaded; for me, it's the overbearing self-consciousness of the 90's. The Darkness know that we might laugh at them, so they laugh at themselves first; the White Stripes may be a blues band, but their need to exude cool is every bit as strong as their desire to emit heat, and the calculations have been made accordingly: there's as much artfulness as there is art.
 
 In truth, I don't care whether the music sounds new or old: I just want it to have ambition and exuberance, a lack of self-consciousness, a recognition of the redemptive power of noise, an acknowledgment that emotional intelligence is sometimes best articulated through a great chord change, rather than a furrowed brow. Outkast's brilliant "Hey Ya!," a song that for a few brief months last year united races and critics and teenagers and nostalgic geezers, had all that and more; you could hear Prince in there, and the Beatles, and yet the song belonged absolutely in and to the here and now, or at least the there and then of 2003.
 
 Both "Hey Ya!" and Marah's new album are roots records, not in the sense that they were made by men with beards who play the fiddle and sing with a finger in an ear, but in the sense that they have recognizable influences â?? influences that are not only embedded in pop history, but that have been properly digested. In the suffocatingly airless contemporary pop-culture climate, you can usually trace influences back only as far as Radiohead, or Boyz II Men, or the Farrelly Brothers, and regurgitation rather than digestion would be the more accurate gastric metaphor.
 
 The pop music critic of The Guardian recently reviewed a British band that reminded him â?? pleasantly, I should add â?? of "the hammering drum machine and guitar of controversial 80's trio Big Black and the murky noise of early Throbbing Gristle." I have no doubt whatsoever that the band he was writing about (a band with a name too confrontational and cutting-edge to be repeated here) will prove to be one of the most significant cultural forces of the decade, nor that it will produce music that forces us to confront the evil and horror that resides within us all.
 
 However, there is still a part of me that persists in thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play in the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive. I'm not sure that Throbbing Gristle and its descendants will ever pull that off, but the members of Marah do, often. I hope they won't be passing around the hat by the end of this year, but if they are, please give generously.
 
 
 Nick Hornby is the author, most recently, of "Songbook

Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #1 on: May 21, 2004, 08:46:00 am »
Anybody other than me and Mrs. Balls catch his book reading here a couple of years ago?

Bags

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #2 on: May 21, 2004, 08:48:00 am »
I missed it.  Sometimes I'm a very unlucky girl.  How was it?

grotty

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #3 on: May 21, 2004, 09:03:00 am »
Bags - How cool. I posted a snippet from that on "what are you listening to" a few weeks ago right before I went to see Marah. I love how excited he gets about bands. I think he's fantastic - High Fidelity is one of my all time favs.
 And he knows special music - You should check out Marah, given the opportunity.

Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #4 on: May 21, 2004, 09:04:00 am »
Really don't remember any of the details, except that it was very entertaining.
 
 I do remember Rhett Miller mentioning that he met Nick Hornby one time and Hornby told him her likes to listen to the Old 97's (or maybe Rhett's solo album) while he's on his treadmill.

kosmo vinyl

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #5 on: May 21, 2004, 09:14:00 am »
i've seen him twice and he is indeed very entertaining... although the last novel was a bit of a snooze, then again i was going through a divorce so it was a bit of a tough read and i never finished it.
 
 hornby readings bring in a "unique" crowd of bookworms, musicheads and decked out Arsenal fans.  and both the musicheads and Arsehole fans want to ask him obscure subject specific questions.
T.Rex

Bombay Chutney

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #6 on: May 21, 2004, 09:33:00 am »
Excellent article - thanks for posting, Bags.
 
 His comments about Marah perfectly reflect my feelings about The Slickee Boys (20 years ago) and,  more recently, Washington Social Club. Although I guess there's still a decent chance WSC could break through into mainstream success.
 
 Here's to the old codgers who still like to rock!  :)

mankie

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #7 on: May 21, 2004, 10:27:00 am »
Bags, I thought Bob Mould was your God? Has he been demoted to Allah or some lesser God, as Dubya puts it?

Bags

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #8 on: May 21, 2004, 10:56:00 am »
Yeah, actually Mould is fully entrenched in the gay world and is doing electronic music.  I still love and respect him, but I'm having a hard time relating these days.  And I think he'd understand that.      ;)    So maybe he's a 'lesser' god.  Much like Dave Grohl, as he's basically on hiaitus right now.
 
 It does appear, though, that I have many gods...if the Pope only knew.

godsshoeshine

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #9 on: May 21, 2004, 11:31:00 am »
i guess that means its ok for me to keep wearing neutral milk hotel tshirts to work. thanks, nick!
o/\o

Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #10 on: May 21, 2004, 11:33:00 am »
You probably shouldn't wear band t-shirts to work. Not all that professional.  :)
 
 
Quote
Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
  i guess that means its ok for me to keep wearing neutral milk hotel tshirts to work. thanks, nick!

godsshoeshine

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #11 on: May 21, 2004, 11:37:00 am »
you've never seen my office. shorts and sandals all around.
o/\o

vansmack

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #12 on: May 21, 2004, 12:29:00 pm »
Thanks for this bags.  Other than the fact that he's an Arsenal supporter, Nick Hornby puts in words all that is Smackie.
 
 I didn't care for "How to be Good" because it killed the essence of what it was to read a Nick Hornby Novel - a mans perspective with pop culture roots.  "How to be good" from a womens perspective didn't work for me.
 
 His short stories book "Speaking with the Angels" is one of the best collections of Modern short stories I've read.
 
 Songbook is fantastic and made me listen to Teenage Fanclub for weeks.
 
 Fever Pitch is a once a year read, usually in the summer when footie season is over.
 
 High Fidelity is watched every six months and About a Boy I read about once every two years (I can't watch the movie because of the hollywood ending).
27>34

TheNomad

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #13 on: May 21, 2004, 07:13:00 pm »
Marah Rules.
 
 Go to www.yeproc.com to listen to a new tune from their new album.
 
 Great great stuff.

Bags

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Re: Nick Hornby is God
« Reply #14 on: May 25, 2004, 10:35:00 am »
Letters to the Editor on Hornby's article...
 
 May 25, 2004
 Music With Energy (Those Were the Days!) (3 Letters)
 
 To the Editor:
 
 Nick Hornby bemoans the lack of exuberant, un-self-conscious rock bands like the Philadelphia band Marah in the contemporary music scene ("Rock of Ages," Op-Ed, May 21). But he doesn't give the media conglomerates that control what we hear on the radio their share of the blame.
 
 Essential to the vibrancy of rock 'n' roll in previous eras was the energy brought by radio D.J.'s who helped forge relationships between the listener and the artist. Nowadays, the voices we hear introducing playlists have about as much intimacy with the music as an actor in a commercial does with the product being peddled.
 
 Commercial radio legends like Vin Scelsa in New York (who introduced me to the band Marah) have been forced to find homes at smaller-signal public radio locations, or are off the air altogether. And the next generation of talented D.J.'s will be noteworthy only when we ask the kind of questions that motivated Mr. Hornby. Questions like, "What's missing here?"  
 
 JACOB KOSKOFF
 Los Angeles, May 21, 2004
 
 â?¢
 
 To the Editor:
 
 As a card-carrying baby boomer, if not yet a nostalgic old codger, I suspect that Nick Hornby needs to get out more â?? or at least to spend more time in America and less in London. Anyone who thinks of today's pop music culture as "suffocatingly airless" is clearly not listening to enough rap, which is bursting with the exhilaration and sense of invincibility Mr. Hornby finds lacking.
 
 It also routinely unites the races â?? an effect for which he lauds Outkast's "Hey Ya!" but on which he is oddly mum regarding the songs made by Marah â?? and has done so from the moment it surfaced on record 25 years ago.  
 
 BILL ADLER
 New York, May 22, 2004
 
 â?¢
 
 To the Editor:
 
 It can't possibly have passed Nick Hornby's notice that rock 'n' roll doesn't go by rules. It's not especially fond of wistful old people, either. I'm not that psyched to stand at the rear of the show, trying to act dignified when some 19-year-old says, "That lady must be here to pick up her kid." But I'd rather suffer that chagrin than wish the musical tastes of my youth on kids who want their own sound.
 
 Yeah, it's tough to be old and still love what's new and good about music, but we're not the arbiters of what's going on.
 
 It may be Mr. Hornby's version of excitement and exhilaration to hear a set end with the Righteous Brothers' "Little Latin Lupe Lu," but guess what? Rock 'n' roll doesn't care.  
 
 LOIS MAFFEO
 Olympia, Wash., May 22, 2004