Karl Klockars

If I were to try to sell records, I’d write the most depressing, rainy-day records I possibly could. As the baby boom generation gets older, and their money drives every market in the world, they’re going to want new music that reflects their sad, passive lives. That’s why The Fray and Snow Patrol are getting pushed like crazy.

There’s something about life that sucks the anger out of you, at least in this culture. We start out raging, raging against the dying of the light and we end up buying Norah Jones and John Mayer. There’s science behind that, I guarantee it, but we probably made research of it illegal somewhere along the way.

Sometimes synchron- icity smiles upon us, and a Nickelback video just came on VH1 Nocturnal. And goddamnit if I’m not starting to react, just the slightest bit, to their sappy Canadian horseshit. They have managed the amazing – being a nostalgia band even as a brand new act. It seems that all their songs at this point are about remembering all the great shit you did, the great loves you had way back when.

How sad that we’re selling the living in the past from bands who barely have one.

I hear bands like The Fray on radio, and invariably, if it’s raining out I leave it on. It just demands that kind of feel. I have friends who only play certain kinds of music by the season. For example, Type O Negative in fall, religiously. We’re coming up on October Rust season, and for good reason.

Music sense is very close behind scent sense as far as memory is concerned. A certain smell can take me back to one single unspectacular day if the right shampoo or adhesive scent is in the air, and music can do the same thing, if you let it. I’ve written a number of posts about songs that are jacked into your consciousness and take you back to a certain time in your life.

Interesting that we associate more timid, pensive music at a time when as people we should be growing more and more aware of who we are, of what we really want, when we’re starting to realize who we’re really going to be rather than what we want to do when we grow up.

We should be stuck on Fiona Apple from the ages of 13-22, and then at around the end of those late-teen years, jump headfirst into Bad Religion and the Misfits. Of course, we’re so determined to be our own person and be what we think are rebels at that point, and we go straight to the Guns N’ Roses as fast as we can. I don’t necessarily believe that as adolescents we try to find music that pisses our parents off; rather, we’re just made to piss our parents off in general and we end up with music that reflects that.

It seems that we have a certain L.D. 50 point for rock and roll. When we’re teens (well, when some of us were teens), there’s fifty some-odd freaking years of aggressive music to sift through and pick and choose what you want to attach yourself to. Some of us define ourself by our tie-dye shirts and our Deadhead bootlegs. Others dye our hair, pierce ourselves and pick the metal fashion of the day. More still will latch on to gangsta b-boy culture, or even grab hold of the Beatles or Zeppelin and never let go.

But when you baste yourself in one kind of music, one form of aggressive rock and then stew yourself in all the rest of the surrounding music, at some point you just run out of cooking materials. You’re dried up, ragged and flavorless, and this is a hell of a stressed analogy.

And I find myself devouring every group close to sounding like what I’m looking for. I’m already sick of the last three bands I’ve found, because I just…overdose on it. Part of freedom is the freedom to overdo it. To get everything you can all at once, regardless of where you’re at when you exhaust it.

Too bad I didn’t ration myself. Too bad I’m stuck with the mediocre cardboard cutouts of stuff I used to like. So does that leave me with…The Fray? Crap. I think it does. Damn. I’m getting old.

There’s a window of time when you’re viable, musically. That door pretty much closes at 27. And that’s the point in an artist’s life when he’s at the peak of his skills, starting from 13 or 17 or 4 or whenever they picked up that guitar or sat down at that piano. There’s some kind of biological drive or energy that just peters out around your late 20s. Either that, or the youth-powered nuclear drive that shoves the industry forward, one or the other. Chicken or egg? Youth or talent? Huh?

Look at all the entertainers who die or just fall off at around their late twenties. There’s some sort of fire that blazes from 21 to 26 or so, and then like a flash, it’s gone. You can carry yourself on that intensity for a good while, but when you don’t feel it any more, you better hope you’ve got skills.

I guess that’s the heart of what I can’t understand about the Adult Oriented Rock format artists. When you’re 19 or 22 and full of that fire, how does it get turned into pianos and acoustics? How doesn’t it come out in Marshall halfstacks on 11, how does it not translate into debauchery and flame and yelling at the sky daring it to yell back?

Maybe they did, and it didn’t work. Maybe there’s hope for my grizzled, late-twenties self yet. Just redefine the flame, re-aim the blowtorch to something else. There’s heart in that alt-liberal-atheist-country band yet. Maybe I’m at that 17 year old threshold, just about to set it off again.

Or maybe I’ll just go buy a Coldplay record. And shrug, and take a vitamin supplement. Yawn. Where’s my heating pad. And get off my lawn, you damn kids.