Indie, Dancepunk, and the Economy of Satisfaction

These days you have to quantify relaxation. Carve it up it and shove those pieces into your schedule; do whatever it takes to manage your time and appease both that sense of obligation to other humans and to the self. I’ve been less creative about this lately, and the result has been an extreme submissiveness to music.

Costs: ambivalence toward the lack of active creating of art or original thoughts. Doubts about the implications of the passivity of listening: wondering if I should be doing something that leaves a trace. Should I be making rather than taking? Time is productivity, creativity, and satisfaction.

Benefits: Opportunity to engage with my emotions on a completely visceral level. An escapism I can control by clicking on things on a screen. I-Tunes represents a language of empowerment that organizes my passions, clearly and accessibly presenting them to others.

Not all of those points should be trapped in such narrow categories, but the point is that this is how a hyperstructured life makes me think. I’m adjusting to it, though. And this adjustment has had profound implications for how I navigate my music tastes. I’m living in a state of perpetual fragmentation, but want to find a way for everything that I find important to fit into this structure, music included. Which means that there has to be a sort of logic and efficiency to what I listen to: how do I let my emotions explore as far as they want to go in a limited amount of time? I remain unwilling to compromise music’s emotionally restorative and challenging function, and this is difficult to reconcile with time constraints.

It is through this framework that I’ve been able to understand my infatuation with The National and LCD Soundsystem this school year. The type of music they play has a way of best capturing the urgency of understanding and embracing one’s cluttered life, with all its tension, contradictions, and fluctuating intensities.

This is, interestingly, not a reflection of inherent genre qualities or my own genre preferences, as neither The National’s (fairly straightforward) style of indie rock or LCD Soundsystem’s wry electronica are types of music that necessarily thrive on tension. But this is almost the point: each of these bands find their strength in presenting their respective styles of music in ways that negotiate obvious senses of self-consciousness with a mastery of their genres in the technical sense. It’s as if they’re playing to prove to themselves that they are capable of creating something great. And through all the doubts and triumphs of this process is a beautiful search for redemptive equilibrium that results in tremendously powerful music.

This can maybe most easily be seen in the thematic content of their albums. Both bands released masterpieces in 2007, as The National’s Boxer and LCD’s Sound of Silver were, I think, some of the very best albums of that year and the decade. The songs of both records manifest their creators’ anxiety in similar ways. They present imagery that represents a fatigue with excitement, with social lives that are propelled by the prospect of something better, with the fact that the growing up process never really ends.* They treat hope with a sense of desperation and express disillusionment with reverence. This is all, however, done with a completely unironic grace that resists defeatist cynicism, instead suggesting a fundamental battle with the concept of optimism. It is, wonderfully, the occasional embrace of this same optimism that provides each record with its moments of triumph.

Somehow, though, the records also resist the extreme cohesion or dissonance that would allow one to comment on whether or not optimism triumphs in the end (as a sort of final statement). Instead it simply exists, as a concept that people must relate to their own lives.

I could analyze every song in each album, and though it would be fun, it would probably get self-indulgent and tedious. But there is a way in which the bands negotiate the tension of their music that makes them so important for me at this time:

The ambivalent relationship I have towards the scheduled fragmentation of my life is a symptom of a transition into self-sufficiency, and the struggle to find a lifestyle that can be attuned to the needs of this transition. Accordingly, the ambivalence these bands express in the execution of their own music and the articulation of its subject matter is a way of making that same struggle into something magnificent.

And there is also something profoundly reassuring about the fact that this magnificence is the product of a battle with that process, not the conquering of it.

Time can be productivity, creativity, or satisfaction if you want it to be. But with these pieces of music, it’s a chance to capture the complexity of self-affirmation, in all of its intricate contexts.

*The best examples of this, I think, are The National’s “Apartment Story” and LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.”