Zapruder Point
Consumer/Songwriter

Jump Around!

Amy said she felt like she was rolling the dice when she got me Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records just a couple days before Christmas. She knows I’m a geek, and she saw this book about some indie label that had been around for 20 years, so she impulse-purchased it. I was excited when I opened the thing — it’s packed with pictures and is gorgeously put together. But it was only when I actually started reading the thing on Christmas Day that it became apparent what a home run this was, gift-wise. (Together with the cigar box guitar, Amy gets an A+ this year.)

It was a roller-coaster of a reading experience, actually. At first, I was pretty jazzed to notice they’d interviewed some folks from the Raleigh scene at the time. Here were some people I actually knew, reminiscing about places I’d actually been to, celebrating a scene I’d actually…sort of…  That’s how I almost got sad for a couple days’ reading. The Boy Wonder Jinx was always on the fringe of the scene, never really as cool as the bands people cared about. It felt like we worked our asses off, though, sending our CDs to anyone we could think of, touring as much as we could afford. But we never really got the “breaks” we were hoping for.  I used to nurse pitiful thoughts about how we “must not be doing the right kinds of drugs,” or some such cynical nonsense…

It was like I could still taste the sour grapes.  But as I kept reading, the story of Merge Records proved to be so hopeful that it burned through all those memories like Vap-O-Rub through a head cold. I’ve also changed my ideas about music radically from when I was 25. I’m not really interested in being cool…or in being picked up…or in getting anything like a “break.” Don’t get me wrong — whenever I finish whatever this current batch of songs ends up being, I plan on sending it to labels with the same mechanical relish I’ve been bugging clubs for shows. But I’ll be doing it as a matter of course, my fingers nowhere near as tightly crossed.

Nowadays, while I’m not really interested in “making it” any more (“whatever that means,” as the Arctic Monkeys would helpfully add), I still want to get gigs and stay busy (as I’ve mentioned).  So in these last couple weeks of hustling for a show, throwing emails against the wall, weathering vague rudeness from strictly-business-minded people…it’s been heart-warming to read about Merge, who seem to be genuinely and simply excited about the music they put out. Surely there are people like this all over, at every level, contributing and supporting music because they’re passionate about it…? I’m bound to make contact with at least some of these types of people in Chicago, right? (I mean aside from musicians themselves — I’ve met plenty of “good guys” in that category already.)

This is the hope, anyway.  Meanwhile, I do recommend Our Noise in general. One, because of the hope described above, and the detailed look into the arcs of both Merge AND Superchunk, the band formed by Merge co-founders Mac and Laura. They’ve conducted their label and band careers with such integrity that any musician should just absorb it, learn it, live it. Two, because you get a geeky insight into the making of some classic records by Neutral Milk Hotel, Arcade Fire, Magnetic Fields, and more. Three, because the final chapter imagines a pivotal role for Merge and other independent labels as the inevitable downfall of the majors comes to pass.  I won’t attempt to paraphrase the sentiment here, but it was an exciting…well…merge…of old and new business models, and I for one will buy it!

As should you.  I’d be curious to know what you think.

“Wallace became the chronicler of a world where it was ‘tough’ to be human, but not impossible. This was the subjective world of his readers, themselves animated by an anxious consciousness of their limitations and contingency. It was an article of faith for him that the educated person still came to serious literature for answers to the desperate questions of existence. If literature’s response was that this person, despite all appearances, no longer existed in any meaningful sense, this was a way of ending a conversation, not starting one. Wallace did not shrink from depicting an inhuman world in his novels, but he returned to the problem of what it felt like to carry on a human life in such a world. This is why it is a mistake to connect his own textual experiments—jump cuts, essayistic digressions, endnotes—with the distancing techniques characteristic of his postmodern predecessors.”

–John Baskin, from his essay on David Foster Wallace in the debut issue of The Point magazine

It’s taking me far longer to get through The Lay of the Land than the other two Frank Bascombe books, but passages like this keep me going:

“A lot of life is just plain wrong. And the older I get, the more clearly and often wrong it seems. And all you can do about it [...] is just start getting used to it, start selecting amazement over bewilderment.”

Maybe I really am an Existentialist.  Do I need a label?

“Even back in the 1980s (“my” day), when greed ostensibly was good, there was still a sense that the best and the brightest didn’t go to Wall Street. Lots of people did want to go, of course — there was a palpable thrill in the air when the investment banks came to recruit on campus — but I never had the impression that anyone was under the illusion that what was on offer was anything other than filthy lucre. You took it or you left it. But you didn’t go to Wall Street under cover of greatness. The whole culture hadn’t yet normalized the value system of men like the reptilian antihero Gordon Gekko. Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe were hardly meant to be admired.”

–Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, from her New York Times blog.