Everything I Love Used To Be Noise

I remember the first time I tried soda, which feels like a memory you'd only have access to if you were alive when soda was invented or you were raised in a cult that disavowed syrup, like that memory would also have to find you at 18-years-old, with a chin curtain and a big straw hat, visiting a city for the first time, being offered something your slightly more worldly cousin knew to be called "the devil's bubbles."

But I was born in 1989 and did not spend my childhood locked in a basement. This was at a friend's birthday party, around kindergarten or first grade. This friend, David, decided to have a cowboy birthday, and for lunch we all sat on his living room floor, watching episodes of The Lone Ranger, eating pigs in a blanket and drinking root beer. I got maybe four sips out of my bottle all day. The carbonation was too intense. The other kids were taking pulls and I could not understand how they were physically capable of what to me felt like chugging barbed wire.

Objectively, the weird part of that scene was a five-year-old wanting to gather his friends to watch The Lone Ranger, a TV show whose last iteration had aired fifty years before any of us had been born. To me, the weird part was a bunch of kids submitting to liquid torture and asking for seconds.

I thought about that twice, recently. Last night, my partner tried a low-sugar craft soda that somehow didn't taste like creek water (I didn't try it, but if you'd like to, grab yourself a can of Pura Soda's Cucumber Lime flavor). She offered some to our 4-year-old and he said he didn't like soda. I understood. I have no idea when I turned, but now I think soda's pretty neat.

The other time was a week ago, talking with a friend about the reunited band Times New Viking. I last saw them in 2008 and they're coming around next month. He'd never heard TMV and, while I think he'd enjoy their work, I gave the caveat that the first time you hear one of their albums, it probably sounds like noise. I love Guided By Voices and Flying Nun bands, lo-fi music has always had great appeal to me, but even now, almost two decades after first encountering Times New Viking, there are songs that seem more feedback and clipping than music. There are stretches that sound designed to make Mutt Lange break down in soap opera tears. This is art I love— “Move To California” might be the song I’ve listened to most, full stop— but if you weren’t ready for all these perfect pop songs to be this far in the red, you might not give it a second shot. If I said this band had great lyrics, you might assume I was fucking with you, given how hard it can be to make them out.

Case in point: “Pagan Eyes,” from TMV’s Stay Awake EP, opens with a perfect guitar hook, which you can hear for all of 7 seconds before the drums, organ and vocals drop, at which point it’s soup.

I bought this EP the week it came out 18 years ago (shout out to Cellophane Square in Seattle, which would close in 7 months), I’ve listened to it regularly since, and, as much as I love it for exactly what it is, I‘ve wished there was a cleaner version almost as regularly.

When I listen to Times New Viking and I hear what initially felt lost behind a wall of fuzz, I can also recognize the fuzz. The forest is still there, even if I'm naturally focused on the trees. I can't hear that with Pixies. I have no way to account for my reaction the first time I listened to Surfer Rosa. I bought that CD in early high school and listened to it in one go, lying on my bed. I thought the album was very good, but I also thought it was largely instrumental. I just did not hear vocals on at least half of the songs.

Steve Albini, who produced Surfer Rosa, has a reputation for mixing vocals low, but Black Francis and Kim Deal are yelling all over that record. Francis is often screaming. There's one song, "Something Against You," where the vocals sound dirty and a little warped, like the mic is hidden in a vacuum cleaner, but the singing on that album is otherwise distinct and is definitely not subtle. I remember thinking that, after "Bone Machine" and before "Where Is My Mind?" there had only been lyrics on one or two songs. If you know what Francis is singing on a song like "Broken Face," that's probably an especially weird thing to read. Those lyrics are there to make you uncomfortable.

Was I not really paying attention? Was my stereo broken? I don't think it's either of those. I think I sincerely was not used to music sounding like that. It was the root beer carbonation all over again.

I often have trouble putting myself into the position of hearing something radical as being radical. There's nothing I can do, no mindset I can put myself in, to take in a Bill Haley & His Comets song as being a cranked up rave or a Bo Diddley song as full of danger. As good as "Who Do You Love?" is, there's no way for me to hear it as something religious leaders would demand taken off the radio. But that was Surfer Rosa and its two-minute-long pop songs about begging your lover to mail her bloody laundry to your jail cell. That wasn't how music had sounded to me before. There were no precedents for me.

At some point, not too many years later, I was listening to Merzbow, actual noise without melody. And then Merzbow sounded normal to me. I'll never forget the total lapse in judgment I had when the person I shared an office with at my post-college internship asked if I liked to listen to music while working. She was playing minimal techno, chillwave, a new Boards of Canada album, Tomorrow's Harvest, had recently come out and one of our coworkers had sent that to her, things like that. She didn't want to hog the atmosphere. So she asked, and I said I didn't really listen to music while working, but I sometimes listened to noise.

The reason I've occasionally listened to noise while working is that I have OCD, and my OCD was especially far from "under control" in 2013. If I play music I can follow, I will follow it, and then I won't be doing work, I'll be thinking about the words and the rhythm and everything. I still can't read a book while the TV is on. Having that Boards of Canada album on was fine because I wasn't in control, it wasn't coming out of my computer, which meant I couldn't jump over to iTunes and rewind to hear part of a song again, and also she was playing it, so I wasn't worried that my selection was annoying other people and I wasn't getting lost in my head as I tried to gauge whether I needed to switch to something else. But with Merzbow, there's often nothing to follow along with. I can work to Merzbow because it obliterates anything my OCD could interrupt me with. Nobody's ever praised a Merzbow album's structure. I usually don't listen to harsh noise while working, but I can.

So my coworker wanted to hear what noise was and I played two or three seconds of Merzbow's "Woodpecker No. 1" and she looked at me like I'd just shown her a bit of hardcore porn.

Returning to 2008, Fuck Buttons gave me a similar experience with a totally different kind of noise. I was (and am) obsessed with their album Street Horrrsing. The record's first single, "Bright Tomorrow," is now its least interesting track, but at the time it was two weird halves. For its first four minutes, "Bright Tomorrow" is an intensely repetitive house track, and then there's an explosion, and for its remaining four minutes, the song was loud, formless and huge. Later, I'd realize the song's second half wasn't formless, that there's a sci-fi melody pulsing through all the noise. It took a long time to hear that, though. "Bright Tomorrow" was special to me, but it was also almost a dare, something I'd play for friends just to see their reaction to the turning point. I'd never heard an album, much less a song, with that dramatic a shift.

Very rarely, the music that's hit like ice water has been shocking for its lyrical content. I already owned a couple Xiu Xiu albums by the time a friend burned a copy of WHY?'s Elephant Eyelash for me, so I was familiar with that kind of bracing emotional honesty, but "Yo Yo Bye Bye" threw me for a loop. As the first chorus begins, after a verse of straightforward, unusually talky lines like "I'd like to talk much longer / but I'm on somebody else's cell phone's time," the music swells and Yoni Wolf sings "I'm fucking cold like a DQ Blizzard." By the end of the song he's returned to the poetry of Monterrey birches, but that one moment was so jarring I didn't know if "Yo Yo Bye Bye" was even something I could listen to again. Did that moment ruin the entire song? "I'm fucking cold like a DQ Blizzard?"

He's a great writer, though. We can talk about whether that's a good line, but of course Wolf knew what he was doing when he put it there. As he'd explain later, he was in a Dairy Queen while WHY? were on tour and:

"I wasn’t talking to nobody because I was so depressed, and then the line popped in my head – “I’m fucking cold like a DQ Blizzard” – and I started cracking up. Can I say that in a song? It was just the way I felt right then. It was so gritty it felt like the right things to say."

I'd never call the lyric "gritty," but it does knock you sideways for a moment. Now, I like it, and not just because of the anecdote, but because it's the kind of childish, dumb, dynamically emotional thing that could strike you as you're an adult grappling with teenage feelings.

It reminds me of an old interview with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart, which I'm going to block quote here, because I've found this true, brilliant and inspiring for so much of my life If you've suffered through previous blogging endeavors, I'm sure I've made you read it before. This is from 2003, after the band had released their second album:

Pitchfork: The first thing I usually get asked by people when I play them a Xiu Xiu record is, "Is it a joke?"

Jamie: [Laughs] Ouch! Notice, I'm laughing. So... perhaps it is!

Pitchfork: I think a lot of people aren't used to music addressing them in that way. It sometimes seems so over the top that most people aren't used to anything being that...

Jamie: My dad at one point was a really famous record producer, and he told me that the only regret he ever had in music was not going over the top enough. He talked to me kind of long and hard about-- you know, not necessarily that we're doing this successfully, who the fuck knows, but he talked to me about-- any time you're doing something in music that makes you feel kind of uncomfortable, then something actual is happening. And sometimes it's successful, and people can get touched by it, and sometimes people are like, "Is it a joke?" But the times that it's successful never happen unless you go fucking balls-out on something and just rip yourself apart. Personally, too, any creative venture that's ever meant anything to me personally has been really over the top. I mean, shit like, most indie rock, I think, is some of the dumbest fucking music I've ever heard, because it's usually just, listless. Not even the same old stuff, but people being very subtle, and very guarded. I mean, fucking, why? Why?

Pitchfork: I think a lot of people just want to be in a band, or think that they can innovate by just being another band with, like, tape manipulations...

Jamie: People have been doing that since, like, the 40s. Big deal. If somebody can do indie rock with tape manipulations, and then they can tear their fucking heart in half, then they're doing something, hopefully. I don't know. Going over the top in and of itself isn't an end. I don't just mean emotionally. I think that in anything you do– I mean, just SCREAMING THAT MY LIFE'S HORRIBLE! I'M GOING TO CUT MY OWN FUCKING HEAD OFF! I mean, I don't think that's necessarily going over the top. I think that whether or not we do it successfully, sometimes we do. I think that being incredibly honest with what you're feeling is the most over-the-top that you can go. And if it's really histrionic, and it's really crazy-dramatic, but that's a real expression of somebody's life, then that person, luckily for them, is doing something that can be a real experience for somebody. And if you just sit there and wear a fucking trucker hat and play a Jaguar guitar, you can suck my fucking asshole. Ech, ech! It pisses me off. I'm so fucking tired of that shit.

It doesn't feel coincidental that Xiu Xiu covered "Yo Yo Bye Bye."

One more thing I didn't feel I had the preparation for. I liked Wolf Parade when I was in high school, and knew the better of their two songwriters, Spencer Krug, also occasionally played piano in his friend Carey Mercer's band Frog Eyes. When Frog Eyes (with Krug in tow) recorded a free Daytrotter session in 2006, almost a year before the release of their masterpiece, Tears of the Valedictorian, I downloaded it and had no idea what to make of what I was hearing. The first song, "Caravan Breakers," was almost dizzying. There's a repetitive, addictive keyboard bit holding everything down, and then the other members of the band sound like they're racing each other to see who can finish the song first. Mercer's voice is as musical as his guitar playing.

The first song on Tears, "Idle Songs," sounded the same way. There's some drumming for a few bars and then everybody joins in at once and they don't stop to breathe until a guitar solo crashes in at the end.

This wasn't unusual in the way the abrasive things I've mentioned were– there are great hooks in these songs, the production is crystal clear– and I still can't make out half of what's being sung, so it isn't like the WHY? track. The only lyric I could be confident I knew was the part in "Caravan Breakers" where Mercer sings "Wee-heeeee, I want a belly made of gold."

I knew I liked those hooks enough to want to figure out what was going on here. It was almost a joke, how weird Frog Eyes sounded, but it was alluring enough that I knew I wanted to take it seriously. I knew that nothing else in my life had sounded like this, and I got enough peeks at what was going on that I recognized I could potentially one day take in the entire picture. Until that time came, I'd sort through the noise.