somebody built a mall and put the whole scene inside it. the bands are kiosks now. the labels are anchor tenants. the guy who used to book the basement show on fulton is doing "partnerships" and he has a lanyard.
we are not above any of this. we sell t-shirts. but there is a difference between selling a t-shirt and pretending the t-shirt is a movement, and most of you have stopped being able to tell.
the guy from that band everyone is pretending to like this month has been telling people he produced a record he played tambourine on. we have the session sheet. we are not going to print it, because that would be cruel, and because he will do this again in six weeks and we would rather save it.
two separate people have now told us the same story about the van, the gas station outside barstow and the missing drum hardware. the details do not match. one of them is lying and we think we know which.
somebody is going to get very famous this year for being extremely mediocre and we would like it on the record that we said so first.
here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud: most of what you love is already over, and the part you are still enjoying is the echo.
this is not a complaint about kids today. kids today are fine. kids today are, if anything, better musicians than we were, better organised, better at recording themselves, and far less interested in the specific brand of self-destruction that made the last twenty years so photogenic. that is progress. that is good. we mean it.
the problem is structural. when a scene works, it works because there is somewhere to play, somewhere to sleep, somewhere to print, and enough people who care to fill a room on a wednesday. all four of those are being priced out simultaneously. you cannot fix that with a better guitar tone. you cannot fix it by starting another label. we have watched six people start another label this year and every one of them is now running a warehouse out of a bedroom.
what actually helped, historically, was somebody with a lease being irresponsible with it. a room, a bad p.a., a person willing to lose money for four years because the alternative was having nothing to do. every scene worth writing about started with an act of financial stupidity by somebody who is now, twenty years later, unwilling to admit that is what it was.
we are not going to pretend we have a solution. we are a magazine. our entire contribution is telling you which records are good, occasionally telling you which people are frauds, and keeping a list of rooms that still let bands play in them. that is the job. that is the whole job.
but if you have a lease and a tolerance for losing money, now would be a good time.
the alternative is another decade of bands who are technically excellent and have absolutely nowhere to become interesting. you can hear it already. everything is recorded beautifully. nothing sounds like it came from anywhere.
one more thing, and then we will stop. the reason this matters is not nostalgia. we are not asking anyone to recreate a year they were not alive for. the reason it matters is that a scene is the only quality control that has ever worked in this form. a room full of people who will tell you to your face that the new songs are worse is worth more than every review ever printed, including ours. take that away and you get exactly what we have now: bands who are praised by an algorithm, discouraged by nobody, and finished by twenty-six.
go be irresponsible with a room. that is the whole editorial.
there are now four bands called the same thing and three of them are in the same state. this is not a coincidence, it is a failure of imagination distributed evenly across the country.
pick a worse name. the worse name is available. the worse name is why people will remember you.
