BoogMusic

That was Mike Patton in March 2008.  Yet here we are, a short two years later and Faith No More is back out there playing to crowds of pudgy, balding thirty-something year olds.  This bothers me, way more than it should.  I don’t mean just Faith No More- I love Faith No More; I saw Faith No More at the American Theater in St. Louis on the Angel Dust tour with Helmet opening and it was a truly seminal experience in my life.  As was seeing Blur at Roseland in ’96, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in early ’92 supported by the then-unknown Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, and Rollins Band that same year with the totally unknown Tool opening.  Like countless other kids at other rock shows, I had the experience of, for just a few hours, not feeling like a total loser and that I was actually doing something cool, or at least seemed cool at the time.  They were awesome shows played in pretty small venues by acts that didn’t really feel the need for lasers and sets and all the trappings of “mainstream” music that all the square phonies at school were into.  These guys, as they said, cared a lot: big money stadium shows were for old fogies like the Who and U2; we had a scene based on awesome rock & roll, man, not your soulless suburban corporate nightmare.  Fuck Happy, man, Fuck Happy.

That, of course, is all total bullshit.  Every one of those bands that I thought we so above it all would’ve loved to not be broke.  Living on a bus for weeks at a time, eating Taco Bell, fighting with every two-bit promoter for money I’m sure gets pretty old.  If fifteen years later all those pimply kids you used to play for now have dough enough to see you again- no, have dough that they’re chomping at the bit to part with to see you again, why not?  Who cares if it feels a bit rote?  To quote Malkmus from a recent Spin article, “If the band likes hearing people cheer, and getting a check, as is the case with us… then it usually ends up working out, even if they’re just ham-and-egging out the same old chords.”

But therein lies the rub: none of us are thirteen anymore, and this time these guys are just in it for the money.  Even if they play great, it’s still just a money gig.  Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but how jazzed can you get for somebody else’s payday?  When you consider they probably don’t really like each other and they’re not working on any new music, it comes off as pretty soulless.  It’s worse than soulless, it’s exploitative and blatantly commercial, and I really can’t imagine myself having a good time after paying too much to stand around with a bunch of other pathetic 30 or 40 year old aging hipsters pretending we’re all back in college while listening to someone cynically cash in on our collective nostalgia.  I don’t know who to despise more in that transaction.

As I said earlier, this bothers me way more than it should, but it does.  The Malkmus Spin article makes me hate every band I liked growing up, or at least reminds me why I pretty much stopped listening to current music after 1996.  To claim that touring or playing out is “kind of weird” unless you’re getting paid and “if you’re doing it for the art, stay at home with your family” seems a little cold and calculating, and quite frankly, is a bunch of rationalizing bullshit.  I guess, as town-cryer for Gen-X zeitgeist, he really sums up what sucks about Americans today- more interested in maintaining the contrivances of their suburban existence than doing something decent and soulful, albeit painful.  Wait- haven’t I heard this before?  Isn’t this the kind of thing bands like Pavement used to rail against back in the day? Or was that all just a way of intellectualizing their lack of success in the face of Hootie and the Blowfish?  I guess if Stone Temple Pilots are elegant bachelors, then are Pavement very shrewd cultural politicians?  Spoiled children abound in the spotlight of public adoration.  I almost respect Kurt Cobain for killing himself.  At least he didn’t have to turn into his parents.

Unless, of course, his parents also killed themselves…