Yeah. I'm a thirty year old, grown man who likes to write about pop music. Not necessarily the Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake vein of pop music (which is not without its validity), but pop music nonetheless. Pop music that's simply an artist following their own vision, even if that vision means *gasp!* being accessible to normal people. People who like to sing along.
Music is a young man's game. No doubt about it. Everybody from Little Richard right on up to My Chemical Romance has started their careers writing music about being young and, more often than not, disenfranchised. What would the Beatles have been without the mass hysteria of the screaming young masses and the global parental freakout that followed? Great damn songwriters, really. But sometimes it's hard to see past those moptops or the drugs.
Somewhere after that magical age of twenty five (i.e. not a college freshman but really shining off adulthood), you have to acknowledge that your taste in music is probably veering far off the course of the musical mainstream. And that, in its own way, is a golden thing. No longer bound by the tastemakers of modern corporate (or should I say conglomerate) radio, you're free to find your real muse. You're free to find music that is what it is, as opposed to music that plays like a pantomime of teenage rebellion and disenfranchizement. You're free to find yourself somewhere that is, preferably, far away from Nickleback.
And that's where I found LCD Soundsystem and their wonderful album, Sound of Silver. Initially, I'd read about them in a glowing write up at Slate.com where the author of the article raved about the song "All My Friends." An anthem for the aging disenfranchised, "All My Friends" sang about what it was like to grow up: putting on the favorite albums of your youth, staying up way too late, regretting the things that you said and realizing that you don't do it nearly often enough. Poignant, moving and funny, its underlined by an unalarming sense of dread as opposed to the sunny, cheerier feelings invoked by most summer time pop.
I was twenty eight when I found this. Certainly, the chorus of "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan and the next five years trying to be with your friends again" certainly hit me as I watched friends move away, settle down into careers/relationships or all of the above. I couldn't help but feel like I'd found the self help seminar I'd always needed. I should be with my friends tonight. Dammit!
My girlfriend at the time, in one of her typical and frequent outbursts of kindness, bought the album for me. Possibly because she was tired of me cranking Franz Ferdinand's cover and raving that it was so New Order! What I found inside that cd case was nothing short of a musical leviathan in my life. Filled to the brim with songs of melancholic glee, it touched on the empty promises of nostalgia ("Sound of Silver"), death ("Someone Great") and even such adultly concerns as gentrification ("New York, I Love You"). I felt like I'd even found my anthem as a pub crawling twenty something in the song "North American Scum." Screw the Lost Boys. I'm part of the Lost Generation and we drink our way in.
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