One of my brothers is eight years older than me, which means I had someone feeding me sage advice from a very young age. And because of who my brother and I are, most of this advice has manifested in fantasy sports and, certainly, pop music. For my 13th birthday he gave me a full book of CDs (what a concept), which has continued to inform my personal preferences to this very day.
Os Mutantes wasn't included in that birthday gift, and I had never really been exposed to them before they headlined one night of the Pitchfork Music Festival in 2006. At that time he and his friend Andy were nice enough to let me know that ""No dudes actually like Os Mutantes, they just put their posters on their walls so girls will think they're cultured and sensitive.""
I'm only a few years younger now than Andy was then, and already my role has started to switch. Now I have friends who ask me which Wilco album to tell someone is the best if they want to sound sensitive (Being There), mature (Summerteeth), hip (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) or factually correct (A.M.). All of these conversations ostensibly take place in house parties or bars, because those are the only times you're involved in a social setting casual enough to argue about music and drunken enough that you won't be expected to support it.
Most of the times it wouldn't matter, anyways. Broad musical preferences—the kinds you're likely to exchange with total strangers—are often just social products (what you are exposed to depends greatly on with whom or where you locate yourself). But in order to parse out how a person fits into that social construct all you have to do is parse out which aspects of the social preferences are most apt—that's how we as social animals are able to fight through this mess.
Obviously, some bands lend themselves to this exercise better than others. I've already mentioned Wilco, but the one I like to walk through most is Modest Mouse, because it allows the most room for error. Everyone has heard of Modest Mouse, if only because ""Float On"" still gets more airplay than Leonardo DiCaprio in ""Catch Me If You Can."" And as it turns out, that song's source album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, is the fulcrum of this whole project.
Good News was the definitive point at which the angular, insolating mess found a voice in very rounded, softened production. Good News was the big breakthrough, even though its predecessor, The Moon & Antarctica, did all the same things, but with more raw emotion and delivery. The only difference is how badly you like your songs to sound like they're made for a movie soundtrack. They also had an album hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200, 2007's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, but anyone who says that is their favorite probably likes Death Cab For Cutie too much for their own good.
But before all of that, on both 1996's This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About and 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West, frontman Isaac Brock traversed more challenging and more engulfing thematic terrains while the rest of the band indulged in more natural and emotive textures. They can certainly get unsettling and difficult, but they're exactly the kinds of things you would embrace if you like songs that feel organic and without pretension.
And if you eschewed their entire discography and answered the collection of B-Sides and rarities Building Nothing Out of Something, then we should probably meet up for drinks sometime.
No doubt, this is a form of superficial judgment I'm not altogether proud of. But inside the context of a bar or a house party there's little room for much else. So if you're talking about folk music and you mention Edward Sharpe or Devendra Banhardt, don't be surprised if you get a beer dumped on your head. And if you're caught in a circle trying to impress someone who doesn't seem to understand how pop music works, or if you are overwhelmed by interrogations and fearful of namedropping the wrong French no-wave outfit, just turn it around and change the subject to how it's a shame that Bono is able to get away with writing such shitty music just because he's a humanitarian. That's one thing we can all agree on.
Don't like to associate with people who prefer Kyle's spring semester columns over his fall semester columns? They're just posers trying to look hip anyway. Tell Kyle you're a true believer at ktsparks@wisc.edu.
