By now it’s a time-tested cliche: “The record only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”
The Velvet Underground & Nico (yes, the record with the banana on the cover) was the first great alternative album ever recorded. Lou Reed’s fierce poetry over the band’s radically unconventional grit laid the scaffolding for punk rock, post-punk, new wave and art rock to come. Even contemporary indie isn’t safe from the tentacles of this acute debut. And it was recorded by a group of then-nobodies working in perfect obscurity as the in-house band at Andy Warhol’s New York art studio, The Factory.
There’s a certain romance to the notion of an artist crafting his masterpiece in private. The persistent underdog with no fame, no audience and an electricity bill to pay. We can all place ourselves in his shoes.
On those grounds, it’s worthwhile to take a look at modern equivalents to The Velvet Underground & Nico; three albums whose influence far exceed their recognition. To the underdogs!
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - The Doldrums
The Doldrums is an album that was never meant to see the light of day. It doesn’t belong in anyone’s iTunes library. It doesn’t belong on Internet forum discussions or on the tips of anyone’s tongues. These 15 schizophrenic tracks belong in some forgotten drawer on the dusty, scratched up CD-R Ariel Pink, also known as, uh, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, initially recorded them. Using nothing more than his own layered and tone-deaf voice and a feeble-at-best command of the guitar and synthesizer, Pink crafted some of the most genuine, nostalgic and unsettling pop music ever set to tape. And he did it without ever caring if anyone heard.
The story goes that a homemade copy of the disc found its way onto the floor of Animal Collective’s van one tour. There it sat collecting grime for a couple years, before one of the band members decided to throw it on. They were astonished with what they heard, and immediately wanted Pink on their label. Thus, The Doldrums became the first non-Animal Collective release to be put out on the band’s own Paw Tracks.
What followed were low reviews and an even lower publicity campaign that relegated Pink to a fringe but extremely dedicated cult following. There are many, including ex-Girls frontman Christopher Owens, who credit Pink as the most gifted songwriter of this generation. His brand of lo-fidelity, inspired equally by “dad rock” and 1980s cop thriller soundtracks, predated the so-called “hypnogogic pop” trend in indie music by nearly a decade, giving him ample time to perfect the craft and set the standard.
Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
The term “bedroom artist” is bogged down with negative associations. That label applies to the breed of musicians who record quiet, tenuous, reverb-drenched, lo-fidelity songs with the intent of obscuring melody and blurring the line between distinct sounds and voices. It all sounds very pretty in concept, but so many “artistes” use this opaque technique as a mask for genuinely poor songwriting.
This dubious scene blossomed in the later years of the last decade following Grouper’s release of the gorgeously haunting Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill in 2008. The album was met with positive reviews from critics across the board, but quickly fell out of print and shrugged itself into obscure corners of the web. Those who stumbled upon the lost LP tended to be Internet-hip creative folks who figured “Hey, this is easy! I’ve got GarageBand and an acoustic guitar. I can make this.”
As simple as Dragging a Dead Deer sounds, however, no one since has matched it in terms of sheer elegance and beauty. For all it’s ambience and subtlety, the album is effortlessly free of any pretension or boredom—something that can’t be said for most of the copycats.
Chuck Person - Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1
Chuck Person is an alter ego of Daniel Lopatin, better known for his work as Oneohtrix Point Never. In 2010, Lopatin began uploading mysterious videos to YouTube under the guise Sunsetcorp. These videos featured tempo-shifted samples from late 80s/early 90s adult contemporary, R&B, and ambiguously dated midi files looped and distorted endlessly over vague, corporate, technological imagery from that same period. The results were extremely unsettling, to say the least.
After rousing some curiosity, “Chuck Person” anonymously dropped a cohesive mixtape of these short vignettes. And, as is par with Lopatin’s work, Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 became the birth of a whole new aesthetic. One astute Internet user observed that the mixtape sounded as though it were hiding, unshowered, in the corner of a public library computer lab. Truer words have never been typed.
In 2012, thanks to Lopatin’s influence, the vaporwave genre exploded on the scene with appropriately titled artists like Macintosh Plus, Laserdisc Visions and Saint Pepsi perverting commercial culture from the dawn of the digital age. Smooth jazz and elevator music were blended and saturated to mock consumer gluttony all while embellishing on and embracing it. A musical equivalent to retro-futurism if ever there was one, thanks to Chuck P.
Have any albums you think launched a thousand bands? Still have no idea what “vaporwave” is? Let Max know at mdfisher2@wisc.edu.
