The Velvet Underground was an New York City-based rock band who, under Andy Warhol's management, permanently altered the landscape of popular music through its blah blah blah blah. You know the story. Or if you don't, the introduction to the band's Wikipedia article can bring you up to speed with the highlights. Calling the Velvet Underground influential is one of the oldest lines in rock criticism, so I'm not really going to spend too much time defending it. Plenty of more insightful ink has already been spilled on the topic; no use rehashing all that here. The Velvet Underground's output is a landmark in music history, one that has inspired many an artist. You won't here me arguing that point. But is it still inspiring artists? Ironically, this question came to me after listening to the most recent album from Foxygen, a band that is without a doubt inspired by the Velvet Underground. If you haven't already, go give Foxygen's latest, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, a few spins. In my reckoning, it's one of the year's best albums, and also one of the funnest, especially if you're into late-'60s-style psych rock. The album takes tons of cues from that era's heavy-hitters, including the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and any number of bands captured on the Nuggets compilation, and it spins those allusions into a playful homage.
But as much as McCartney and Mick Jagger have left fingerprints all over the record, the reference point that stuck me most was that of the Velvet Underground, particularly from the poppier Velvet Underground/Loaded iteration of the band. There is, of course, that famous Brian Eno quote that "everyone who
bought one of those 30,000 copies [of the first Velvet Underground
record] started a band," and Foxgen is definitely one of them, at
least metaphorically (the band members' birth dates preclude them from
actually being around for the first pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico).
The influence is most pronounced on the album's second track, "No Destruction" (embedded below), but you can hear VU touches in all the songs, from the "Herion"-style, slow-to-fast percussion/organ sections in "On Blue Mountain" to lead singer Sam France's channeling of Lou Reed's drawling monotone pretty much throughout the album.
We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic is only Foxygen's second album released since Jagjaguwar Records picked them up in early 2011 (I have yet to listen to their first album, Take the Kids Off Broadway), which makes them relative newcomers to the music industry. And as I got to listening to this newcomer's album more and more over the past week, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I heard another new band that sounded remotely like it could be one of those Eno 30,000. Of course, pop and rock radio has never had very much to do with the Velvet Underground, but where the lack of VU influence is sort of surprising to me is in the (for lack of a better term) indie music scene, an arena that has embraced the Velvet Underground sound in the past. Looking at the current generation of headlining indie darlings (Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Janelle Monáe, etc.) it's hard not to notice how distinctly un-VU most of them sound. Sure, it can be
argued that none of these bands could exist in their current form
without the foundations laid by the Velvet Underground, but when it
comes to what they sound like[1], the Beach Boys, the Band, Prince, world music, and, um, '80s adult contemporary[2] seem like more relevant touchstones than "Sister Ray" or "Sweet Jane." There are a few exceptions (The Men and everybody's-favorite-2013-debuting-band Savages come to mind), but those are notable more for their rarity than for their place within larger trends. Compare that to the rise of indie music in the '80s and '90s, when bands like R.E.M., Belle and Sebastian[3], the Pixies, Joy Division, and My Bloody Valentine found creative potential bursting out of every nuance of the Velvet Underground's distortion-meets-NYC-underbelly sound. I can think of two reasons that might explain the weaning of indie music from the Velvet Underground. First, perhaps the Velvet Underground sound became too much of a default template for indie music, and maybe this made the deviations from VU territory become more innovative and therefore more emulated. If you look at the best (or at least the most notable) indie rock records from about a decade ago, when current-gen bands would have been forming their sound—Funeral, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, White Blood Cells—a lot of them became known not for their use of VU-inspired noise and distortion but for the addition of electronics, nontraditional instruments, and pre-VU genres like folk and the blues. So maybe it was those elements that seemed fresher and more inspiring to younger artists, causing electronic dance music and Americana to replace post-punk and noise rock as the go-to sounds for indie bands.
Second, there's the increasing influence of hip hop and R&B on the scene, two genres that have never felt very much of the Velvet Underground's pull. When the mid-2000s thrust indie music into the mainstream, it tore down a bunch of the self-imposed stylistic barriers surrounding indie rock (guitars, whiteness), and put the scene into a conversation that included not just Arcade Fire and the Shins but also Outkast and Beyoncé. When Pitchfork has more to say about Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, and Kenye West than the new My Bloody Valentine and David Bowie albums, you know something has changed in the indie world. And that's good. I like seeing music scenes going in new directions. Great as it is, the Velvet Underground isn't the be-all, end-all of music, even rock music, and I welcome the chance indie music has to kill its idols, so to speak. A lot of thrilling things are going on in the music world now, and I'm all for the new ideas coming out of those exciting transitions. Sometimes it's nice to have a good ol' throwback, though. And that's when I put on that new Foxygen album for the fifth time today. But, then again, I could be wrong. Maybe you think I'm totally missing out some great new bands. Maybe you think there hasn't really been a big change in the VU's influence. Or maybe you think my reasons for the change are complete garbage. Or maybe you just want to share some related anecdote. Don't be shy: share it in the comments! Make your voice known! I'd love to hear from y'all.
Until next time. 1] A tricky game if there ever was one. If you listen hard enough to the nuances, anything can sound like it was influenced by anyone. But let's not overthink it; I'm just talking about the main sonic aesthetic of these bands.
2] Two years later, I am still confounded by the production choice to turn one of Bon Iver's prettier tunes into a Michael Bolton song. 3] Who have in recent years excised the hazier VU sound present on early albums like If You're Feeling Sinister in favor of the sunnier territory of power pop and '70s FM. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just sayin'.
Halfway through Me and You and Everyone We Know, I thought I had it pegged down. I was wrong, and I'll explain why. But let me give some context first.
Sometime during the past two years, too gradually for me to pin on a specific date, I got bored with "indie" movies. Now, people can quibble a lot about the word indie, whether such-and-such movie really qualifies as indie or not when so-and-so actor worked on it and whatever studio distributed it, but I'm not here to get into credibility debates, which are pretty dull anyway. Moreover, the term indie has described so many different things over the years that it's basically meaningless as anything but a genre distinction. In 2013, indie isn't a studio, or lack thereof; it's a style. So when I say that I got bored with indie movies, what I really mean is that I got tired of romantic comedies whose primary emotions are ennui and sincerity, where the men are stammering and disaffected, and the women are outgoing and have eclectic hobbies, and the children are precocious, and the dialogue lets the audience know it's sophisticated because it references literature and uses the word "fuck," and everything about the cinematography and soundtrack is just a little too precious.
Of course, in addition to being a horrible trainwreck of a run-on, most of that last sentence reeks of an oversimplified view that dismisses a diverse collection of films made by hardworking, talented people. Not that such trends don't exist in certain brands of cinema (I'm pretty sure they do, and I am tired of them), but it's unfair and disrespectful to dismiss huge swatches of (mostly) American film output based just on aesthetic criteria. Plenty of good things have actually come out of this genre, and to tell you the truth, a lot of movies that I like quite a bit share many of those "indie" qualities I listed above.
Nonetheless, such was my mindset going into writer/director/actress Miranda July's 2005 film.
Here's the movie's synopsis on Netflix, which appears beneath its pastel-saturated poster: "Eccentric Christine seeks emotional connections in the modern world
while newly single shoe salesman Richard copes with his recent
separation and his teenage son experiences a sexual awakening." Quirky woman, disaffected man, precocious teen: indie flick, right?
Well, as it turns out, sort of. The first half of the movie or so didn't do a whole lot to change the impression I had gleaned from the cover and Netflix blurb. In its early goings, Me and You and Everyone We Know seems to aspire to a romantic comedy take on the Magnolia-style film that became popular around the turn of the new millennium, where casual acquaintance and synchronicity interconnect the lives of a large cast of characters. It would be cumbersome to describe the considerable number of characters and subplots in the movie (a cumbersomeness that Me and You avoids through clear and efficient storytelling, which itself should have clued me in that something special was going on), but the focus initially remains on quirky Christine (Miranda July) and sad-sack Richard (John Hawkes), which is what gives the movie such strong indie rom-com vibes early on. The two first meet in what I assumed to be a take on the typical "meet-cute," with a perhaps overly clever conversation on how the street signs mirror the relationship they might have together. Before long, the script gives the two a few more of these Holly Golightly-esque chats, and the movie is well on its way to indie-pop territory. But then something happens in the final forty-five minutes of the movie that blew me away: Me and You and Everyone We Know ceases to aspire to indiedom and instead achieves the sublime. The film pulls away from the supposedly central romance and lets the rest of the characters' stories unfold in deeply human ways that push toward the surreal and the emotionally naked. For example, the beginning of the movie shows Richard's teenaged son, Peter, goofing around on an internet chat room; there he meets an anonymous user, to whom he describes, at the suggestion of his six-year-old brother, Robby, a practice Robby calls "pooping back and forth forever" (which is exactly what it sounds like). Robby then begins to log on to the chat room by himself and continue talking to the anonymous user (who has taken quite a liking to the idea of "pooping back and forth forever"). The movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of the situation, but the payoff of this subplot, when Robby meets the chat room companion (a thirty-ish woman who curates an art museum), is absolutely transcendent and indicative of the beauty this movie dishes out in its second half. When the two meet, there is no screaming or revulsion between the two, but instead a tender understanding and a completely non-ironic embrace. This ending somehow manages to frame the two as wistful lost souls finding peace (read: real human beings) without reneging on the movie's promise to deliver on the ick-factor and comedy of a six-year-old meeting a thirty-year-old with a fecal fetish for a blind date. These are two characters finding unexpected profundity out of a situation whose initial premise would have exploited their situation solely for comedy. What's striking is that while nearly every character gains this profundity by the end of the film, often in equally bizarre ways that contrast the initial realist/indie aesthetic of the beginning, these resolutions never feel jarring or ridiculous. This won't make sense to anyone who hasn't already seen it, but that it doesn't seem out of place for a movie that begins with a marriage falling apart to end with the image of a child literally causing the sun to rise speaks to the astoundingly natural way that director Miranda July manages to transform the lives of her characters. This is the stuff of avant-garde cinema, grown like a weed out of conventional meet-cute scenes. Upon finishing the movie, then, my question became: why start with the indie trappings at all? This is a movie that dresses itself up in indie pop sensibilities but by the end refuses to be pop in any sense of the word. Why even bother with all the meet-cute stuff at the beginning? The answer, I think, partially lies with a sympathy for the audience. You don't want to throw viewers into a world that ignores conventional rules of science and human interaction; no matter how beautiful the images you create, your audience will always be alienated without some kind of lifeline. The conventional human drama provides that lifeline. I'm thinking of Charlie Kaufman's great Synecdoche, New York, a movie I saw recently that reaches the same kind of avant-garde profundity at the end as Me and You. Synecdoche doesn't give off the indie rom-com vibes, but it still takes time to establish realistic character motivations and conflicts before diving into the stages-within-stages and actors playing actors. But the more I think about the indie false start in Me and You and Everyone We Know, the more I think there's more to that story mode than just hooking the audience. And here's what I've realized: that was never the story mode it was trying to adopt. Only my expectations of the movie's plot set it up as such. I read the plot synopsis and heard the opening notes from the soundtrack, and I assumed I knew what I was seeing. Looking back at those first scenes, however, I realize that the surreal bent exists throughout the movie, albeit in a subtler form. If I'm not looking for a meet-cute, Christina and Richard's conversation about their prospective relationship is less cutesy and more just plain weird. Really, it's pretty strange that these two people just launch into the sort of conversation that contemplates their own mortality, just out of the blue, but it's right in keeping with the movie's ultimate bent on sublimity. Here are two characters passing the time by passing through time, stepping out of their own realistic situation into a metaphysical head space. I didn't notice this because I was looking for clunky artificiality of genre tropes instead of something with its own personality altogether. I put the conventions there by looking for them.
In short, it's unfair to a movie to judge it by its genre, especially since a lot of movies actual resist classification by genre. And, well, that's all I've got. Sorry, it's another long post. Please don't hate me. Thank you so much for slogging your way to the end, and I'd love for you to share what you think in the comments. Readers are wonderful. Oh, and I promise I'll do a short one next time. Until then.
