I spent too long on Youtube today. I realized I spent too long on it when it started to actually impact my mood. It began on a positive note. I was feeling nostalgic, so I thought I would search for clips of a band called Defcon 1. They were a band from my high school, a year or two ahead of me as I recall, but they were fun. We did a controversial production of Beowulf at my school one year, and the "drama kids" as they were called, got a lot of crap for it, unfortunately, from the less open minded students. I thought it was great. I saw it at least two times. Anyway, it was controversial, in part, because Defcon 1 wrote songs related to the Beowulf story and performed them on stage as a sort of narrative to go along with the story. And they were a pretty heavy, industrial sounding, quasi-metal band. The drama department also wanted to use candles, but had to switch to flashlights due to fire codes. And all of the performers wore black clothes and crawled and ran down the aisles during the show. Admittedly, it was kind of dark for a high school production, and this was in the age of Marilyn Manson as a perceived threat to the moral fabric of America's youth, so the Gothic imagery didn't sit well with some folks. Long story short, they were called freaks and outcasts and all of those meaningless high school terms that seemed so hurtful at the time. But I thought it was awesome. Defcon 1 even put on a few shows of their own after the play, and I stuck around for those as well. So I thought, small chance though it may be, perhaps someone recorded parts of the play, or a Defcon 1 "show," and maybe they put it up on Youtube. They didn't. I did find Defcon 1, but it wasn't the same band. So, that'll have to be a memory stored in the brain memory bank, instead of teh intarwebs.
From there, I decided to search for clips of The Dumbwaiter. I was in a production of The Dumbwaiter in college, and I know that video was recorded, but I was never able to get a copy for myself. I thought it might be cool to see if anyone maybe posted clips. They didn't, but I did find clips of other performances of The Dumbwaiter. And that was really enlightening, because I always wondered how the first few lines of the play were supposed to be read, as I struggled with them myself. I played the character Ben, oddly enough, and as I understood the play, Ben was a time-worn hit man who had grown cold to it all, and who tried to cope with it by ignoring the danger and the tediousness. His counter-part Gus, by my interpretation, was a still wet behind the ears, newly committed hit man, still jumpy, anxious, sloppy, and a little A.D.D. Anyway, the first few lines consist of Ben reading from a newspaper. The first 'word' in the play is, "Kaw."
I read it as a sound of disgust and outrage. And I read the rest of the article the same way. I just thought it might be interesting to have a hit man, who has clearly killed and done horrible things countless times before, to feel sickened by a story in a newspaper. The story was about an elderly man who crawled under a bus to try to cross a busy road, when the bus moved and crushed him. Anyway, one production clip that I watched treated the dialogue pretty much the same way. I felt justified, as I don't fancy myself to be a skilled actor at all, and yet someone else had the same interpretation. The BBC, in fact, as the clip was from an official BBC television production. So that made me feel good, as the play was written by beloved English playwright Harold Pinter. Then I watched another clip that had the actors laugh at the story instead. I thought that was an interesting twist. And in a way, it makes more sense. They are killers, after all, so it's not unreasonable to think that they'd think such senseless violence would be funny. Especially since there's a later bit of dialogue about a little kid that killed a cat, and they chose to go the repulsion route with that story. No remorse for a human death, but repulsion for the senseless killing of an animal. Also an interesting take, given the hit men context.
So in this case, Youtube actually enlightened me a bit over the impact that decisions in directing can have over a performance, and how decisions as actors can have an impact on tone and message. That's pretty deep for Youtube searching though, so I turned my attentions to a much geekier search. I pulled up a list of bands, mostly modern with some classics thrown in, and I made it a point to check out each band listed, and keep track of which ones I liked. I even started keeping an Excel spreadsheet, because I am just that sad, geeky, lame, whatever you want to call it. That's when the mood change began.
I don't like sounding like an old curmudgeon. It's very easy to slip into the, "Bah... Kids these days..." frame of mind, and I like to give things a chance. That being said... I checked out 38 bands listed under A. Of those, I liked 12. And most of those were old bands. Of the bands that I didn't like, the majority were modern emo and screamo bands. I just really don't see the appeal of these bands. It's what "the kids" are into right now, and I respect that. After all, I still have nostalgic love for bands like Korn, even though my matured musical education has revealed that Korn and the like made pretty shitty music, in the long run. And I'm still convinced that Deftones are a great band, despite being part of that rap-rock movement that also spawned Limp Bizkit. The Deftones were my first concert, and I still buy their albums. And I love Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, etc., partly because that's what was around when I was growing up. And I believe that we're drawn to the art that is new and widely present during our teenage years, and sometimes nothing can shake that.
So if kids want to listen to Fall Out Boy, A Bird A Sparrow, Abandon All Ships, etc., more power to them. I was even willing to take my niece and nephew to see Atreyu, Hollywood Undead and Escape the Fate, but I got an ear infection and had to ask my brother to take them instead. I would have done it though, even though I can't really stand Hollywood Undead or Atreyu, because I understand just how much a band's music can mean to a young kid. I also understand how magical concerts seem when you're young. In fact, I still get giddy when I get to see a band that I love. It's like getting to see a superhero in real life.
But there's still a part of me that can't help but shake my head over the fact that this is what's popular today. Kids are excited to see these bands. These are the rock stars today; impossibly skinny guys with floppy hair that's a comb stroke away from being A Flock of Seagulls, dressed in purple t-shirts and studded belts, lip rings flopping away as they scream into their microphones because the popular girl doesn't see their sensitive side and prefers the company of the date rapist in the making football player over their exclusive company. Yes, that's what high school is all about. I'll give them that. What teenaged guy hasn't pined over a girl and questioned her choice in boyfriend, and what teenaged girl hasn't hoped to find the one sensitive boy flower in the pile of douchebags that litter the high school's halls? I get why kids eat this up. But that doesn't keep me from wishing they were embracing bands like The Riverboat Gamblers, or The Dollyrots, or The Ramones, or The Misfits, etc. instead, or at least as well.
That's a curmudgeon point of view; the very thing I try to avoid. I know how annoying it can be having an old timer trying to shove a band down your throat, and poo-pooing bands that you love, simply because they don't get it. It's just that, there's so much music out there. It's impossible to wade through it all, or even a good chunk of it. As a music geek, I want to hear as much of the best of it as I can. So when I check out 38 bands and only like 12 of them, it leaves me feeling a bit hopeless. I know there's great music out there. I know there are plenty of new, young bands that I would like, but it just seems so hard to find them now. And that doesn't make any sense, when you think about it. Technology has progressed so much, and kids have so much more instant access to information now than we did even 20 years ago. It used to be if you wanted to check out new music, radio was pretty much your only option. Unless you had an older sibling, or family member, or cool indie record store clerk to take you under their pop cultural wing. Then MTV came along and gave us two options, but as soon as The Real World became a hit, the music part of MTV went away. Today we have Youtube, Myspace, countless peer to peer websites, internet radio, podcasts, Wikipedia, seasonal concert festivals, etc. etc. etc.
And yet good new music continues to allude me. I find myself going back to older bands that I missed the first time around, removing myself more and more from what's current. Maybe that's just because I'm getting old, and teenaged angst no longer resonates with me like it did when I was a teenager myself. Or maybe the music industry really is dying faster than I thought, leaving behind only that which is marketable and selling, until the trend becomes over saturated and dies, and a new trend is born, producing hundreds of copies, until that trend is dead. But that's a nihilistic view, and I refuse to give in to it. There will be good art as long as there's a need for art, and there will always be a need for art. If all else fails, there's still the great music that has come before.
All hope lies in the proles.
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