Michael Kaiser, the president of Washington D.C.’s renowned John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, wrote an article today for the Huffington Post in which he decries the prevailing availability (and encouragement) of amateurist criticism on the internet. The age of the blog, it seems, has co-opted professional critics to the point where they are being pushed out of a job, and the opinions of said critics are rapidly being eschewed by the public in favor of an unprofessional lot of bloggers and pseudo-journalists with a casual interest but not a professional interest in whatever art form they encounter. He is specifically referring to theater criticism, referencing many Broadway-centric blogs of which I wasn’t even aware, but it’s easy to extrapolate his point to other blogs — Gorilla vs. Bear, Slashfilm, Pitchfork, and others, the combination gossip/news/review sites that dot the internet, and realistically have since its inception. The internet is, after all, a media of opinion.

As he puts it, “arts criticism has become a participatory activity rather than a spectator sport.”

• Every artist, producer or arts organization used to wait for a handful of reviews to determine the critical response to a particular project. And while very few critics for a small set of news outlets still wield great power to make or break a project (usually a for-profit theater project which runs longer and therefore needs to sell far more tickets than any other arts project), a larger portion of arts projects have become somewhat immune to the opinions of any one journalist.

While Kaiser’s point is well-made and cogent — and he actually cites examples, though nothing textual — it ultimately amounts to little more than an attitude of sheltered generational protectionism, which I suppose is his prerogative. It’s an attitude born of the same sympathies and fears with which the recent concern for the death of the newspaper industry has been cultivated, and while it’s true the system of criticism as it has existed for more than a century is being threatened, its “death,” as Kaiser so fear-mongeringly puts it, is being far overstated.

Call it Ivory Tower Syndrome. Kaiser, as the president of one of the most upper-echelon, aristocratic arts organizations in the entire country (if not the world) has a certain universe to protect, one to which he and very few others are privy. Like the New York Times, the Kennedy Center is one of the guiding lights, in theory and principle, of the American media landscape, and only Carnegie Hall (a much older facility) ranks above it in terms of prestige, which unfortunately means that Kaiser’s ivory tower, well, towers over most others. That’s not to say the opinion is his alone, nor that it only exists within the walls of his confine of prestige, but Kaiser’s affluent protection of the idea of an aristocratic style of criticism, one in which the opinions of art (if not the art itself) are reserved only for a brand of elite America, is outdated enough that modernity and change could punch him in the teeth and he would refuse to acknowledge its existence. He’d probably blame ghosts.

To begin with, we have to get to the heart of what constitutes “criticism” and what consititutes “review.” There’s a big difference, one that can sometimes be difficult to define. The determination of whether an art form is good or bad based on a set of objective rules, guidelines and circumstances can fall in either category. But a critical appraisal is a little more deep than that, and requires vexed, complex, knowledgeable, and introspective analysis of the art. It’s the difference between the lengthy and marvelous Film Crit Hulk blog — it’s exactly what it sounds like — and Talkin’ Broadway, which Kaiser himself references in his post, which is apparently based on reader submissions like this one, an off-Broadway review of a play called Milk Like Sugar.

• Malik is into telescopes, which he uses to look into the sky at the planes he’s positive are full of people staring down at him in disapproval, but that he’s sure will be his ticket out of his ghettoized existence? Huh?

The problem that Kaiser and other media doom-sayers have with the prevalence of criticism blogs is with their sheer enormity, but that’s the wrong angle to take. As Kaiser puts it, “the growing influence of blogs, chat rooms and message boards devoted to the arts has given the local professional critic a slew of competitors.” “Slew” is a bit of an understatement, no? More like millions, Michael Kaiser, MILLIONS. But if there is a problem with the massive abundance of competitors to the throne of arts criticism, it’s not with the number by itself, it’s with the fact that their lack of art education and serious, institutionalized studies leave them incapable of the sort of in-depth analysis that a professional, theoretically, understands. In the case of cinema, they know nothing of mise-en-scene, line, technology, or, like Milk Like Sugar’s reviewer above, fail to actually probe what something means and discard it without understanding it because they don’t understand it. That’s the real virulence that is infecting arts criticism; not the abundance of it, the vacuousness of it. It’s certainly not aided by abundance, but as Kaiser rightfully points out:

• Younger people get virtually all of their information online, through news web sites, social media and chat rooms. And older people are increasingly getting their information online as well.

People aren’t drawn to internet criticism because there’s just so much content available to them; people are drawn to the internet because it’s the internet. The fundamental mistake that Kaiser and other print doom-sayers make is the assumption that the newspaper industry can’t survive without paper, which is flagrantly false. If the New York Times were to figure out a way to systemically reduce the number of its print issues, merge most of its content to the internet, and find ways to make both subscription fees and advertising expenses coexist nicely in paying for its online content, it would be wildly successful. If people aren’t reading print, stop printing. That doesn’t mean that your content must suffer, of course; it’s just taking the form of a new medium. Simple concept.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF PITCHFORK

The problem, ultimately, is the lact of proactivity. Long before most people had thought seriously about the threat the internet represents to print media, a small website had sprouted up in 1995, launched by a teenager named Ryan Schreiber in the belly of his mother’s basement. Schreiber had a fierce interest in music, especially artists signed to independent labels, which he felt the mainstream media — magazines like Rolling Stone especially — were ignoring in favor of larger recording artists. The internet (as a public entity) was just four years old at the time, and now-retro-glamourous content publisher Geocities, a relic in internet terms, had launched only the year before. Advertising was impossible to figure out; even the modern internet can’t quite determine how to effectively disseminate its ad content in the post-popup world. But in spite of all of that, in spite of the youngness of the medium and the confused disorder that prevailed, Schreiber launched Pitchfork.com anyway, just a shitty teen with a hobby.

Pitchfork (Media) is now one of the most influential music publications in the world, akin to Rolling Stone in its late-60s era of self-discovery. It profiles heavy-duty major-label rappers like Drake and Kanye West alongside unknown indie quantities like Perfume Genius, in a lot of cases — just ask Lana Del Rey — helping launch careers in the process. It sponsors a yearly music festival in both Chicago and Paris, and has significant presence at every other major United States music festival. And its ratings — on a scale from 0 to 10, often hilariously, exaggeratedly swung one way or the other — can come to define an artist’s career, often out of political intent on the part of the publication. Pitchfork’s famous 10.0 for Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy shot through the internet like a cannon blast, and certainly provided a publicity boost for what’s now come to be known as a magnum opus. Which was part of the point.

Pitchfork is both influential and insanely profitable, which is helped in large part by the fact that the number of its salaried employees is actually quite small. Pitchfork is almost entirely supported by freelance work, writers who put in hours worth of effort on reviews that push 1000 words to not get much out of it at all. The fact is, however, that these writers are willing to put in all the work for not much pay, and their content is distributed to a massive amount of eyes. Pitchfork, in short, is driven as much by passion (as well as the desire to be a part of the Cult of Pitchfork, which is another subject) as much by sound and cogent business decisions. But what draws people to Pitchfork in enough numbers to support a website that has so little ad content that it’s actually quite baffling? Why has Pitchfork become so influential? The answer, I think, lies in a surprising source: Roger Ebert.

The visage of Roger Ebert, noted film critic, historian, scholar, and schlup, has never struck many people with an air of media keenness or technological savvy, but few human beings have adapted to the changing face of media as well as Ebert has, and nobody — absolutely nobody — has carried a comparable foresight into its development. With his famous partner Gene Siskel — together representing the two sides to the Chicago newspaper coin, Tribune and Sun-Times — Ebert launched the long-lived television series Sneak Previews in 1975, appearing on the show until 1982, when its fabulous success resulted in the still-airing At the Movies. Sneak Previews began as once-monthly local Chicago operation before expanding to a national audience, airing biweekly, then, eventually, every seven days. It was also, surprisingly, the highest-rated entertainment show in the history of Public Broadcasting.

The leap from paper to television was at that point a risky one, especially for something like film criticism, which had earned its legacy in philosophical texts, history publications, newspapers, and magazines like Cahiers du Cinema. But Siskel and Ebert’s experiment paid off, the two of them eventually becoming the godfathers of modern film criticism. It was not (and, in some circles, still isn’t) a popular medium among the old guard, who felt the thumbs-up/thumbs-down method of critique was oversimplistic and cheapened a complex art (an argument that ignores the three-minute, intelligent, often famously divisive discussions the two carried prior to each final judgment), but Ebert’s foray into the then-new world of television was a resounding triumph. It’s only now, in the age of computers, that At the Movies — which Ebert, due to his cancer troubles, no longer hosts — is being seriously threatened with extinction. But Roger Ebert is a brilliant man.

A few year ago, the still-ugly website of his underwent a bit of a renovation. It had been years since Ebert had begun focusing his attention more and more on his internet content, launching his ever popular Great Movies series of essays — real theoretical essays, not judgments — but his struggles with cancer left him bedridden and reclusive. It was then that he contracted his web editor, Jim Emerson, to begin taking over more and more online content, while he investigated the fabulous new world of the blog — something Pitchfork is still considered, and certainly could have been from the start — which began to take a more and more prominent role in his web presence, as did his growing following on Twitter and Facebook. Emerson himself is a brilliant film critic with a tremendous blog, which features long-form, incredibly specific film analysis, itself a part of Ebert’s website. It’s arguable now, with his jaw surgically removed during his cancer treatment, that Ebert has a more profound and omnipresent impact on American culture than he did when he was a distinctive weekly voice on PBS that had so firmly infected American culture that he himself was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one he didn’t get because of his newspaper reviews or his work as screenwriter for a cult classic.

It’s not a coincidence that Ebert’s website has become the preeminent internet source for film while Pitchfork has become one of the two or three most important music publications in the world, so much so that founder Ryan Schreiber was once nominated as a finalist for the Time 100, a list of the world’s most influential people. It has to do with content. Roger Ebert’s ascension to internet superstar directly correlated with his website’s newfound emphasis on diversity of content (along with an element of sympathy for his failing health), and there’s not a website on Earth that has a more diverse lineup of content than Pitchfork — with ongoing features like Pitchfork.tv (a video series), interviews, Guest Lists, Why We Fight, and its recently-launched Kill Screen, a video game blog. And while Michael Kaiser might not refer to Roger Ebert with the same lamenting crowdsource disdain with which he refers to small-time Broadway review blogs nobody’s heard of, there’s no question that Pitchfork, which operates (unlike fellow media-driving site The AV Club) without any print presence at all, falls under the parameters of Kaiser’s criticism obituary.

But Pitchfork does engage in criticism, not the wearying, edifice-obsessed value judgments of Peter Travers or the film critic for Podunk Newspaper X. Whether you agree with their determinations is ultimately irrelevant. Pitchfork manages to be a web publication that shatters both of the online trepidations that color Kaiser’s death sentence for real criticism — it is not uneducated, and it manages to be smart and profitable in the same breath that it rebukes the print medium. It is simultaneously a competitor to professional criticism (like the AV Club) and a culture-shifting professional force. In doing so it laid the foundation for how quote-unquote “real” arts criticism — university-educated, elitist, secluded — can survive in an era that it thinks has destroyed its natural habitat once and for all. Just look at Roger Ebert’s gloriously diverse website, which lacks only video content. The key to survival is to emulate not the tradition of the newspaper, but the tradition of the magazine instead — but with far more constantly updated content that surpasses even the ability of the once-daily broadsheets.

If the death of real criticism does occur, it will be only because the ivory-towered cultural and media elite fail to see the path to their own salvation, and fail to adapt to the very idea a shifting media culture that’s been in constant motion since the 1950s, allowing the truly stupid critical community to fill the void they leave. If people like Kaiser see the end of print as the end of arts and news media (disregarding the fact that punk zines are absolutely flourishing right now, another subject that 1000 words could be spent on) then the burder of its death will be on them, because they failed to see just how easily it could be saved. But the beauty of media is that young people can be rather intelligent, and maybe a changing of the guard might be in order.

The Milwaukee Public Museum is currently running a special traveling exhibit on Cleopatra, which I write about here, a rather jaw-dropping bit of history that features a clutter of statues, busts, artifacts, tools, and even money that decorated the Egyptian palaces during Cleopatra’s reign. I personally had the pleasure, because I was the only media member at the museum’s preview day last Thursday who seemed interested in the subject (in actuality I was enthralled, which was unnerving in comparison to the pretty, vacant, generically blonde reporter Fox 6 had sent, whose empty uninterested responses of, “Oh,” every time an immeasurably important historical idiosyncrasy was explained to her by one of the archaeologists who discovered the treasures made my blood curl), of being led around the exhibit by Sophie Lalbat of the Institut Européen d’ Archéologie Sous-Marine, an incredibly kind, gentle French lady in her 60s or 70s, almost as my own personal tour guide.

What she and her partner Franck Goddio, who led the expedition that recovered the artifacts, explained to me about the bits of historical paraphernalia was resoundingly fascinating. My interests in history are generally surrounding the ways in which modern society does or doesn’t incorporate historical trend into cultural thought, specifically the ways we often totally ignore flagrantly obvious lessons — hey, maybe deregulating subprime lending isn’t such a good idea — to advance an ideology that would otherwise be proven insolvent. There’s also the idea of myth, which fascinates me because of the ways in which it’s often more valuable than history itself. Jack the Ripper, for instance, has had an immense cultural impact not because of his crimes but because of the reaction to and mythologization of his crimes — which themselves  very few people can describe — which continues to this day. De Palma’s Black Dahlia, for instance, might as well have been about Jack the Ripper. (Maybe it would have been better if the culprit in that movie was actually the Ripper himself, because fucking A that movie sucks.)

Archaeology has always been my weak point. I fucking love archaeology. Fucking dinosaurs. Fucking ancient cultures. Fucking bones and mummies and shit like that. Fucking probably some ancient alien craft that they’re not showing us. And considering the level to which Cleopatra is held as a mythological being, not just by modern society but by the Romans, who immediately took steps upon her death to outright lie about her life in order to construct a contemporary-turned-historical narrative that was both sexy and politically tangible — and also the basic ways in which Egypt is fucking cool as hell — make the Cleopatra exhibit rather exhilarating for me. It’s essentially impossible for me to not think it’s really, really cool.

But the amazingly interesting — and troubling — thing about the Cleopatra exhibit is all the ways in which it hides the reasons it’s so interesting. On the surface, the idea of walking within a foot of something that Cleopatra herself may have touched on a daily basis is amazing, and most of the art is beautiful even though the ocean under which it’s been buried for centuries has somewhat eroded a great deal of its detail. But there’s a lot more historical nuance to why these pieces are so important, and very little of that nuance is communicated through an exhibit that spends a lot more of its energy on looking really beautiful than intellectually engaging with its patrons.

Take the example of a naos — a relatively small ancient Egyptian shrine — that’s tucked in the corner of the exhibit just about as soon as you walk in. It’s a three-walled, pinnacled stone chamber into which an effigy or an offering was placed for worship, which is cool and everything. Maybe they sacrificed animals in there. Here’s what the placard at the foot of the naos has to say about it:

Putting the Naos Together

The Naos of the Decades [very Indiana Jones — ed.] s the only known record of this version of the Egyption creation myth. It was smashed to pieces by early Christians. In 1817, the Louvre in Paris acquired the top section. The partial story it told aroused the curiosity of Egyptologists.

Then, in 1940, most of the base and rear wall were discovered in the Bay of Alexandria. Finally, in 1999, Franck Goddio found the missing pieces in the Bay of Aboukir.

The first thing that strikes me is that you don’t know what the fuck it’s talking about when it mentions “this version of the Egyptian creation myth.” What it means when it says that is that there’s a long section — on the outer left wall — that recounts the creation of the world to worshippers. But nobody at this exhibit will know A) where the hell it is, or B) what the hell it says, because nobody can read the damn heiroglyphs. Also, what Egyptologists? Whom?

Here’s what Franck Goddio told me in my short interview, word for word, about the “Naos of the Decades”:

Engraved on the walls of that naos is a calendar, and it’s considered the first astrological calendar in the world. That piece has been reconstructed from different pieces; this one was found in the 18^th Century on land in 1776. We discovered the wall face, the base was discovered in the 1930s, this one in 1776, and the remaining was discovered by us. A kind of fascinating puzzle. [Jean-Francois] Champollion himself studied that piece and could not interpret it because there was too much missing. And we found that missing part, and on that part we had the surprise to discover text which is the creation of the world according to the Egyptians. That text was known to exist but had never been read before.

I took the liberty of bolding and italicizing as I saw fit, because that placard leaves off not only some incredibly interesting bits of historical trivia, but some incredibly important bits of historical trivia. The oldest astrological calendar known to man is sitting a few feet away from the patron and he’s wholly unaware of it. Jean-Francois Champollion is the man who TRANSLATED THE ROSETTA STONE, and he studied the top of the naos in detail and couldn’t figure out what it said.And the bit about finding an artifact the existence of which had been recorded by Greek historians, while not particularly important, is almost unfathomably cool. So why don’t we deserve to know?

It strikes me that this must happen all the time in museums everywhere, and it’s something I’m not exactly comfortable with. The inner critic in me, the one wary of the ways in which we’re unable to culturally contextualize the past into modern society, goes crazy when I encounter this. One could write a book — hell, maybe I should — with chapters comprising nothing but the history behind important artifacts at world-renowned museums. And what those places are hiding from us.

Cerebral Ballzy is not a good band.

Maybe I should preface that statement. The Brooklyn 5-piece hardcore punk outfit, the product of a surprisingly thriving New York scene, an element of punk regionalism that’s been too quiet for too long, whose debut self-titled full-length got mercilessly destroyed by Pitchfork yesterday, is a loud, obnoxious, trite, shrill band. There’s nothing thoughtful about their music, there’s nothing interesting about what they have to say. They have nowhere to take the genre, they have nothing to add to it. All they do is hock the wares of a thousand hardcore punk bands from the 1980s. They are an intellectual wasteland, which is interesting considering many of the bands they pick their music from — Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, the Germs, and others — at least left the impression of intelligence, even (as with the vast majority of hardcore bands) it ended up being preening self-interested pseudointellectualism. Their songs are 90 seconds of interchangeably overused chords that have no consciousness of the active way in which hardcore punk disrupts and deconstructs the idea of music. They are an empty shell onto which the image of punk rock has been thrust, but below the surface there is absolutely nothing.

And yet that is precisely why I like them.

The Pitchfork review is interesting for me; more than anything it represents the turning point in my appreciation for the band. (Here it is, in all of its 4.8-awarding glory.) There’s absolutely nothing in the review that is incorrect, and it is a fair estimation of Cerebral Ballzy’s music. It is indeed “perfectly serviceable and perfectly competent, middle-of-the-road punk rock music that probably sounds much better live than it ever could in a recording studio.” The band really does “just want to be a punk rock band, with their own stupid band name, with their own songs about getting fucked up and telling various authority figures and peers to fuck off.” And yes, it is true that “what these kids are doing, and the way they’re doing it, means that their only truly distinguishing feature is their band name.”

And up until I read that review, I totally agreed with every word. Maybe it’s a little bit of Pitchfork reactionism; I admit myself to be a bit wary of most anything the indie-shill blog pumps out. But there’s something a little more profound at work here. Reading through David Raposa’s thoughts on the band made me understand my own thoughts more clearly; having them almost to-the-T objectively placed in front of my eyes was like stumbling upon an essay I’d written a few years ago and being forced to reconsider an opinion I forgot I once had.

I like Cerebral Ballzy because their music is so stupid. I like them because their idea of a stinging anti-authority anthem is a song called “Don’t Tell Me What To Do.” I like them because they copy and paste what other great bands have done before them. To me, Cerebal Ballzy is a group of snot-nosed young assholes rolling around in the needle-infested back alley of hardcore punk, gleefully, stupidly, and blindly letting its eccentricities and metaphysics rub off on them. That, to me, is the epitome of punk rock.

There’s an element of grandeur and charm to a band like Fucked Up, who indulge in hardcore punk’s violence while toying with its basic composition as a genre, but there’s a respectible shittiness to the monumentally D.I.Y. efforts of a bunch of brats throwing themselves at a genre and trying by fire to figure out what the hell it’s about, disregarding the idea that for some reason bands must deconstruct a genre in order to be good in the 21st Century. The guys in Cerebral Ballzy — Honor Titus, Melvin Honore, Mason, Jason, and Crazy Abe — don’t give a flying fuck about intellectual subversion or crisscrossing genre standards; they just want to make some goddamn punk. And if there is one thing punk rock is, it’s formulaic.

The A.V. Club recently ran their annual fall film preview, and one line in particular stuck out to me. Regarding the totally silent 1920s throwback The Artist, they write:

“The biggest problem with The Artist is that its A Star Is Born/Singin’ In the  Rain story arc is way too predictable, and nowhere near as emotionally effective as its inspirations.”

To which I ask: Who fucking cares? The predictability of your standard 1930s Hollywood romance is nothing new; it was predictable at the time and has always been predictable. Those films were predicated on the standard that they had to happen a certain way, and the audience knew ahead of time how they would end. So whether or not The Artist’s story is emotionally resonant has nothing to do with its predictability. The reason The Philadelphia Story’s ending is so memorable is because it managed to undermine people’s expectations for the standard romantic ending without tearing the rug out from beneath the concept; Jimmy Stewart still finds a bride at the end of the film, but it’s exactly the opposite of the person the audience had been led to believe it would be.

Now, Cerebral Ballzy is no Philadelphia Story. And there is a such thing as a work of art that suffers from how formulaic it is, mostly because it pretends it’s something profound and innovative while blatantly playing down to well-worn ideas, which then appear negatively quaint in the art’s lofty goals. The Tree of Life does this, as does much of Andy Warhol’s ouevre. But Cerebral Ballzy never had and doesn’t have any illusions about what they’re trying to communicate. They are a shitty, stumbling drunk band of snots who make punk rock for the gleeful thrill, and they do what has time and time again been proven to work.

So while Cerebral Ballzy is not a good band, I’ll be fucked if they aren’t fun.

Today it was revealed in an interview with the French magazine Le Figaro that was published yesterday — Sean Penn is fluent in French, don’t ya know — that the star and protagonist of Terrence Malick’s recent arthouse dynamo The Tree of Life doesn’t really know why his character is in the film. That’s not to say that he doesn’t understand the movie or his character, but rather that the finished, combined product lacks completeness and a great deal of what drew the actor to Malick’s magnum opus in the first place is eschewed in the final product to, in Penn’s eyes, the film’s detriment. To wit (via The New Yorker):

I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry [Malick] himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

Penn’s explanation is quite elaborate and logical, and demonstrates the brilliance with which a good actor can bring to reading an understanding a script before he takes a role. We can’t forget in light of all his absurdist political dramatism and habit for taking on shitty, Oscar-baiting roles — think I Am Sam — that Penn is a capital actor, one of the greatest of his generation, who brought Method to a new universe of filmgoers and served along with River Phoenix as the Gen X versions of Brando and Dean for a very short time, and he knows quite a bit about his craft. It’s no secret that the editing room was Malick’s hovel during post-production for The Tree of Life, with the ongoing rumors of a six-fucking-hour cut being testament to that fact, but if indeed the final cut with which the director stamped his approval is a far cry from what it was originally intended to be, Penn has a point that can’t be ignored.

When The Tree of Life debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, where it inevitably would go on to win the Palm D’or, the immediate response — very immediate — was mixed. It was simultaneously booed and cheered as its credits crept across the screen that day, and although it eventually emerged champion, seemingly silencing its critics, the ongoing response to the film has remained as polarized as it was when it premiered. A theater in Samford, Connecticut even went so far as to warn its patrons that the film they were about to see was “a uniquely visionary and deeply philosophical film from an auteur director,” extrapolating that due to the high volume of spectacularly confused moviegoers, no refunds were to be issued.

Now one can take issues with several facets of that ignoble policy — for one, movie theaters shouldn’t be in the habit of deciding for its audiences whether a film is good or not, and for two, The Tree of Life is not a particularly confusing film, and god knows why people get so lost — but it does speak to some ongoing unease audiences have with a film that has been instantaneously branded as a masterpiece by almost every important contemporary film critic. For Sean Penn to admit himself one of the ignorant herd casts a fairly long shadow over Malick’s decision-making, and lends a great deal of credence to the idea that maybe The Tree of Life really isn’t as good as people have determined it to be. It’s a stance that I’ve held since I first saw it on its opening weekend in Milwaukee, and if I may inject a bit of pride into the proceedings, I feel somewhat vindicated as a critic by Penn’s assessment.

Now, The Tree of Life is not a particularly bad film. The cinematography, acting, score, and editing are all among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in a movie, even more so than Malick’s previous effort, the woefully underappreciated The New World — the editing in particular may be the most marvelous I’ve ever seen. But there are also problems, many of which much deeper than what Penn has decided to take issue with, ones that most critics have either ignored or dismissed with a casual wave, asserting that the film is Abstract High Art and one can excuse a few diversions from narrative film tradition for the sake of the experience of watching a film like The Tree of Life. They are wrong.

For one, the character motivations and family dynamics, particularly as they center around Brad Pitt’s father character, are tremendously cheap and paper-thin, and Malick stoops to the most petulant Dysfunctional Family cliches in order to develop the relationship between Pitt and his son (Hunter McCracken, an excellent name), an obvious stand-in for Malick himself. The very idea that Malick would draw on the Job story to describe the father, one of the most played-out in the history of any literature, practically a trope upon its original Biblical publication, speaks to how thin and stereotypical The Tree of Life’s characters actually are. Most of them are eminently predictable in almost every way — that there would be a massive family fight at the dinner table was almost set in stone at the very start — and this lends itself very poorly to the film’s overall intent. And appropriately enough, no character suffers more from lack of depth than Penn’s.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments of extreme poignancy and beauty among the wreckage, as with the wonderful sequence in which McCracken observes his father play the church organ during service, a moment in which Pitt is for once at extreme peace, lost in an art he regrets not pursuing (one he indeed has tried to impress upon his children all their lives). In that moment the young Jack swells with love, almost pride for his father, and for a brief second all their manufactured conflict is forgotten for the sake of the echoing notes that reverberate around the church. But such moments are few and far between in the grander scope of The Tree of Life, and don’t make it for its duller, dumber moments.

Apologists will argue that it is precisely because the film emerges from Malick’s own personal experiences that it succeeds in approaching the vague cliches with which it loads itself, and that one’s own personal experiences cannot possibly be cliches because real life as it unfolds never dumbs itself down. This is a patently false defense, because even if these events were drawn directly and without embellishment from Malick’s own past — his issues with his own father, who did not even attend the film’s United States premiere despite an invitation from Malick himself, are well documented — that doesn’t make them any more interesting when placed on the screen. All of that is null, of course, because these experiences aren’t wholly autobiographical, because all fiction is fiction, naturally embroidered with non-truths and invented events.

As for Penn, he hits the nail so hard on the head that he splits it in two. Even though Penn isn’t the top-billed actor in the film, he is in fact its protagonist, a man whose personal experiences and (one can assume) crumbling personal life lead him to revisit and reassess a past that he had apparently discarded as soon as he hit adulthood, driven by his hatred for a father he felt no love for and a past he worked tremendously hard to emerge from. But most of what we ever see of Penn in The Tree of Life’s final cut are television advertisement-esque shots of him walking briskly along a towering corporate skyscraper, talking abstractly on his cell phone, and brooding before an obviously symbolic, flickering candle the purpose for which we never understand. (I guess it’s supposed to symbolize life or something — maybe Penn is dying? — but if it is, holy shit, what an impossibly stupid, vapid thing for it to represent.)

In short, we never understand a damn thing about his character, which is preposterous in light of the fact that it is Penn’s experiences and motivations, whatever they might be, that drive him to come to terms with his memories and inspire the film to launch into its extended flashback sequences. And if all the various shots of the universe, the dinosaurs, and the planets are indeed manufactured in the head of Penn’s character as some critics have suggested — I personally take slight exception to this reading* — then we never really know why it is that he’s speculating about God, the vastness of space, and the unending march of life and the nature of the universe, and in the end, don’t understand a damn thing about him.

* To me, those sequences only serve to substantiate the story of Job that opens the film and defines the father character. All we see in those extended sequences are the universe passing as the universe does, with no care for beings, planets, and spaces that are subject to the will of the universe above anything they might try to accomplish. Even the much talked-about sequence between the two dinosaurs, where one places its foot on the head of a sleeping other, threatening to crush him, before eventually deciding against it and walking away, follows these same lines of reasoning. The threatened dinosaur in that moment IS Job, its life totally in the hands of forces outside of itself. I suppose these scenes might represent Penn’s extrapolation of the Job story, with which he associates his father, into a larger context, but that A) doesn’t make sense in the context of the film’s epigram, which is drawn from the Book of Job and speaks outside of its characters to the intent of the film itself, and B) doesn’t make it any less of a goddamn cliche to bring up Job in the first place.

In that final, Fellini-esque fantasy sequence, arguably the most important in the movie, in which Penn walks along the beach of his mind among the many characters and people which he draws from his past, we see plainly Penn and the memories of his family as they existed in the film’s flashback scenes — even the younger version of himself. He and the imagined specter of his father walk side-by-side, for once content with one another, and he and the memory of his mother share an embrace decades in the making. There is no reference to his parents as they exist at the time of his life that is portrayed in the film, either because they are dead or, most likely, simply not related to their former selves the memories of which Penn struggles so much.

It is obviously meant to be a sequence of extreme power, in which Penn finally comes to terms with the past he has spent the bulk of the film reevaluating. He is for once content with a portion of his life which he has grappled with for the whole of the time since it occurred. In the context of itself it is quite a beautiful scene — except for the barf-inducing moment in which his mother’s memory gives him over to the mind’s-eye idea of his wife, with the supremely cliched line, “I give him to you,” another example of the film’s troubling willingness to submit to the lowest common denominator. But we never, ever understand what makes Penn so eager to return to those memories, which would naturally seem important considering his status as the protagonist of the whole film.

It’s this problem on which Penn The Actor is elaborating in his Le Figaro interview which has so far today swept the internet like wildfire. But what Penn is suggesting more than just that his own character is almost entirely undeveloped is that at one point he wasn’t, and that Malick went out of his way to vacate the personality and motivations of the character that exists at the absolute heart of the film. There’s something to be said for the idea of a protagonist who is barely in a film at all — in fact, it’s a neat device if used well — but we have to know something, anything about him in order for his character not to be a massive gap in the cohesiveness of his filmic context. It’s less convention than it is simple logic: characters must be developed. Bratt Pitt’s character, for all his simplicity, certainly is. Hunter McCracken’s character certainly is. Sean Penn’s character, in my opinion the most vital in the entire film, is not.*

* One last thought: Oddly enough, I don’t think Penn is entirely on the money with his statement that “[a] clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without…lessening its beauty and its impact.” The Tree of Life is, at its heart, a narrative film, and even though it’s as elliptical as any Malick film, even though it leaps back and forth through millions of years of history, all of its flashbacks and ellipses themselves utilize narrative logic. One simply cannot argue that the long flashback to Penn’s childhood does not feature narrative logic. Flashbacks are among the oldest narrative devices in cinema; here they are simply extensively and boldly utilized.

Regular Show is the tits

One of the most joyous elements of the modern indie scene, to me, is the sheer diversity of the jumbled canvas of what’s become for all intents and purposes a pseudo-genre. What was once a fairly unified sound, with the likes of Pavement and Archers and Loaf and Silver Jews all sharing the same brilliantly irreverent chord progressions and ear for Alex Chilton powerpop melodrama, has become a blog-driven, ever-unwinding web of musical styles and traditions that have all seamlessly integrated themselves into the “indie” non-genre that mostly now only shares an aesthetic predilection for low-fidelity recording and not much else. It’s an environment that has driven the increasingly influential Pitchfork blog to rather notably (and sometimes hilariously) dig to find new microgenre signifiers to describe individual bands as genres unto themselves, mostly in the terms of other groups, thus negating the point. But no matter what the practice is a testament to the diversity of what has become a movement far outgrown of its roots as either a ’70s-aping collection of smart-ass dropouts of a super-twee collection of xylophone-playing dweebs.

This much seems like common knowledge, so I won’t dwell on it much further, except to note that from the diverse mish-mash of modern indie has emerged a rather strong, mostly unspoken and unrelated punk rock scene that embraces both the roots of the original punk movement and the shared aesthetic of indie at large, be it a predisposition for the psychedelic, intensely lo-fi recording techniques, or sometimes both. The preceding statement should have actually been introduced with a disclaimer; while it’s true that most of these bands make what could accurately be described as punk, they are not and have not (for the most part) been a part of any significant stage of the development of punk rock as a genre unto itself, nor do they (for the most part) outwardly attempt to fit into a still-there punk milieu.

Most of these bands are fairly foreign to the punk scene as it still exists, but their names are fairly familiar to those who follow indie rock with scrutiny: the sunny SoCal surf-obsessed pop punk of Wavves, the basement three-chord drive of Dum Dum Girls, the spritely irreverent Let’s Wrestle, the deeply intellectual yet highly adolescent streetpunk leanings of Titus Andronicus, the ’90s alternative-obsessed Japandroids, the ’50s bubblegum-recalling Hunx and his Punx. There are also the few outwardly and admittedly post-punk groups of “popular” knowledge, like Les Savy Fav and the now decade-old Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But with the exception of one Pitchfork.tv video caption I saw that described England’s Male Bonding (another excellent example) as “pop-punkers,” there’s little-to-no admitting that these are actually punk rock bands. Even the Dum Dum Girls, whose lead singer (and formerly sole member) named herself after Dee Dee Ramone, and who were once described by Pitchfork (a name I regret has come up so often) as “lo-fi jangle pop.”

But also from this ragged, diverse assortment of indie punk has emerged the most unlikely of indie rock superstars: Fucked Up. A band that has never had any hesitance about being a punk rock band, and who most every music publication rightfully describes as a hardcore band, who happens to be signed to Matador Records, one of the chiefly influential independent record labels of the day. Rotund lead singer (and all-around nut) Damien Abraham — in Fucked Up terms, Pink Eye — who boasts a gravely screech reminiscent of another hardcore punk legend, Keith Morris, whose new hardcore supergroup Off! also became for some reason an indie sensation just last year, has expressed surprise at how willingly his band, now for the third time, has been graciously accepted by an indie community that also intensely values the demure folk of bands like Bon Iver. And he’s not without a point, though it’s more surprising to me that he’s being embraced as a punk band than anything else in an age where microgenre and compartmentalization are hip trends.

Fucked Up’s 2008 magnum opus The Chemistry of Common Life won the Polaris Music Prize the next year for being Canada’s top album, very nearly the equivalent for its time and place of Arcade Fire’s magnificent upset at this year’s Grammy Awards. But the hailstorm of praise for their follow-up, June’s expansive and incredible David Comes to Life has been far more overwhelming than even the massive welcome for The Chemistry of Common Life. 8.6/10 from Pitchfork, 9/10 from Spin, A from The A.V. Club, and a spectacular 86/100 from aggregator site Metacritic, which evaluates the album based on the combined grades of as many professional evaluators as possible. All while being a boisterously loud, unabashedly intense punk rock album, and to that regard perhaps the most important punk record since Green Day’s American Idiot — itself a far inferior record (despite even its praise) — and maybe the single most influential punk rock release in at least a decade.

But with the arms-wide-open acceptance of the album as both a masterwork and a singular vessel of punk rock spirit, I venture the opinion that maybe, just maybe, David Comes to Life isn’t actually punk rock at all. That’s not to say its influence on the public re-acceptance of the punk milieu, which has been so fruitfully tarnished by the likes of Avril Lavigne, Sum 41, Blink-182 (who, alas, just released a new, absolutely fucking terrible single), and the odd late-period sellout of one-time heroes Green Day, won’t be significant. Far from it, as of all the new punk to emerge in the last year, including the recently-A.V. Club-endorsed Milwaukee post-hardcore act Absolutely, Fucked Up seems to be the standard bearer of the new punk movement, outshining the critically-acclaimed reemergence of old-school punk bands like Smoking Popes, Screeching Weasel, Dwarves, Swingin’ Utters, and others.

But there are cracks in the armor of Fucked Up as being a straight-up punk band that outstrip the band’s acceptance as being a straight-up punk band, and thus the revitalization and repopularization of the music as a genre. That’s not a bad thing, as punk was in dire need of a hero, and perhaps Fucked Up is it. But as Fucked Up has become ingratiated into the indie scene, they, like the late Jay Reatard before them, have begun to wear the diversity and intellectualism of the scene outwardly, and have become as Dum Dum Girls, Titus Andronicus, and Wavves: a punk-ish band. And wouldn’t it be cool if a punk-ish band managed to save punk? And if so, far less exciting a question, where exactly is punk rock as a movement unto itself?

A self-explanatory list. Songs are linked.

Iron & Wine - Walking Far From Home (Kiss Each Other Clean)

Okkervil River - We Need a Myth (I Am Very Far)

Paul Simon - Getting Ready For Christmas Day (So Beautiful or So What)

Beastie Boys - Make Some Noise (Hot Sauce Committee Part Two)

Screeching Weasel - Dry is the Desert (First World Manifesto)

TV on the Radio - Second Song (Nine Types of Light)

Fucked Up - The Other Shoe (David Comes to Life)

Jamie Woon - Lady Luck (Mirrorwriting)

Dwarves - The Dwarves are Still the Best Band Ever (The Dwarves Are Born Again)

Saigon - The Invitation (feat. Q-Tip & Fatman Scoop) (The Greatest Story Never Told)

You knew something was up when people who didn’t even know who Ben Weasel was were making a big deal out of his now-infamous SXSW row, where he reached into the crowd and took a swipe at a female fan, then punched the female venue owner in the ribs when she rushed out to break up the fight. Not that violent actions against women aren’t a big deal — although I don’t necessarily think Ben’s actions are as cut-and-dry as others are portraying them — but when a relatively small-time (if important) punk band that made its name 17 years ago becomes headlining news for the type of controversy that was common as spots on dalmations for punk rock in, say, 1994, and often went without comment, there’s both a notoriety and level of publicity to the genre that hasn’t been present since the tragic rise of Avril Lavigne and Good Charlotte.

Again, fighting women is a different matter altogether. But in the age of Youtube and cell phone cameras, punk bands are able to get away with a lot less than they ever have. Violence at shows has, in some form or another, been an inherent part of the punk scene since its inception — but especially since the advent of hardcore — and bands like the Dwarves (in a lot of respects the punk rock GWAR) were able to become legendary for their the purposefully absurdist magnitude of their mythically raucous shows. A bartender acquaintance recently recounted to me a tale of seeing the Dwarves live in the late 1990s, only to have the show end abruptly (as they had a tendency to do) when the band began to throw folding chairs at the audience, who naturally fucking loved it, to the consternation of the venue owner. This kind of thing used to happen all the time, whether or not anyone wants to admit it.

One thing the Ben Weasel incident seems to suggest, regardless of its consequences, is that more eyes seem to be focused on punk rock now than have been in a long time, a phenomenon that goes hand-in-hand with a relatively massive output of quality material from decades-old bands like Screeching Weasel, Social Distortion, Chixdiggit!, Swingin’ Utters, and Smoking Popes — to name a few.  It’s indeed a testament to punk rock’s recent resurgence, whatever notoriety it may bring, that violence at a punk show is now important news on influential music blogs like Pitchfork and the AV Club, whose ability to ascend small-time music non-news into instant headline material is ironically something that the punk rock scene’s tight-knit online community has been seeking since the internet’s public debut, and something that, in the case of the AV Club’s new feature column LOUD, is actively helping its case.

But very quietly punk rock has also been invading the indie rock universe, a musical community that was just a few short years ago drenched in xylophones, country music, and Bruce Springsteen impersonators that valued, for some reason, vintage keyboards, silly beards, ugly t-shirts, and tons of flannel. Which is not to say that alt-country and indie folk is inherently bad — a substantial amount of it is quite exceptional — but it does highlight the shocking speed in which bands like Titus Andronicus, Dum Dum Girls, Wavves, Let’s Wrestle, Surfer Blood, Vivian Girls, the Vaccines, Japandroids, Fucked Up, Hunx and his Punx, and a myriad of others who ape and indulge in a spectacularly diverse punk rock tradition have fundamentally changed the game.

Part of it is probably 90s nostalgia — 2011 is, after all the year that Radiohead, the Beastie Boys, PJ Harvey, the Meat Puppets, REM, Snoop Dogg, metal gods Morbid Angel, Eddie Vedder, Weird Al, and Foo Fighters have all already released material, with new music still to come from the likes of Dr. Dre, the bafflingly reunited Soundgarden, Blink 182, Sublime, They Might Be Giants, 311, Fiona Apple, Lenny Kravitz, Jane’s Addiction, Smashing Pumpkins (no really), Primus, the Cranberries, Toadies, and, in the case of punk rock itself, Blink-182, the Offspring, Pennywise, Lagwagon, Murphy’s Law, NOFX, Reel Big Fish, and Suicidal Tendencies.

We are, after all, entering that second decade removed from the 1990s (as difficult as it is to believe; hell, kids old enough to drive legally this year were born in 1995 — nineteenninetyfuckingfive), and it follows natural suit that in the wake of the last decade’s obsession with the 1980s, which bands like the Killers popularized, we would move on toward the decade of which everyone seems to have the fondest memories. And punk rock came of age in the 1990s, exploding onto the mainstream charts for really the first time ever, a few important bands — the Clash, the Sex Pistols — excluded. Screeching Weasel themselves were (and are) a product of gen-x disillusionment, an intellectual and purposeful revulsion to the ultra-correct, self-righteous politics of bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat that they extrapolated into a manifesto of suburban smartassery that bands like Green Day and Blink-182 would take to the tops of the Billboard charts. And while bands like Smoking Popes and Social Distortion have been fairly regularly releasing material throughout the last decade, many bands completely stopped, or stuck their heads so far up their political asses — like Green Day and NOFX — that they forgot how to do what made them great to begin with.

And the sheer volume of punk rock releases that are being bunched together this year from some fairly influential bands, most of them great, suggests this is more than coincidence. Coupled with the rise of what one might stupidly term indie punk, the scene is taking its first real gasps of breath in damn near 7 years — for perspective, during which time in the 1970s and 1980s, punk rock evolved from pub rock to the Ramones to the Clash to the Germs to Black Flag — and it has caused myself in particular to become especially reacquainted with a musical genre that I once loved.

My middle and high school years were an amalgamation of ill-fitting musical tastes. For some reason or other I adored really terrible radio-friendly post-grunge like Saliva alongside black metal (about which I knew an embarrassing amount), death metal, industrial, and eventually indie. But one taste that never changed throughout my adolescent years was an adoration of punk rock, one that became tremendously strained by the emergence of the last generation of radio-friendly pseudo-punk idols like Avril Lavigne and was ultimately stretched to the point of fracture by Green Day’s spectacularly weird reinvention as a politically-minded glam rock band in the wake of the then-forgivable but now capitally insipid Warning. I spent several years away from punk getting to know an exceptional amount about indie rock, but the survivalist hardiness of punk’s reemergence in the last year-or-so has recently piqued my interest again in the music I love the most, and in the following weeks and months I aim to document my reacquaintance with a lost love in the form of a series of blog posts which I’m titling My Summer of Punk.

My Summer of Punk will be an attempt to reevaluate old tastes; analyze the impetus for punk’s reemergence; document some of the up-and-coming indie bands that lean way more toward punk rock than Pitchfork, with its handy “lo-fi jangle pop” label, is capable of admitting; review the state of the modern straight-up Punk Rock Band; and ultimately revel in what’s likely to be the few short months of punk’s modern heyday, which hopefully Ben Weasel didn’t kill off a little too abruptly. And who knows, maybe Odd Future, hint hint hint hint, will figure in there somehow too.

(This post is the first in a series.)

Arcade Fire changed the way I think about music, but I’ll get to that later.

2004 was a big, big year for indie rock.  In April, Modest Mouse, who had been idling in obscurity since the mid-1990s, slammed the top of the pop charts like a brick with “Float On,” a song, considering its success, that is not unsurprisingly exactly the kind of thing the band had never released: a poppy, straightforward, decidedly happy anthem to positivity.  The album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, reached #18 on the Billboard 200, an unfathomable number for an indie band in the music industry post-N Sync.  And the next month, the Killers one-upped them with Hot Fuss, a big, stylized tribute to new wave, which landed four top-100 singles en route to a spot at #7 on the Billboard charts and a certification, so far, of Platinum three times over.

The latter album, along with Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled debut and the White Stripes’ Elephant, finished on the Billboard Top 200 year-end album chart.  But another, decidedly more influential album was released that year, to very little mainstream fanfare and no Billboard recognition: (the) Arcade Fire’s Funeral, an album that would ultimately come to define indie in far more profound ways than any of the others, and arguably an entire generation.

I didn’t discover Arcade Fire until Neon Bible was released.  My high school years were spent buried in the wastes of punk rock and industrial (only one of those genres has had any staying power for me; I recently downloaded the entire Vandals discography for old times’ sake), and two things appealed to me about Neon Bible: A) its cover was all black and neon and dark, and B) its title was delightfully blasphemous.  I didn’t care a lick for Springsteen or U2, I had never heard of John Kennedy Toole, and the indie rock scene, aside from the inescapable ubiquity of “Float On” and especially “Mr. Brightside,” was only a burgeoning love, helped along by changing high school tastes and the sudden realization that pop music was not something to be afraid of.

As a result, it took more than a few listens for me to realize how good what I had heard actually was, and were it not for the fact that it was released halfway through my second semester of college, when my changing tastes were as flexible as they had ever been, I might not have even paid it any mind.  And it was an even bigger leap for me to rewind the Arcade Fire tape and discover the brilliance of Funeral, a profoundly different entity.  Neon Bible wore the characteristics of goth rock and new wave like a funny hat, which enticed me at the time, but I acknowledge now as being a screen of impenetrability that detract a bit from the heart of the thing, and not unintentionally (though they’re still too distracting, especially the church reverb).  My first run-through of Funeral was an unimpressed one, in part because I hadn’t looked beneath the surface of its successor adequately.

In February, Arcade Fire shook things up a little bit (just a smidge, really) by winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for The Suburbs, a move we arguably should have seen coming based on the fact that the program had scheduled them for two performances to close the show, as opposed to the one song that every other band had been allocated.  But still, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga had been penciled in to win that award, because everyone sort of understood, whether they were vindictive about it or not, how the Grammys were supposed to work.  The response was swift, immediate, and angry from fans and pundits alike who had no idea who this band was and who had just naturally assumed the artists with the #1 records would win the big trophies.  Hell, Barbra Streisand couldn’t even figure out what was the band’s name and what was their album’s.

What people didn’t realize is that The Suburbs did debut at #1, a monumental showing for an indie rock band that was admittedly slightly cheapened by the Billboard charts’ rapidly growing irrelevance, but not much.  After the band’s win, the album leaped all the way to #12, narrowly missing the top 10.  And it’s not like Arcade Fire is without recognition: their defining achievement, “Wake Up,” is featured in the wildly popular trailer for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, which is arguably more notable than the film itself.  There’s also this NFL commercial, which aired during the 2010 Super Bowl, which the band only agreed to on the stipulation that all profits the NFL made from the ad be donated to charity.

Obviously, whether they were well-known enough to be recognized for a Grammy win or not, there’s something about this band that resonates with people in a significant way.  The album moved 156,000 copies in its first week, more than 60,000 more than Neon Bible did, and this is an age where downloads are more pervasive than ever before. (Adele’s 21 moved 350,000 in its first week, which is an absolutely absurd number to pull these days.)

Funeral to me just sounded to me in my limited exposure to the genre like every indie album ever.  Plinking piano, acoustic guitar, xylophone, accordion.  On first listen, Neon Bible was just so much more, a loud, big, thunderously political thing that seemed to be saying and doing something more unique, which I suppose is at least partly true.  But the overt political statements on the album mostly come off as trite, the thunder overbearing.  What I realize now, and what I realized then that made me understand just what Funeral was trying to communicate, is that there is a singularly personal and singularly young undertone to Neon Bible, one that is inherent to Arcade Fire simply being Arcade Fire.  And not just because the album comes off as one big prayer; “Windowsill,” what has grown on me to be the album’s best and defining song, is a first-person ballad that compares the state of living in modern America to the state of adolescent personal despair.  “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more” becomes “I don’t want to live in America no more.”  The album is trite not because of Win Butler’s lyrical shortcomings — which would be my critique of The Suburbs — but because this is not how simply Arcade Fire understands how America operates, but how the enlightened youth of this country understand it.  And Arcade Fire has essentially taken it upon themselves a mouthpiece for those youth.

Nothing is more true of Funeral, especially “Wake Up.”  And that was the launching point for the rather profound impact that the album has had on my life others and the lives of others.  Even The Suburbs, which I view more as a successful experiment in form but an applaudably failed exercise in content than the instant classic that the Grammys and others have taken it for being, is obviously about growing up in its titular neighborhoods.  The success of that album, though, lies in the ambiguity with which its back-and-forth narrators audit their childhoods: there is no wholly positive overview of life in the burbs and there is no overly negative one; the city rejects and judges as much as the suburbs bore.

I hesitate to use the phrase “new Nirvana.”  Nirvana was not only an immediate, iconoclastic call to arms for the American youth to Arcade Fire’s steady symphonic artistry, but they were far more recognizable and successful in one album than Arcade Fire has been in three.  But Nirvana and Arcade Fire are similar in the way they appeal to the rebelliously adolescent worldview of their contemporaries and fans, and they both share the pay-attention-to-me pathos of the young and affluent who have a tendency to drive culture.  The key difference between the two, ultimately, is in the fact that Nirvana’s rejection of culture was unintellectualized and sarcastic, whereas Arcade Fire’s approach to what it means to be young is from a sort of cold, analytical perspective that rationally assesses why we think the things we do as an adolescent and comes to more of a tragically revisionist conclusion than Nirvana did.  Both speak to their generations in very impactful ways, but Arcade Fire weave Grimm’s Fairy Tales out of being young in America instead of blunt, acerbic poetry.

Funeral reads like a collection of tragic bedtime stories than anything else; written almost entirely in first-person (which is the same for the rest of Arcade Fire’s catalog as well), the album is a series of personal narratives told with a moral in mind, a message that the band (especially Butler) are trying to communicate to their generational peers about being young in the modern world.  Almost all the tales are tragic, and almost all the tales are focused on neighborhoods (which would become the title to four different songs), with the exception of “Haiti,” Regine Chassagne’s ballad for her parents’ homeland.  The songs deal flatly and truthfully with the fairly normal lives of everyday kids.  And the music is as big as anything Arcade Fire has ever written, with serious debts to Springsteen and U2.

Listen to The National’s High Violet or Frightened Rabbit’s The Winter of Mixed Drinks without being reminded of Arcade Fire.  The movement isn’t huge, but it’s there.  And there’s a reason they’ve moved on to sell out arenas in an age when such a tour is next to impossible.  The band matters.  I think Grammy night showed that better than anything else could.

Yesterday I stumbled across this absolutely abhorrently bad article on Huffington Post, a misguided, weird, and all-around preposterous attempt to pin down the “10 bands shaping the post-Nirvana era.”  Granted, Huffington Post is not what I would call a driving force in pop culture criticism, nor would I single them out as an influential voice in the music industry whatsoever.  And I suppose it’s par for the course from a source that farms all of its content from other websites, patching them together like a Reddit for the retarded and calling the content their own.  But this list is tremendously stupid and bears singling out for how utterly bizarre some of the choices really are, as well as to fill in the blanks as to what is actually a fascinating question of modern musical identity, a question that is legitimately worth exploring.

For one, Dave Matthews Band, Green Day, Pearl Jam, and Radiohead were all around during the Nirvana era — whatever that actually is; Nirvana was a cultural force for exactly four years between the release of Nevermind and Kurt Cobain’s suicide, so I don’t see how there was ever a “Nirvana era” to begin with — with both Green Day and Pearl Jam dating back to the 1980s.  Obviously Pearl Jam were Seattle contemporaries of the seminal grunge parrot act, but Green Day’s individual members were all involved in one way or another in the meteoric rise and continuing influence of the pop punk movement of the late 80s and 90s, often providing springboards for the success of other, better groups: queercore masters Pansy Division and newly notorious punk gods Screeching Weasel, of whom Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt was actually a member for a time, among them.  Green Day’s influence is of particular interest, because it was arguably as significant as Nirvana’s in the 1990s, taking pop punk from the skate park mainstay it was in the 1980s to the top of the pop charts.  Green Day’s Billboard success was actually a precipice not seen in the punk movement since the Clash, and rarely ever approached by the Ramones.  They were a hugely influential group, not even infinitesimally due to their aught-era political rock operas, which most of the groups they inspired overwhelmingly despise.

One could, I suppose, make an argument for Radiohead — very few bands are as genre-pushing and continually inspired as they are — but to lump Muse in with them is particularly ridiculous.  And not just because they should like Jock Jams meets Queen karaoke night; without Radiohead, there is no Muse, making them one of the inspired instead of one of the inspirational.  I have yet to see a way in which Muse is shaping anything; their stage shows are borrowed from 1980s arena rock drawing boards (especially U2) and their music is a conglomeration of a series of chart-topping prog and hard rock acts — Tool, Rush, Radiohead, Dream Theater, the aforementioned U2.

The conversation is not exactly worth pursuing from here (Honestly, Linkin Park?), but the voids left in Pollack’s list are still intriguing.  The music industry has not exactly progressed much in the last decade-plus, with a series of pop stars and rappers replacing one another on record company rolls — N Sync to Bieber, Britney to Gaga — while the recording industry slowly and painfully unravels because of its refusal to amend its business model to suit changing listening and purchasing trends.  We’re essentially stuck in a perpetual state of 1999 — rap is forever popular, pop stars recycle — but rock and roll is slowly phasing itself out of the industry on a large scale.  Even in the indie world there are few remaining influential rock acts, with most of the big sellers being leftovers from an era where rock music could push sales.

So where are the bands that shape our era?  Even if there ever was one, I would hardly define the current state of music as the “post-Nirvana era,” seeing as how that band ended 17 whole years ago, an absolute eternity in pop music — 17 years passed between Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” and Journey’s formation.  With the explosion of the microgenre and the expansion of the indie folk movement that has been cultivated since the late 90s, the current state of music is one of a staggering amount of diversity, one helped along into the semi-public eye by the existence of “publications” like The AV Club and Pitchfork and the proliferation of the blog scene.  Pop music is pop music, but in no way is it the be-all-end-all; even in the early 1990s, Pollack’s “Nirvana era,” a host of bands from My Bloody Valentine to Dinosaur Jr, Matthew Sweet, and a hundred others were facilitating the next generation of musicians in as profound a way as Nirvana. 

So I think the ultimate question of the defining artists of our generation will be decided not by who’s popular now, but by the next wave of artists, by the bands who wear the influence of their musical heroes on their sleeves.  And in order to pin them down currently we have to determine which groups in the blog era have the potential to last the longest, to linger on the minds of musicians for years to come, which, needless to say, is difficult.  But I think it looks something like this, not limited to 10 and with very little in the way of justification here, and no, they do not all reflect my tastes:

• Arcade Fire, bringing indie rock to the masses at large and breaking it free from the prison of irony
• Kanye West, making hip hop more than clubs and style
• LCD Soundsystem, making dance music cool again for the punks and hipsters
• Wavves, redefining punk in the post-Reatards era
• Lady Gaga (grudgingly), making it cool to be a “serious” artist
• Animal Collective, fusing experimentalism, psychedelia, and pop
• Mastodon, breaking metal free of the nu-metal prison
• Vampire Weekend, essentially defining the modern “indie” sound
• Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, for (potentially) redefining the rules of distribution, and for being insane