here has never
been a better time for rumors. Deployed right, they can hop
around the world in minutes on the Internet; they can shake up
giant companies or summon international attention.
The four-day CMJ Music Marathon, which ended late Sunday with
the final tunes from about 1,000 bands, solo acts and disc
jockeys, is primarily an exercise in rumor propagation. The
musicians who performed at 60 clubs around the city, and during
daily convention sessions at the Hilton New York, generally
aspire not to conquer the Top 10 or to fill arenas, but to
become more potent rumors.
It's not as glamorous as a sweepstakes for pop's next big
thing, and few of the performers would be likely to turn down
serious offers to be heard on commercial radio stations or to
headline concert halls. But these performers have learned to
operate with a cult following based not on national marketing
but on college radio airplay, press attention, friends'
recommendations and Internet tips. It's a realm where a band
like the Promise Ring — which is barely a blip in the commercial
precincts tabulated by Billboard magazine — means more than 'N
Sync ever will.
Chuck D, who gave the convention's keynote speech Friday,
described the music business circa 2000 as working on three
levels: exploitative, Titanic- size major labels; more adaptable
independent labels, or indies; and still experimental Internet
outlets that he calls "inties," potentially millions of
them.
He predicted that with the inties, the entire music business
will grow, but not as fast as the number of hands in the pot. He
urged an audience of budding musicians and moguls to learn to
get things done cheaply.
That realism was no news to many of the marathon's
performers. They have scaled their expectations to the college
circuit, which has become a domain unto itself: smaller, more
stable and less trendy than the pop mainstream.
It's a zone in which bands seem content to reach only
listeners who make an effort to find them, while those listeners
pride themselves on their elite tastes, not wanting to share
with the uncouth masses. "It's kind of obvious but I still like
it," an audience member said, slightly defensively, after one
band's set at Brownies.
Many bands come to CMJ to expand their audiences but not to
change them qualitatively. As in any niche, the music has
evolved to serve ever more specialized needs, polishing up
subgenres that don't reach much further off-campus than a 10-
watt station. Collegiate bands have become like personal Web
pages, hoping to attract some traffic to their particular
assortment of eccentricities.
I club-surfed through the music marathon, hearing about 3
percent of the available shows; many other performers were
already familiar, and the marathon's program guide assigned
genres to most of the bands I missed. Even allowing for some
sampling error, it was clear that much of the collegiate domain
represented by CMJ has become a stubborn backwater.
College radio stations once prided themselves on being ahead
of the public; now, they and their listeners have entrenched
themselves on the sidelines. On those margins, they have come to
prize craftsmanship and nuance, and they have a strong
preservationist streak. In collegiate rock, bands are given time
to improve, and some use it well.
Hip-hop, the musical revolution that current college students
have grown up with, makes collegiate rock nervous; at a time
when hip-hop has seized the pop mainstream, it showed up in only
a handful of CMJ shows. Upper-middle-class college students
treat hip-hop as a self-conscious put-on. Kleenex Girl Wonder,
which mostly played crisp but off- center power-pop songs with
polysyllabic lyrics, introduced them with exaggerated b-boy
grunts and slang. MC Paul Barman played up his suburban
nerdiness, wondering in one lyric if his attempts at hip-hop
were as culturally disrespectful as Taco Bell's Chihuahua.
The guitar-centric 1980's were still in progress during the
CMJ marathon. P. J. Harvey, introducing songs from her new
album, summoned Sonic Youth's dense guitar drone while she sang
like Patti Smith. David Gedge of the Wedding Present, with his
other group, Cinerama, brought back straightforward new wave
tunefulness in songs about wounded love. A Dutch band, Bettie
Serveert, laced tuneful midtempo folk-rock with collegiate
feedback and an occasional punk-rock speedup.
Throughout the marathon, bands unleashed feedback and reverb,
setting off elaborate drones and screeches that suggested plenty
of practice-room tinkering. One of the most striking
performances was by Broadcast, which moved between cool,
1960's-flavored pop and gargantuan, sustained drones that were
by turns celestial and menacing.
Other bands, including the Spoozys and Causey Way, set out to
rediscover the giddy, parodic cheer of the B- 52's, thus
reviving a warped 1980's revival of 1960's garage-rock and
surf-rock. The collegiate circuit is also the home of
alternative country, which prides itself on the virtues of old
honky-tonk music while coming up with lyrics like one that Kelly
Hogan sang with her band, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts: "I like
your twisted point of view."
One staple collegiate style — claimed by dozens of bands in
the CMJ lineup — is emo, a pensive, guitar-centered, emotionally
turbulent music that harks back to 1980's and early 1990's
college-radio favorites like Husker Du and Fugazi. The music
broods and turns in on itself, with guitar riffs folded like
origami and lyrics full of troubles, hesitations, poetic
obliquities and an occasional flicker of anger.
It's music that thinks too much about thinking too much,
while gazing nervously into a post-graduation wilderness.
Dismemberment Plan sang, "No light leads you onwards, no signs
point you on your way."
While Dismemberment Plan opens up emo with touches of manic
humor and outright funk, emo is more likely to brood like the
band Karate, a trio that played somber, measured guitar riffs
and jazz- tinged leads behind sentiments like "This is how young
ideas die." The style can also reach for oceanic surges and
grandeur like Cave In, which was so steeped in arty 1970's rock
that it played Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused."
Another recurring style was what's sometimes called slo-core:
quiet but not necessarily placid songs that refuse to rush. It's
an approach that extends back to Velvet Underground ballads by
way of Mazzy Star and the Cowboy Junkies, seeking a simplicity
that is both a refuge and a bottoming out of despair, and it can
strive for folky simplicity, as Damon and Naomi did, or reach a
lapidary complexity, as with the ghostly, complex harmonies of
Ida.
Both emo and slo-core look resolutely inward, with lyrics
about tortured relationships and private uncertainties. There
was extroversion from a handful of hard rock and heavy metal
bands like Glassjaw and Disturbed, groups aiming not for the
cloistered college market but for a broader audience. Collegiate
hard rockers preferred to deliver the big riffs
self-consciously, with a knowing sense of parody.
There was also girl-bonding exuberance from Le Tigre, the
bouncy new band led by the riot grrrl ringleader and punk
feminist Kathleen Hanna; over electronic drumbeats and
handclaps, she and her band members chirped lines like "Let me
hear you depoliticize my rhyme." The Micranots, a rap group from
Atlanta that zigzags between boasts and consciousness-raising,
asked its audience to suggest subjects for free- style
(improvised) rhymes; the crowd offered police brutality, ganja
and "the third eye."
Even college students can't mope all the time. The marathon
also had some dance-music shows. BT (the initials of Brian
Transeau) emerged from his studio with a full band. He had songs
that harked back to the 1980's goth style of Siouxsie and the
Banshees and Depeche Mode; then he added power-chord guitars to
booming house- and trance-music crescendos, making a full house
at the Roxy raise their hands and cheer.
DJ Assault, from Detroit, used primitive but propulsive
drum-machine beats and repetitive bass lines behind relentlessly
raunchy chants. (In a way, Assault's music wasn't that different
from its absolute rhetorical opposite in Le Tigre.) On the dance
floor, the CMJ crowd stopped worrying about existential
questions and lovers' quarrels. And for the moment, the division
between refined collegiate tastes and the wider world was broken
down by the power of the beat.
