BY FLETCHER WORTMANN

In print | Published November 20, 2008

From seventh grade on, I attended the improbably-named Beaver Country Day School. It should not surprise regular readers of this column that Teen Fletcher did not straddle triumphant the apex of the adolescent social pyramid. There were many, many reasons why I did not fit in. Prominent among these was the fact that my mostly white, mostly affluent classmates listened exclusively to hip-hop, and I did not. Their music implied a deep concern with busting caps in unfortunate places and with issues of bitches, and also of hos; they regularly encouraged me to throw my hands in the air, so as to signify that I was a true player. Sadly, I myself was unable to enjoy such simple pleasures of cultural imperialism. I listened to The Beatles, The Stones and The Who. I listened to Led Zeppelin because, although I was disquieted by the numerous Satanism references, I was comprehensively re-quieted by the numerous Hobbit references. I listened to Simon and Garfunkel and I clenched my fists and wept with tortured introspective empathy. This was my rebellion. I wanted to confront, not the “man,” but the 11th grader in the saggy trousers and the $600 sneakers. And so I felt a little fiery twinge of vindication every time I blasted Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” through my Discman.

As a fan of decades-old, culturally irrelevant music, my favorite magazine was “Rolling Stone.” In one issue, lodged between an interview with a popular Canadian artist with an extremely tenuous grasp of irony and an interview with a popular Canadian artist apparently unable to spell “skater boy” correctly (Quebec’s public schools clearly require significant restructuring), was a review that caught my eye. “Rolling Stone,” you see, employs a rigid three to three-and-one-half star grading scale. What I’d found was a review that, in violation of the fundamental principles of mediocre music journalism, rated an album four stars. This record was profound, they claimed, prophetic and messianic; if Jesus had made rock music and somehow rock-star Jesus in no way resembled Bono as one would expect him to, then this is probably what he would play. The album was called “Is This It.” The band was The Strokes.

I can hear the sniggering of the cool kids, the ones who were Breaking Social Scenes and Neutralizing Hotel Milk while I was composing abstract, improvisational pieces on my Fisher-Price xylophone. But to me this music was a thunderbolt. A jangly, underproduced thunderbolt, striking down from the heavens wearing very very tight electrical pants. You see, every song that I’d heard before The Strokes had some kind of recognizable human experience at its core. Every song was about love, or about heartbreak, or about a disappointingly superficial debate vis-à-vis the cinematic merits of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (as I recall, I think we both kind of liked it). “Is This It” was about absolutely nothing whatsoever. The Strokes embodied the experience of not really feeling that strongly about things, maybe, I guess, and their complete and utter lack of enthusiasm was infectious. The band’s adequate musicianship and uninspired lyrics were exhilarating. They were mediocre, but they were spectacularly mediocre, and they destroyed my preconceptions of what music could do. I played the record at a party and moderately-attractive nerd girls nodded approvingly. I played it for my mother in the car and she said it gave her a headache and would I please turn it off. This was staggering. I was listening to a record that annoyed my parents. A whole new world of discordant, marginally alternative music unfolded before me.

As the souls of the irredeemable damned are upon the day of judgment cast from purgatory into Hades itself, so I graduated and came to my beloved Swarthmore. Things were different here. People listened to the same music I did, only more so. Here, if you tuned your radio accurately to three decimal places and stood on top of a tall building and listened between six-twenty and six-twenty-five, you might hear through the static a Yo La Tengo song, played three times in a row. And here the other students listened to bands that weren’t even played on the radio, bands that they’d read about on blogs. Blogs! I didn’t know that people could have blogs, except for Neil Gaiman. I attended concerts here, real concerts for the first time; the lead singer’s perspiration and spit drifting like fog in the spotlights, bony indie children nodding and jostling together, all un-ironic in their post-ironic joy.

But Swarthmore students are fickle, mercenary. They might recommend a band and then, after it gained a modicum of popularity, they would providentially realize that said band had inappropriately appropriated traditional African musical traditions despite the group’s privileged Ivy League background, and also that they totally sucked and I’m listening to Crystal Antlers now (oh, you haven’t heard of them? Yeah, they’re pretty obscure). Their flexibility of opinion astounded me. I was clearly dealing with professionals. Escalation was inevitable, and I allowed myself to be dragged into an unacknowledgeable cold war, mp3s slung back and forth like missiles. New pornography, arcades that were tragically and perpetually on fire, lips aflame and self-effacing mice; the names were never stupid enough, the music never obtuse and dissonant enough. Somewhere, there exists a band playing neo-psychedelic harmonic electronic garage-revival post-rock for an audience of zero. The proverbial white-striped whale, the event horizon of indie rock. I wasted precious years of my life hunting it; had I not turned away in time I would certainly have been destroyed.

Pop culture is moving on now. The indie aesthetic has reached saturation point. I’m not sure exactly when this occurred; perhaps when, during a marathon Disney Channel-viewing session, I observed a trio of floppy-haired jangly-guitarists discussing the importance of abstinence, especially while one is dating a blood relative of Billy Ray Cyrus (really, isn’t this common sense?). The mainstream is consuming the margins, pop is eating itself, that guy with the expensive sneakers is now wearing Converse and singing “Mr. Brightside.”

Soon everyone will be sick of indie. I admit that I’ll miss it when it’s gone. The current zeitgeist is no more sophisticated than any of the previous ones, but it is the first one I’ve really felt comfortable with. I like the flannel, I like the cynicism and I like the dorky glasses. I like being able to wear a faux-vintage Transformers t-shirt in public and being able to claim that I’m doing so ironically.

But I’m getting nostalgic. I’m too young to feel so old. I remember I was at home this summer, listening to “From Her to Eternity” by Nick Cave in my room and I heard a knock on the door. It was my mother. “What is this?” she asked disbelievingly, and I tried to explain, and she squinted and shook her head and asked me to turn the racket down. I smiled and told her why this was funny, and we both laughed. She went back to her room, and I turned down the volume. Not as much as I should have, though.

Fletcher is a senior. You can reach him at fwortma1@swarthmore.edu.

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