MisterRoboto (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} arrowintwolakes) wrote,@ 2006-05-09 12:00:00 |
|
Pretentious Band Names
One of the biggest misconceptions when I returned to my original bread and butter after trying my hand at being a movie geek and a pop music geek was that there weren't hipsters in the literary world, or those that were, though they rejected canonization, their claims for doing so were tiresome to people who knew what they were talking about in relative terms to them which is pretty much to say everyone. Of course, a special kind of category deserves a special kind of hipster. (I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, to learn that there are philatelist hipsters.) I'll maintain the music analogy because I was never old enough or well-versed enough to get to know any movie hipsters.
One has PitchforkMedia, the other has McSweeney's, for example. It is true that Pitchfork regularly puts out interesting articles, good reviews, and lights on the best of the obscure as it comes to light, but it is done in such an insufferable rock n' roll sanctimony that it's hard to get through. Similarly, McSweeney's will with regularity publish good fiction, verse, and prose but is done with such an enraptured sense of post-modern irony and manicured self-consciousness that renders it an equally swampy mess.
You will be happpy to know then, gently reader, that there is a Venn-like intersection between these two domains of fatuous hipsterdom and that is: band names. Though I have in the very recent past described (probably to Claire, because it's not as if I talk with anyone else ever at any time) how descending graduating classes in Ithaca's writing school became more writerly and less bitchy, there were always the literary hipsters, one in particular, a devout At the Drive-In/Mars Volta fan would construct... well,... interesting concrete poems and carefully guard them showing them to select few. (Parenthetically, he and I had a great time making absurdist poems as the parties of our mutual friends wound down and those who were able to drink as much as us were having sex and everyone else was in a stupor or passed-out; revelling in our arrogance and the products of our consciously carefully constructed pretension; I'm still not sure if his pretension was, ultimately, genuine or not.) But though the younger classes had more people seeking art and at least more people with realistic approaches to writing, so did, it seemed, the level of literary hipsters grow. And their most clever use of cant and idle talk was the creation of proverbial band names in the true spirit of indie music intentionally alienative elitism.
This is incredibly insufferable behavior. "Kooky" bandnames derived with that same sense of facetiously crafted insouciance and irony is a sure fire way for me to never, ever listen to your music, especially if you go on to name your songs, albums, and "band names" similarily. The line, I suppose, is very thin, but it is there, I tell's ya. The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, for example, is fine because their name states both their gimmicks and the general attitude they have as a band. David Hillyard and the Rocksteady Seven is not. It's just stupid. And this is bad enough save for that the literary hipsters will, quite seriously (if anything they say or do can in fact be said or none without irony) believe their fictional band names with fictional members and albums all with names of this same level of pro-elitist indie onomatology is just stupidity's further engenderment and subsequent embrace. The stupid ease and moronic results of which I used famously in the chat featured in this entry.
So, when people started talking about King Dork, I was as mildly interested as I usually am when an allegedly literary rehashing of high school comes out, which is to say not very much. But with the advent of the King Dork band name contest, I am rolling my eyes at my deceased interest in this apparently ok book. It is fitting that the same effect I get when I read a stupid ironic band name is the same for music as when that stupid ironic bandname is used in connection with books.
One of the biggest misconceptions when I returned to my original bread and butter after trying my hand at being a movie geek and a pop music geek was that there weren't hipsters in the literary world, or those that were, though they rejected canonization, their claims for doing so were tiresome to people who knew what they were talking about in relative terms to them which is pretty much to say everyone. Of course, a special kind of category deserves a special kind of hipster. (I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, to learn that there are philatelist hipsters.) I'll maintain the music analogy because I was never old enough or well-versed enough to get to know any movie hipsters.
One has PitchforkMedia, the other has McSweeney's, for example. It is true that Pitchfork regularly puts out interesting articles, good reviews, and lights on the best of the obscure as it comes to light, but it is done in such an insufferable rock n' roll sanctimony that it's hard to get through. Similarly, McSweeney's will with regularity publish good fiction, verse, and prose but is done with such an enraptured sense of post-modern irony and manicured self-consciousness that renders it an equally swampy mess.
You will be happpy to know then, gently reader, that there is a Venn-like intersection between these two domains of fatuous hipsterdom and that is: band names. Though I have in the very recent past described (probably to Claire, because it's not as if I talk with anyone else ever at any time) how descending graduating classes in Ithaca's writing school became more writerly and less bitchy, there were always the literary hipsters, one in particular, a devout At the Drive-In/Mars Volta fan would construct... well,... interesting concrete poems and carefully guard them showing them to select few. (Parenthetically, he and I had a great time making absurdist poems as the parties of our mutual friends wound down and those who were able to drink as much as us were having sex and everyone else was in a stupor or passed-out; revelling in our arrogance and the products of our consciously carefully constructed pretension; I'm still not sure if his pretension was, ultimately, genuine or not.) But though the younger classes had more people seeking art and at least more people with realistic approaches to writing, so did, it seemed, the level of literary hipsters grow. And their most clever use of cant and idle talk was the creation of proverbial band names in the true spirit of indie music intentionally alienative elitism.
This is incredibly insufferable behavior. "Kooky" bandnames derived with that same sense of facetiously crafted insouciance and irony is a sure fire way for me to never, ever listen to your music, especially if you go on to name your songs, albums, and "band names" similarily. The line, I suppose, is very thin, but it is there, I tell's ya. The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, for example, is fine because their name states both their gimmicks and the general attitude they have as a band. David Hillyard and the Rocksteady Seven is not. It's just stupid. And this is bad enough save for that the literary hipsters will, quite seriously (if anything they say or do can in fact be said or none without irony) believe their fictional band names with fictional members and albums all with names of this same level of pro-elitist indie onomatology is just stupidity's further engenderment and subsequent embrace. The stupid ease and moronic results of which I used famously in the chat featured in this entry.
So, when people started talking about King Dork, I was as mildly interested as I usually am when an allegedly literary rehashing of high school comes out, which is to say not very much. But with the advent of the King Dork band name contest, I am rolling my eyes at my deceased interest in this apparently ok book. It is fitting that the same effect I get when I read a stupid ironic band name is the same for music as when that stupid ironic bandname is used in connection with books.
