There’s this girl I know named Mary Claire, and we often drunk dial each other to swap insults and brag about pranks. During one of our inebriated conversations, I blurted out, “I don’t care what anyone says! I love the new AFI single!” On the verge of tears, she too confessed to loving the song. We both felt that admitting to fandom of AFI was tantamount to credibility suicide, which is why it took liquor and the confidence of a friend to confess such a dark secret.
While hungover on the toilet the next day, reflecting upon our conversation caused me to think of the backlash surrounding Against Me!’s relatively recent signing to Sire, a division of Warner Brothers. It was a tempest of fury, prompting even the normally sane Mitch Clem to talk shit. How could the band who sang “Reinventing Axl Rose” sign to a major? People were mad enough when they signed to Fat Wreck; you can only imagine the furor when the group who sang “We want a band who plays loud and hard every night/And asks for nothing more than a plate of food and a place to rest” became employees of one of the biggest corporations on the planet.
I, too, was shocked by the announcement, especially in light of the We’re Never Going Home documentary, which showed the band being courted by multiple major labels and rejecting them all, even an offer by Virgin in excess of $1 million. It was not that I was caught up in scene politics; I was afraid they would pull a Husker Du and release a terrible record as their major label debut after a string of incredible indie albums.
You see, releasing a great record is all that matters, at least to the receptors of art (meaning: us). Aesthetics mean more to rock ‘n’ roll than any other genre – if you go to a local showcase and the next band looks like they met through the Hawthorne Heights fanclub on MySpace and announces that their name is I Killed My Beloved While Crying Tears, you write them off before they even play a note. However, art only matters in how it affects the individuals receiving it. “Pink Houses” by John Mellencamp matters because it made a bunch of Midwesterners think that their lives meant something, whether or not you think Johnny Cougar should get the fuck back to Indiana and stay there. Do people still debate the politics behind Renaissance art? Yes, Dante had the Catholic Church breathing down his neck and El Greco had to apotheosize the royal family, but that doesn’t mean their art is any less great. As the behind-the-scenes matters faded with the passage of time, they became increasingly less important. All that we have left is the art, and that’s all we should have to judge. If a piece of work is dependant upon context, it won’t last through the ages. I still listen to Phil Ochs, but I find myself having to consult Google every other song, which kind of ruins the experience.
It seems this phobia of mainstream musical success is unique to rock ‘n’ roll. Do you think jazz fans called Cannonball Adderley a sellout when he had a chart hit with “African Waltz?” No, they were just glad that such a stellar representative of the genre was recognized by the public at large. Blues fanatics smile whenever BB King is mentioned in the news, if for nothing else than their favorite genre is being discussed in the public forum. However, hardcore rock ‘n’ roll fans lose their minds when the rock music they love becomes popular.
Once again, I return to AFI. I discovered them in the seventh grade when their album Answer That and Stay Fashionable was re-released on Nitro Records. I thought they wrote the catchiest ever hardcore song about buying cereal, and followed their career through all the changes – the dark lyrical shift in Shut Your Mouth that eventually gave way to the heavy punk of Black Sails in the Sunset and the mainstream modern rock breakthrough of Sing the Sorrow. I still think The Art of Drowning is one of the best punk rock albums ever released. Apparently, there were a lot of people who felt the same way, as Nitro could not keep up with the demand to the point that they recommended AFI sign to a major. Their mainstream success did not decrease my fandom; it just made it less public. I was guilty of the same sin all rock critics who aren’t Chuck Klosterman are guilty of – hiding the bands that we secretly feel ashamed of from our critics list. Klosterman is a model of what a rock critic should be. He doesn’t hide his love for Rod Stewart or Motley Crue even while working at Spin, a magazine that lives perpetually fifteen years in the past.
The point is that “Miss Murder,” the new AFI single, is as engaging as anything they’ve ever released. It doesn’t matter if five thousand or five million hear it; it’s still a suicide ballad that raises the hair on one’s arms. The power of art is not who else it affects, but how it affects you. When you hear a song, look at a painting, or read a novel, you are the only person receiving that art from your point of view. You can only judge how it affects you. I don’t dislike Fall Out Boy because Pete Wentz is an annoying idiot and all their fans are self-absorbed jerkoffs (otherwise, I wouldn’t like Pavement); I dislike Fall Out Boy because they make music that doesn’t appeal to me at all.
When Against Me! releases their new promo single with the video they shot on a major label budget, I’m sure people will have a negative response, regardless of the content of the song and/or video. There will be those who yell “selloutz!” without having heard a note, and that’s sad. It doesn’t matter to them that Tom Gabel is one of the greatest American songwriters or that they play passionately or that they still put on the best guaranteed Great Night Out in the country. What matters to people like that is music politics and blah blah blah. I can only hope that a hundred years from now, people will have forgotten all this nonsense and recognize Against Me! as one of the greatest musical groups in American history, instead of worrying about what label logo is on the back of their records.
I can always understand fears about pandering. When the Clash were aiming for a mainstream breakthrough, they wrote “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” which science has proven to be one of the five most irritating songs in history. When groups deliberately try to alter themselves in order to appeal to the most common denominator, I do agree that art has been abandoned in favor of Fast Cash Now. However, even this doesn’t affect the Ghost of Art Past.
I’m always surprised by retroactive criticism. Should Lucero ever get a big hit on CMT and modern country radio, it won’t matter to me. I’ll be glad for their success and hope that musicians I admire can make a living doing what they love, but it won’t mean that “Ain’t So Lonely” will mean any less or any more to me. Experiencing a song only approaches the macro level when it reaches the level of commonality that songs like “Champagne Supernova,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” or “My Own Worst Enemy” achieve, which only means drunks in bars sing en masse.
If record company politics factor into your appreciation of music, don’t bother appreciating it, because all you’re appreciating is context. It’s like criticizing a painting for the frame in which it came. Listen to what affects you, and ignore everything else.
-By Matt Corbett