A few years back, when I was still living in the dorms on campus, I had a discussion with my roommate about The Darkness.
It wasn’t necessarily about whether the music was any good or not.
We both liked their debut album, but only he liked the second.
We came to terms of agreement by just settling that “Permission to Land” was fun, and we could ignore “One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back!” without much guilt.
Even if we agreed, we couldn’t let a good topic die.
The thought turned instead to how serious the band was supposed to be taken.
It wasn’t so much about whether or not they were a joke, but instead how much of a joke they were.
In this, I wondered if the joke ran deeper than just a band making barely-hidden double entendres.
I figured they were some sort of postmodernist amalgamation of every ‘70s and early ‘80s hard rock cliché.
Skipping over the obvious points: the falsetto, the over-the-top guitar duels and the image they created for themselves with cat suits, leather pants and Thin Lizzy T-shirts.
Rather, something about their quick rise and fall back into obscurity seemed just as calculated as the music: band’s debut comes out of nowhere, goes at least gold, tops a few scattered “Best of the Year” lists.
Band becomes one-hit wonder in the United States, releases a cloyingly moronic Christmas single, kicks out a non-essential member of the band (who is replaced with guitar tech), makes a sophomore slump album, singer leaves band for rehab and solo career, previously-mentioned guitar tech becomes singer, band goes back into obscurity and breaks up.
I’m just waiting for them to make a reunion tour and they’ll have hit all the clichés of a hard rock band.
After throwing this idea back and forth, I understood myself a little better.
The most important point of this being that I think too much about one-hit wonders I remember from high school.
I’m not saying my theory is likely to be true, it’s just fun to take the music I enjoy and spin it around until there’s one unifying idea that puts all of an album under a single context.
A second point being I’ve found any band that puts effort into how their music and, by extension, they themselves should be interpreted, grabs my attention like little else.
Pragmatically, the aspects of a band outside of what is presented in songs shouldn’t really change how I think about them.
Do I find Nine Inch Nails’ “The Slip” or Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” better solely because of the manner in which they were released?
I certainly enjoy music being released as a work to be spread around as much as possible instead of a commodity.
This doesn’t make these two albums any less a collection of digital files on my hard drive, though.
Should I retroactively stop liking Kanye West’s music because of his public persona?
His beats shouldn’t, on principle, sound different because he’s an egomaniac.
But it doesn’t matter asking these questions, does it?
If I allow any time to think about these issues while I’m listening to a song gives these issues their saliency.
If I actively or passively think about a song as more than notes plunked out on a guitar or a few megabytes taking up space on my computer, I’m already taking the music out of a context unblemished by my own interpretations and extrapolations.
But that’s boring.
It’s mind-numbingly dull to go through an album without these extra thoughts.
It might not make songs better to think about them as having a deeper meaning than “it’s just a song,” but music is just more engaging if it’s not just something to be used as background noise.
The B-Side: When to judge a song by its band
Published: Sunday, October 25, 2009
Updated: Sunday, October 25, 2009
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