Review Summary: Sorry for party rocking
I have to admit that I’m kind of tired of reading half-hearted apologia for Dude Rock written by Dude Music Writers. At the outset, let me say that this is a privileged problem. No matter how much critical backlash there is or may be against Dude Rock, there is no undoing the fact that the critical community’s focus for the prior—oh, say, 50 years—was disproportionately focused on Dude Rock. And although the focus of prestige websites like Pitchfork has shifted away from Dude Rock (at least in its more traditionally understood forms), there is still plenty of room on the internet and in the market for Dude Rock, as well as for Dudes to talk and be passionate about Dude Rock. See, e.g., Ian Cohen’s twitter feed, this website.
But with the release of a new Japandroids live album, it’s time for another round of music writers, almost all of whom are men, twisting themselves into knots to let us know that these kind of bands matter to them while performatively explaining that, don’t worry, they also know the music is stupid. This isn’t a particularly new trend: I remember being frustrated at Adam Downer’s beloved 2014 review of Beach Slang’s
Cheap Thrills on A Dead End Street on this very website for taking this tack (albeit in the context of a negative review). In it, Downer characterizes Dude Rock as an immature phase to be gone through and left behind. Speaking in second person, he remarks that as you get older (your mid 20’s, when all traces of toxic masculinity are famously left behind for good) you see a “lifetime’s supply of rock kitsch exposed for what it [is]” and laments that “you wish you still believed in the healing power of power chords and the solidarity of punk lyrics. But you don’t anymore. Not really.” To which I would remark...okay, maybe you don’t… but it’s a bit of a convenience to completely write off a style of music without explaining why it might have once been resonant, or admitting that the fact that it once meant the world to you surely was of some utility.
And this past week, Jeremy Gordon, in a de facto review of
Massey ***ing Hall for his newsletter, mounts what is ostensibly meant to be a defense of the band and its less than stellar live reputation. In it, he almost makes the inverse of Downer’s argument: this used to be important to me, so it’s ok that I still like it (although of course I know better than to really revere it now). You’d hardly recognize that Gordon is a fan of the band, though, given that he falls all over himself to continually explain how “embarrassing” it is to like Japandroids, as well as to isolate and take cheap shots at Brian King’s cheesiest lyrics in order to prove their insubstantiality, as if their over the top nature serves no rhetorical purpose (“Tramps like us/baby, we were born to run? A bit gauche, don’t you think?” -Gordon on Springsteen, probably).
The point of all this snark is to say: we get it, already. The negative aspects of a band like Japandroids are patently clear to any discerning listener. The songs verge on hokey, the rock mythology it draws on can be conservative or implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) misogynist, and the fans are mostly white bros. And it would be one thing to read an insightful critique of Japandroids’ music from someone just coming to the band or who isn’t a man (In the vein of, say, Jessica Hopper’s “Where the Girls Aren’t” or Quinn Moreland on Weezer). But at what point does the repetition of these criticisms from writers who are (1) also men and (2) who appear to actually like the band anyway become reductive enough to obscure the actual point of music writing, which is to pinpoint what the personal and cultural MERIT of the music actually is?
Ironically, I don’t think there’s much personal or cultural merit to be found in
Massey ***ing Hall. Japandroids’ live act has always been their weakness (mostly for practical reasons— it’s hard to recreate their massive on-record sound with just the two of them, and Brian King’s unadorned voice kinda sounds terrible). What’s more, I think reckoning with Japandroids as a tangible thing is a lot less interesting and attractive than trying to wrap your arms around the ethos of their music in the abstract. When Jeremy Gordon writes about the band in his piece, he talks about being in his early 20’s, hammered at a Japandroids show, and looking back on those days and feeling a bit silly. Although I find that anecdote to be a bit of projection—just because YOU liked this band when you were a drunk ***head doesn’t mean it’s music solely for drunk ***heads—I see where he’s coming from. Honestly, my least fond memory of Japandroids’ music is probably the only time I saw them live, in DC on the
Near to the Wild Heart of Life Tour. My main memory from it is a guy standing behind me who kept loudly remarking to his friends that the crowd were a bunch of pussies for not moving around enough.
But at the same time, I think stopping at this surface level of criticism does Japandroids’ music a disservice. There has to be a reason I connected to an album like
Celebration Rock or a song like “Young Hearts Spark Fire” before I ever got drunk at a rock show, or why I’d rather hear “The House That Heaven Built” late at night, alone in my car, than with friends or played by the actual people who wrote it. The feelings it inspires are often too visceral to really get a handle on, but I think what has always grabbed me is the tremendous sense of desperation and longing baked into the band’s joie de vivre.
Gordon characterizes these feelings as “rife with valorization of alcoholism, valorization of mystical women, valorization of hot chicks, valorization of staying out late and driving across the country and feeling weird about your dad or whatever”. I think this is a bit of a bad faith characterization of the band’s interests. Sure, King definitely sings a lot about girls (although I personally find the occasionally juvenile lyrics of Post-Nothing easier to contextualize than the epic wife-guy poetry found on
Near to the Wild Heart…). But male-male friendships are treated with equal reverence, and the creative spirit is as much of a muse to King as booze is.
Plus, these songs aren’t just saying that the aforementioned things are what make life worth living. They’re acutely aware that it’s crushingly lonely to realize in the cold light of day that these are the things that make life worth living. In his piece, Gordon isolates “Younger Us” as a song he doesn't care for (once again, he apparently likes the band), remarking that he always found the conceit of the song “pathetic”. Yeah, being nostalgic for nights drinking with your friends is inherently kind of sad. To show I'm not imputing this knowledge on the band apropos of nothing, a counterpoint on the same subject found on
Post-Nothing album cut “Rockers East Vancouver”: “tired old youth/burned right out/we keep waiting, but still nothing changes/it’s a shame.”
The point of this dialectic isn’t necessarily to argue that the greatness of a band like Japandroids will be lost to the conventions of modern music writing. It’s also, as anyone who has read this far can tell, not really to argue that
Massey ***ing Hall is worth hearing. It’s to take stock of a band whose place in the consciousness is ever-shifting and whose possibility of future output is questionable (I would bet we get the
CR 10th anniversary before an LP4, if it ever comes) and argue that they deserve to be viewed in more than black and white. There’s still a generation’s bonfire waiting to begin, but when the last one starts to burn down to its embers, it’s worth remembering how and why it once roared like hell.
