Annivyrsary: 2009

ISSUE #46

2009: the last good year, or the first bad one? Less depends on the events of the past, and more on how young you are when they happen. Still, ten years feels like one long blink, and, looking at everything born in 2009, it must be the gestation period for unintended consequences to catch up to us: this was the year Bitcoin was invented, the year Facebook and Twitter got big enough to stay. On the bright side, Sully landed that plane in the Hudson, and network television was having it's swan song with NBC's Thursday lineup: Community to Parks and Rec to The Office to 30 Rock.

The internet was just about finished smashing the monoculture to dust, and, with streaming still below the horizon, the industry was atomized just enough for music to become the Wild West. In the absence of a true leader by birthright, Pitchfork and other aggressively hip publications leveraged their burgeoning power by stepping in and steering the culture to their version of the underground. Weird shit got way more play than it would have even five years before. The xx, Animal Collective, Gizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Japandroids—this is essential Pitchforkcore, and I ate it the fuck up (I wasn't the only one—even Donald Glover would use half of these songs as backdrops for his I Am Just a Rapper mixtapes).

The recession had hit us all pretty hard, and here we start seeing musicians slipping into ornate personas to try to lift the malaise. Music was trying hard to be glitzy: you can hear it in all these sawtooth synths, from Passion Pit to Sleigh Bells to MGMT, who distilled the entire "fake it 'til you make it" dreamer ethos into "Time to Pretend." The New York garage revival had faded a little, and we were ready to shed that nostalgia and split up to cover more ground: note Justin Vernon's vocoder work in "Woods," the baroque chamber pop of "Two Weeks," or the zooted space opera that is Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon: The End of Day. It wasn't the only concept album that year: the medium itself was brought to a devastating peak with The Antlers' Hospice. Not an easy record, but a rewarding one, and lasting.

Our personality is baked in whatever kiln is available when we're young, and that year I was such a baby, and so stupid. My frontal lobe was being chiseled by everything alive in the culture, and, unfortunately for me, that happened to be the era of Peak Twee—Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up, (500) Days of Summer, Where the Wild Things Are—the whole Sundance scene really, and all their respective post-Garden State soundtracks. This was all very present when I started opening up to what was being said around me, started reading and listening with a curious ear—far too late compared to peers, it always felt. I was doomed from the start, a small-town kid, no local music scene, no real mentors. All I could do was sneak to the computer room after dark to read reviews and listen to thirty-second iTunes samples until I was confident I could invent the rest of the song in my head. We're all a product of our environment.

If, as a species, we're compelled to create origin stories, this one must be mine: it starts after my parents' divorce, adjusting to my dad's new house every other weekend. There was this senior from my freshman year who had just gone off to college. I'd thought he was rad as hell, and now he was starting at a radio station down at Mizzou. This is how I found myself at midnight every Saturday, illuminated by the computer and the microwave's dim light, streaming an online radio show. My loser ass had nothing to do on a weekend (are you kidding?), so of course I spent my time calling in. I thought I had to look cool, so here I was asking for Neutral Milk or some shit I'd read about just to hear a full song. He would answer, he would patiently play them, and then play something that sounded similar, and that's how he gently steered me in the right direction. That's where I first heard Antony and the Johnsons, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tom Waits, PJ Harvey—he was probably just trying to get through the night, talking politely through my pestering, but it was a huge influence. Radio is essential, and there's no treasure quite like a trusted curator. So thanks, Al—I get to run my own show now.