Sunday, June 27, 2004

Magnetic Fields…

How they show genuine love for their art form, for their very narrow little sliver of music, that never gets any respect—how it’s so naïve you know it must be a form of irony, yet they do it without condescension, ironic yet not at all sarcastic or condescending, the poignancy of that naïve world, we’re so ‘post’ these days, that’s what the media does, makes everything a caricature of itself so quick that you can’t explore it before it’s gone, become an icon, usually a cheap, second-rate one. That’s why the media’s penetration has inevitably meant the quickening, the acceleration of that change—everything is captured up! You want a rebel-girl, here’s alanis morisette and pink and…
You can’t identify with movements anymore, if you’re smart, because they are images and stereotypes by the time they're movements.
Anyway. That was a long aside. Magnetic Fields creates these portraits of that world, that old one we sort of grew up hearing about

Something else about this pace of change, it makes you more critical of the moment, the permenant ironist, always knowing that what’s now is soon to be appropriated and gone, so you are already ironic in your present moment, just laying the ground. Thinking anything will actually hang around is a form of boarishness, foppish soppish sentiment.

But Magnetic Fields does it without condescension, they pull you into that headspace (Wilco, listenting to them now, that’s what they do too. But. I never liked this sort of music because, in part, I couldn’t trust the people who said they liked it, they had some bit of that everpresent irony, that makes me distrustful and distant—some of them are really good people though, even tender and sweet, but the point is when they said they liked it I didn’t know, did they think it was so smart, so purely ironic, so masterful in its imitation, and improvement on, a cliché—or did they sometimes like the very things I’m talking about, and that just didn’t come out in the explanation—

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