A musician friend wrote to me recently that he was starting to see Fleet Foxes as the musical salvation for our generation. And I know what he means: Their soaring harmonies often make me feel like I’ve packed my heart a suitcase and binoculars and sent it off on an incredible adventure in a hot air basket, a journey that’s somehow completely quaint but simultaneously beyond remarkable. Their music is beautiful and clean and simple, but not entirely without angst and therefore, mostly, manages to avoid feeling too sappy.
But it gives me pause, this new (old) sound that seems to have crept (back?) into our cities in the past 5+ years. It’s hard to avoid noticing this powerhouse coterie of groups who sound as if they belong more to a meadow than the metropolis (I’m sure there are hundreds more, but the groups in constant rotation I’m thinking of include Fleet Foxes, St Vincent, Beach House and others). To be sure, this isn’t a criticism of these groups, who do what they do fantastically, rather, I wonder what it means when we’ve allowed our aural cities to be colonized by a sound that doesn’t speak to, about, or from “the urban” but appears instead to occult our urbanity. After all, isn’t that what’s been happening to our aesthetics on all fronts for at least the past decade? The boys traded in their “PNB” hoodies for plaid Woolrich jackets and scruffy beards, our neighborhood streets have transitioned from graffiti filled alleyways to suburban style strip malls (helloooo Soho) or precious hand-crafted (read: obscenely priced) specialty stores that hearken back to some small village most urban dwellers seem to be saying they’d rather inhabit (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Brooklyn).
The miracle of cities—like the “old New York” that so many of us are still stuck on— is that we come face to face with different, challenging realities that stimulate and excite us, consistently knocking us out of our comfort zone, expanding our notion of what is desirable or even possible. That wall wasn’t just a wall, it was a canvas. That cardboard wasn’t an old box, it was a fucking dance floor. It’s the friction between what is and what could be that makes city life so complicated and often so seductive.
It’s not necessarily that Nas’ Illmatic presents a more authentic urban voice—I mean, any self respecting rapper will tell you theirs is just as much a constructed, composite narrative of urbanity as any other— but just what are the political implications when we’ve stopped including these voices and perspectives in our own soundtracks? What happens when we have so thoroughly rid our urban landscapes, visual and aural, of any space for contestation, for alterity, for fantastic(al) deviance?
All I can think is that maybe if we weren’t so busy singing along to blissed out harmonies, fantasizing about the Blue Ridge Mountains, we could acknowledge that our situations are a bit closer to Biggie (“know how it feels to wake up fucked up, pockets broke as hell ... But they don't know about the stress-filled day, baby on the way, mad bills to pay ...”) and maybe, just maybe, we’d be pissed off enough to actually do something about this bleak ass future we’re staring down.
