1.
I like Foxygen’s music, but I don’t think it belongs to them. After an initial EP in 2011, the duo of Sam France & Jonathan Rado were quickly scooped up by Bloomington, Indiana-based independent label Jagjaguwar. They released the bands debut full-length album We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic earlier this year. Wistful, lo-fi yarns strung around the fingers of classic rock like a cat’s cradle game slowly unravel as modernity claws at the reusable strands of the songs’ tropes and sonic composition. Let me be clear, I don’t think their music is bad, but elements of the band feel worn-thin and pilfered in 2013.
If we continue to laud bands like Foxygen for successfully aping the music of the past, we will never arrive at a place that allows us to imagine new and innovative sounds—specifically in the genre of “indie rock.”
The immovable sounds, feelings and aura of the ‘60s continues to be exalted by the current generation (I’m talking ‘bout my generation)—and the basis for this feels faulty at best. A backward-glancing set of aesthetic principles seems unavoidable in certain ways for any art form. Indeed, the most exemplary art goes unnoticed while in the climate of its own present moment. This happened for painter Van Gogh and poet Emily Dickinson, we see the awe that deceased artists like Kurt Cobain, the Notorious B.I.G., Ian Curtis and even Janis Joplin have curried in the wake of their untimely deaths. But it seems that fawning over the retrospectively-gilded age of that pivotal decade has reached a point of saturation—one that is fully characterized in Foxygen.
Dragging a long history of unheard and vividly named tapes and unreleased records from the past in their wake, Foxygen have created a mythology that imbues them with the vast “back catalog” that so many classic rock groups possess. But in reality? France and Rado seem to have copped their very lifeblood from the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Bowie and The Stones. What does this mean for us, a world desperate for meaningful music that pushes the creation of new and entrancing art forward? It means a closed feedback loop, it means entrenchment—it means retrogression. Regardless of the group’s compelling musicianship, obvious energy and relentless passion, in a way they are puppeting sounds and ideas that were enacted—and came to fruition—years ago.
The phrasing style, tone and even melodic composition of “No Destruction” is far too similar to Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” to not immediately call Bob’s precursor to mind. Put on The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” and compare France’s vocal stylings to Lou Reed’s—the two styles are too close for Foxygen to cite Reed as a mere influence, which interestingly enough, they do. Claiming themselves as the “de-Wes Andersonization of The Rolling Stones, Kinks, Velvets, Bowie, etc” that declaration can be a hard pill to swallow after watching their music video for “San Francisco” which viewers would be hard-pressed to tell apart from a scene in Anderson’s latest film Moonrise Kingdom. They even bring a Neko Case stand-in female vocalist to cool alongside the refrains in that track. In hip-hop, there’s a term for stealing the vocal style of another rapper, it’s called “biting the flow” and if either Reed or Bowie felt like pressing charges here, Foxygen would easily be convicted of this crime.
3.
“Indie rock” if one may even be so bold as to take that nomenclature in hand and dub it a genre, has reached a stand-still in original thought. While other genres like hip-hop, electronic, and even country/folk music progress in new and fascinating directions, what has become of rock & roll? A genre predicated on rebellion, individuality and fiery indifference has melted into a slew of packaged action figures in lieu of in-the-flesh heroes. Why does their own label have to invoke monumental, creative figures who changed the flow of culture like Wes Anderson or The Kinks to describe Foxygen’s art? And to further claim that the duo is separating the quirky, side-eyed naiveté from the classic rock sounds they are nicking is even farther off-base.
4.
When my children hear the phrase “guitar hero” they’ll think of a farcical karaoke-based video game, not the soul-bending power of a Jimi Hendrix. Or worse yet, they’ll hold up a nouveau-styled Jimi who apes his inventive style. This isn’t to say that nothing original at all is occurring in indie rock—at certain corners and edges the creative life-force is bleeding through the seams of some heart, even as I write this. But these endeavors feel, sadly, to be fewer and farther between.
There’s simply too many things on the side of music, MUSIC, to be swept down into the same Charybdis whirlpool of the copy-cat syndrome. Copying tried and true success isn’t success—it’s regurgitation. Re-creation isn’t a step forward, it’s actually in a multitude of ways, a step backwards. I only employ such harsh terminology because bands like Foxygen are the ones that should be leading indie rock toward some future sound. They are talented and charismatic enough to search out the next wave, to push open the double doors of the 2000s and throw off the encloaking of retro-mania that has smothered the impulse to create within an entirely new crop of human souls.
Allen Ginsberg once wrote, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” but I see my peers and the artists of my era destroyed be their own inability to unshackle themselves from that glorified, arbitrarily chosen window of time that Ginsberg lived in. I don’t want to listen to a new pair of great musicians who sound like The Velvet Underground. I don’t even want to listen to “My Generation’s Velvet Underground.” Instead, I’d be delighted to hear a band compelling and inventive enough to wash away these cultural markers and establish new buoys in the sea of music—new counterpoints to call upon. A record, a sound, a creative act that is irreplaceably new, irreplaceably now. An artistic declaration that leaves behind comparisons and influence for the embrace of supernatural creation—an unavoidable, unmissable body of work that draws new chairs to the table—that speaks with voices as yet unimagined.
Where are the stories of life in 2013? Are the tales we tell only copies of the past? Are we doomed to churn out the same piece of newsprint unrelentingly stuck on the same day’s issue, even years, even decades after the original publication date? A blog constantly refreshed only to find it contains the same content merely book-ended by different ads or draped in different clothes? This is essentially what indie rock has become, and largely, in my opinion, why those same complaints are being filed about the media that covers it.
5.
Give us a monster, 2013. Give us an alien. Give us art that disrupts, that feels the way a Pollock splatter felt against formalism, art that is a free-verse on a bookshelf stacked with iambic pentameter. Please don’t give me Foxygen and call it a new band, even as my nostalgic-trending heart likes the sounds of their tie to my childhood. But I am not a child anymore and neither are Foxygen, really. Why stay stuck there? Give me a noise as yet unheard. I think if you tried to, you could.
