hey guys. i found something that can unite us all together, deerhunter lovers and haters alike.
what do you get when you take - 1 group of idiots with synths + crack addiction + hipsters and journos who know how to hype?
you get the
death of fucking music.
i shouldn't laugh, because in the last few moments of their lives, when these idiots die of their crack addictions, they will look back on the "good times" and be so utterly disgusted and embarrassed as they remember this performance their brains will just send the message "fuck it, just stop beating dude" to their hearts.
i disliked this band before i saw that video which was the first time i've ever heard them. i disliked them because of this puke inducing
article
Nestled among deliberately amateurish photos of blowjobs and hipster junkies at the Museo Universitario del Chopo was a cluster of photos entitled “Hidden Valley.” Ugly teens rode BMXs, fucked around with paintball guns, popped pills and smacked one another with a stick in a barren field between a parking lot and a housing development. Suddenly, in the middle of Mexico City, I was back at home in the suburban wastelands of the Midwest. I knew this “space of anarchy” well; not specifically of course, but generically, and absolutely. Away from parents, teachers and cops, Hidden Valley is the type of place you can experiment with adolescent stupidity as you futilely resist the first onset of Middle America ennui.
I think the wastoids in Salem know it too. They’re officially from Chicago, but I know better. White kids are rarely “from” Chicago. Instead, they’re usually refugees from crappy Midwestern suburbs and dying towns, desperately in search of culture but finding only public transit and better drugs. Salem’s music—a hazy, loping, lo-fi electro—fits that rudderless Rust Belt existence as guilelessly and artlessly as a glassy stare. I can’t say it’s good per se, but it speaks to me. And probably others—there are many of our breed, born under Reagan into a world where our destinies have already been mortgaged. Not “no future” in the cool Johnny Rotten rallying cry sense, but “no future” in that withdrawn, hopeless, Gummo type of way. Not sexy or cool. Not even sad. But maybe a little scary.
This is why the music of Salem speaks more to me than that of more polished, professional and literate indie bands to which my white college-educated self should be demographically attracted. Instead of presenting a simulacrum of a time when people believed that rock could offer world-altering truth, change hearts and minds, and soundtrack youthful romances, Salem delivers the starkness of what neoliberalism has left us—drugs and death. Instead of nostalgia, whether painful or idealized, you’ve got numbed verses like “It’s hard to remember / What we did last November.” There’s not even any sex: Salem’s music is too slow for the club and too weird for the bedroom. As Holland says, “Sex has nothing to do with making music,” and anyway, the antidepressants have robbed him of his libido. I think Salem’s conscious of the distinction between their music and the more entitled upper middle class fantasies of their peers. At a disastrous show for the privileged Twitterati of SXSW, they played their music from a recording while smoking a cigarette in front of footage of a car-crash. This isn’t simple épater le bourgeoisie, it’s more inward-focused and nihilistic than that. When the ruling class is as insulated and unresponsive as it is today, why bother with a fuck you? Might as well get high.
YEAH CUZ OF NEO LIBERALISM LETS SMOKE CRACK AND EXPRESS OUR 'ARTISTIC' BOREDOM. COZ ITS LIKE. IF WE DARED TO HOPE, OBAMA WOULDN'T LISTEN MANNNN.
epitome of hipster bullshit.