brooklyn fail
You know, I started out writing this long-ass ranty intellectual post about why NY Mag’s feature on the ‘Brooklyn scene’ and the Dirty Projectors and how, like, this guy Todd P is totally changing the world got really under my skin and somehow made me kinda depressed. Like about how they DO actually start to get to this good point they make about Brooklyn as a self-sustaining micro-economy of NYU, Vassar, and Oberlin grads who buy 7”s and beer and all hang out at the same places and work at the same venues and play in bands and are secretly depressed about the fact that the internet and the recession meant that their jobs of being a rockstar/journalist/wealthy a+r guy at some cool-ass label/writer/artist/whatever just genuinely aren’t options that exist in the world anymore but here’s this option, seriously, to hang out and exist in this little bubble (challenge, friends: how many people in this photo do you know? point proven) that fuels itself and does feel vibrant and alive and community-ish when everything else is stagnant.
But about how despite getting to that, it’s just awkward to talk about a ‘New York scene’ in this other-y way (“let’s write an article about hipsters for the 47823th time”)… or even about how living in a moldy cheap prewar Bushwick brownstone crammed to the brim with band practices isn’t, like, ‘a big deal’ (speaking of which, anyone want one? I’m subletting my room. no, seriously.)… or my endless rant about blogs vs magazines and how even the bloggiest of forward-thinking NYC magazines seems awfully pedantic and behind things in comparison…. or just about how downright cringe-worthy and off-base that list of “40 songs that define the Brooklyn sound” was and why for some reason that made me really, really sad about the death of media and the music industry and Brooklyn and THE WHOLE UNIVERSE or whatever, all at once.
Then I realised that, yes, sometimes the only appropriate reaction is snark and between that and, natch, the comments on the articles themselves (“The sound of right now? I’d suggest a quick use of the fact-checking machine called google…Some of the songs are from 2006 and 2007. That’s like 4 lifetimes in indie-band terms.” or “This list seems as telling a commentary on contemporary journalism as it is Brooklyn’s music scene…. Yeah… Brooklyn… we get it. What else.”), I got nothin’.
Sigh.
