Music was better back then

Music was better back then. Back when? Back then, when I was younger. You know it, I know it. There were really big heavy metal bands, like Metallica and Guns and Roses. Hair metal was nearly dead, but even then people had to admit that bands like Poison and Warrant had some pretty good tunes on the radio. Hair Metal. A concept so alien to youth of today you couldn’t even begin to describe it.

There were bands like Nirvana, and Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam. These were bands who were so awesome that you can’t even try and put their impact into words. Especially Nirvana. But also Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, and … it was called ‘the Seattle Sound’. And it was amazing. It saved peoples lives.

You could go to a festival and see a lineup including, but not limited to, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Rancid, Ani DiFranco, Beck … you could take the bus up from Canberra with your mates and you could work out things about your life, your middle-class Canberra teenage life, you could lie down under a big tree next to some Canadian girl you had just met and puff on a jay and there would be Thurston Moore in the distance, singing about how men are a not alone on the Diamond Sea, and you could feel like you were having some kind of epiphany, even if you couldn’t quite say what it was. Because it was true: men are not alone, on the Diamond Sea. Look into his eyes and you will see.

Siamese Dream, by the Smashing Pumpkins. By now it had gone past the stage of starting a band: even though you weren’t in the band you could play some of the licks from that album, and it was kind of cool that you could do this and one of the guitarists in the band couldn’t, it was even cooler that even though he was kind of a prick he would sit with you and he would say, so how did you do that, and you would show him the lick, it was really simple, you just had to tune it to drop D. Cool, he would say.

Nothing was lame. Every act that was signed to a major label, that was selling CDs in Australia, was simply amazing. I am talking about bands like You Am I, Spiderbait, Regurgitator, the Dirty Three, Tumbleweed, the Cruel Sea, Magic Dirt, you could go along and see bands like these every month and your life would change, probably for the better. Henry Rollins did a show at the Refectory and someone threw a Doc Marten onstage and he stopped the song and bellowed out “Whose fucken shoe is this?” and everyone there put there hand up, and he said “oh, it everyone’s fucken shoe! It’s a goddamn commie shoe! That’s what it is! I fucken hate hippies!” and then he hurled the shoe back into the mosh pit and the band struck up again, right where they left off. I know this because I was there. I was there because someone let the side door open, those big glass doors, and even though me and my friends were underage we ran right it, just in time for Henry Rollins and the Communist Doc Marten. Henry Rollins is principally known these days as a spoken word artist.

There was a band called the Black Crowes. They were like the greatest bar band in the world, a bunch of stoners from Atlanta who somehow managed to sound better than the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces, at least for a couple of albums, managed to sound better than the reference points that the music critics were using to try and describe their sound. I just don’t think you can say that, with a straight face, about any new rock and roll band in the last five years.

So yeah: music was better then. Of course, music is still being made now. This is what people tell me, at any rate. But it isn’t the same. It just isn’t. You know it. I know it. I mean, I realize that this argument is embarrassing and self-referential and so on and all of that, and that Magic Dirt are playing the Refectory on Thursday night, but it’s just different now.

It’s different now for a hundred different reasons, none of which I know how to describe … I mean I could say something like an iPod is just a walkman or a discman but with more, uh, memory capacity, but that when listen to an MP3 the sound is all compressed and shitty, so really it doesn’t matter that you can be walking around with ten thousand songs of whatever floats your boat. It’s irrelevant. You could even have say, the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in there and it wouldn’t matter, because you probably weren’t there when the thing came out. This is not your fault, it’s not my fault. It’s just a fact. I was at a party recently and people were plugging their laptops into the stereo. I can tell you for a fact, people, that ‘Epic’ by Faith No More just does not sound the same when it’s been compressed down to a file on a laptop. Everything is just too close together.

The astrologer in the student paper says that as sure as the Earth revolves around the sun, everyone here hates me because I’m a mature age student. Well, I would just like you all to know that I understand why, and there is nothing I can do about. And I understand. Everything really is average nowadays. I was just lucky, I guess, to have grown up at a time when the omnipresent wallpaper that is popular culture was not an infinitely customizable shade of grey.