It’s been twenty years since the release of Funeral, Arcade Fire’s debut album. Back in 2004, my life was just beginning, but also already in shambles, and it seems almost too obvious in retrospect that an album like this would resonate with me; an album about the innocence of youth, the loss of it, and the wild search for meaning that follows.

Funeral effectively changed music, and the internet, forever. I don’t know how much hyperbole I can truly spew for an album that seems so ubiquitous to the music history of people my age, it is like singing the praises of water, of air. Funeral composes a bit of everyone who has been listening to it for the past two decades. It is woven into the fabric of our lives, even if it was just one step on a long and evolving musical journey.

Arcade Fire would go on a long and evolving musical journey of their own, right out of my zone of interest by their fourth album, and they’d commit a series of faux pas around cultural appropriation in the process of expanding their style (26 years late to “world music”), losing much of their cool points in the process. Thankfully, the nice thing about recorded music is that it persists even long after the artists have stumbled their way out of the spotlight (or just our spotlight).

Unfortunately, a lot of the other things that were great about the internet in 2004 are decaying, abandoned, or simply gone forever. 2007 saw the launch of the iPhone, which would hasten the ubiquity of social media in a very unpredictable way. If you want to communicate with others on the internet these days, you didn’t post on a personal blog, you post on social media, shouting into a void of impermanence. We don’t go looking for the pretentious opinions of music critics anymore, we look for opinions of the masses–Pitchfork, which was so influential to the music indie scene, is being “absorbed” into GQ, whatever that means, but it doesn’t sound like something that happens to a still-beloved institution.

I hate to swerve another post into old man complaining about the modern age, but if I revived this blog after more than a decade, it only seems appropriate to reflect on what has changed in that time. And it seems like a lot of things have gone to shit since then, which is impressive because 2004 was not just a depressing year for myself personally, but for many people in America–the Bush administration was really getting us down: Green Day’s American Idiot was released just a week after Funeral, and in the years surrounding we’d get Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero, Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Neil Young’s Living with War, and Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, several other albums preoccupied with our pessimistic political moment in the mid-aughts.

And yet, here we are, twenty years later, and it feels like we’ve come full circle. The political landscape is more divisive than ever before, and we barely even have a handful of truly great protest albums to lean on. The internet, which used to be a safe haven for the weirdos and freaks in the world, has now become a battleground for the attention spans of angsty mouth-breathers. The people who are in their 20’s currently aren’t listening to raw, energetic indie rock like Arcade Fire, but (warning: going to shout at clouds now) terrible mass manufactured bedroom pop built a top of mountain of reused samples and borrowed nostalgia. They’re screaming at endless derivatives of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, who are singing almost exclusively about their past, present, and future ex-boyfriends; that are thrown onto Saturday Night Live for a live performance before their song stops trending in TikTok posts, and then disappear, never to be heard from again.

I hate it. But, you know, I can listen to Funeral, and I can imagine a time when it seemed like the bright light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t an oncoming freight train, but a friend’s house, a warm place to spend the night. Maybe we’re on the precipice of this happening again, an age where popular music doesn’t feel so hollow and self-obsessed. But if pop music is a mirror, we’re pretty well fucked, because as far as I can tell our society isn’t veering away from superficiality anytime soon.

Damn! I tried to end on a positive note… but how can I?

Oh well. See you in another twenty years, for the fortieth anniversary.

Post-punk slash dance-punk is having a moment, and I’m loving it. I was tempted to start dropping the names of present day bands, but that’s silly. I’ll just post them as well. So, what do I say about Gustaf?

Well, now I’m stuck. Fuck! What do I say?

I’ve been thinking about this for two days now. At some point I lost the thread of what I am doing over here, just four posts in. Am I supposed to write about the artist? Do I write about myself? Do I write about the song (somehow, when the song has an internal logic I do not understand, like this one)? Do I write something else entirely and wait for inspiration to strike? Then I wouldn’t get anything done!

What would the staires.org style guide suggest? Hello, I like this song. Gustaf is a band from New York, part of a greater resurgence of art punk and dance punk, a thing that I love and am enjoying greatly. I was listening to music the other day and this song came on, and I thought, “yes, this is the Gustaf song I will post, it is weird and muscular and danceable and also sort of vaguely uncomfortable, but in a sexy way, and wait—-is this song from the perspective of the earth? Am I being told to touch grass? Whatever, who cares, just post this shit!”

Okay, id, okay.

I didn’t get into Spoon until 2004’s Gimme Fiction. I loved and still love that album, it would likely be home on any “Top 10 albums of all time” list you ask me to come up with off-the-cuff, assuming I am able to think of anything at all (as I am not great at remembering things on-the-spot, nor off-the-cuff, since we are hyphenating idioms now). Either way, my love of that album, and subsequent albums Transference and They Want My Soul blinded me to the brilliance of their earlier records, with their paired-back production and understated nuance–oh, crap, I’m already descending into hyperbole.

(You might be asking yourself, “Wait, wasn’t Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga after Gimme Fiction and before Transference?” and you’d be right. Unfortunately I’ve never liked that album, despite–or perhaps because of–it being their true breakout hit album and typically being declared Spoon’s best album. I’m here to set the record straight: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is not Spoon’s best album.)

It wasn’t until 2017 that I finally listened to Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight, their third and fourth albums preceding Gimme Fiction. They are both absolutely divine. In some ways, I am doing them a disservice, by picking this song from them to put on top of a post that is now about them. This song is not the best song on these albums, but it is one of my favorites and, in some ways, is perfectly exemplary of Spoon as a band.

Early Spoon oozes a laid-back coolness that is hard to describe, but this song sort of does it. Spoon is a fitted shirt hung on me–nothing else will fit right, or seem so directly applied. Every beat, every musical flourish in their songs feels like just the right thing, placed at just the right moment in time.

Unfortunately, not every Spoon album, nor every song, is flawless. Sometimes they stumble, and I think their constant flirtation with being big in adult contemporary pop rock kind of annoys me–the entirety of Hot Thoughts being very cringe, like a dad in aviators at a club hitting on a woman young enough to be his daughter. It says a lot that Britt Daniel’s track selection for Spoon’s greatest hits compilation only has the title track from that album.

Hot Thoughts basically killed my interest in the band, and I still haven’t listened to their latest album, 2022’s Lucifer on the Sofa. Why bother, when I can just listen to Girls Can Tell or Kill The Moonlight again? Listening to new Spoon would be like looking slouchy in a thin American Apparel t-shirt, instead of reaching for something tried and true, that fits right, like a fitted shirt.

I’m profoundly sad to see what has become of social media. Back in September of 2006, when I first signed up for Twitter, there was nothing that excited me more than the idea of a new blogging platform that more instantly connected me to random people via SMS. And I was right to be excited: I made lifelong connections and had numerous positive experiences because of Twitter.

Early Twitter asked you to post about what you were doing, encouraging you to talk about your life. Over time, the objective of Twitter shifted from talking about your own life, to talking about what is happening in the world around you. Twitter realized that the act of witnessing the world could be a powerful instrument of change and encouraged people to do that, during a blinding moment of techno idealism. There were some genuine moments of cultural change that came from this, like the idea that Twitter had something to do with the Arab Spring.

This evolved, and what Twitter was for shifted again. Instead of talking about what is happening in your life, or about what is happening in the world around you, Twitter became a place where you talk about other people and what you think of them. If Twitter’s “what’s happening?” was on a macro-level originally, the new perspective was on a micro-level, encouraging detailed dissections of others. This moment had some fun and important cultural moments, like that woman with the off-leash dog in Central Park, #metoo, and BLM.

Unfortunately the moral outrage component of this era of Twitter became very sticky and we’re now in the present age of social media, where what seems to drive the most engagement on the internet is creating outrage, moral or otherwise, and conveying that outrage to as many people as possible.

In some ways it’s obvious it’s meant to be a community bonding experience, uniting us against a common enemy. Twitter is now dominated by fear-mongering against the “liberal agenda”, and over on Threads the common enemy just seems to be “other people”, with an algorithm that prioritizes relatively benign but still somewhat irritating content that makes you want to respond, “are you really this stupid?”

It’s just a lot of noise. But we’ve been told that being informed is what makes a person intelligent and respectable, and that we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and that you can’t just bury your head in the sand or else, really, you’re part of the problem. To turn your back on social media feels like a radical act, in a moment where the richest and most powerful people in the world are strongly insistent that social media is the only place worth being.

At some point you have to step back and think about the people who are pushing all of this on us and why they’re doing it. All the politicians, businessmen, social media influencers, and some journalists, are parasites, and they need attention to feed. The social justice roots of social media convinced us all that we’re doing something important by using these services, but those days are long behind us now. Our continued use of social media is only propping up a system that encourages others to victimize our attention, to ruin our mood, to distract us by using our emotions against us.

Our Two Minutes Hate isn’t government mandated, it’s something we do to ourselves all day long, every day; and worse, in this non-fictional real life dystopia, it has ads!