Last Thursday night was long and wavy. Neo-psych - call it freakfolk, call it noise, call it a shoegaze revival - is plentiful...and covalent. Now Espers is touring with Stereolab, Dungen remixes Mia Doi Todd and it's clear that something's happening. Whether or not this is just a passing trend in a subcultural ghetto remains to be seen, but the mass cultural mindfuck has been distilled into ambivalent, gauzy polyrhythms and aching guitars.
For all the wishful thinking and Greg Tate cum Todd Gitlin nostalgia for more political times and dire telos, the post-colonial period following World War II produced more fuzzy sentiments about the world at large than some would have you believe. Woodstock was a one-off: inexpensive political grandstanding for a war that wouldn't end for years. Three years into Iraq with almost five years spent in Afghanistan, buzzing, droning noise, slashing metal and inadvertent tape slippages make an apolitical collage with many meanings.
Suddenly international psychedelia fills the void cultivated by neocon klaptrap - the empty "support the troops" nonsense promulgated by know-nothings like 3 Doors Down along with Kelly Clarkson's marketable poignancy. "Because of You" doesn't only sound like a pained longing for a lost childhood, but some crypto-syllogism for sifting through the emotional distress of loosing a loved one. Instead, psych rock and coke rap offer contradictions and confusion instead of easy answers tied in yellow ribbons bonded by magnets.
It's somehow fitting that cars would be adorned with political messages when they themselves, in Detroit and in Iraq, Afghanistan and Venezuela, have become political messages too.
