![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who reviewed the album Swoon by Silversun Pickups over at Allmusic.com, gave the album four out of five stars but really didn't have anything nice to say about it or the band themselves. Specifically, he wrote:
“Silversun Pickups avoid unpleasantness to such a great extent on Swoon that they rarely shift tempos or dynamics. They merely wallow in washes of sound, deriving equally from guitars and whispered vocals, never pushing forward, never achieving any sense of momentum, just glimmering in the sunlight. It's pleasant enough, particularly when the breathy vocals fade away to leave behind cascades of guitars, but even at its best, it's nothing more than an approximation of Smashing Pumpkins at their peak, with all the interesting parts stripped away.”
I totally disagree with this, and the second track on the album, “The Royal We,” totally proves me correct, for it is transcendental noise of the highest order. It’s got ugliness. It’s got tempo changes. It’s got loud fuzz and shimmering guitars and vocals that sound like sex. It’s got shifting dynamics. It’s got lyrics about drug addiction and overdosing. It’s got forward-pushing. It’s got momentum. It’s got all the stuff Stephen says it does not have. It starts with Silversun’s signature androgynous vocals, goes into a pumping cello-like guitar chug, layers in washes of feedback-laden fuzz, all while asking the listener, “How many times do you want to die?” over and over. But none of this really reaches the level of transcendental noise; that doesn’t happen until the second half. The thing about “The Royal We” is that it’s almost like two different songs. At the two-minute mark, the tempo shifts completely, which is something Stephen claims the band doesn't do, and then the song becomes something else entirely. Supposedly the song is about drug addiction, and the structure of the song is supposed to mirror a withdrawal-to-next-hit cycle, and it does this very well, because the beginning of the song is aggressive, nervous, impatient, “look over your shoulder,” then at 2:11, it’s like you just took a hit of whatever your drug of choice is: the song abruptly slows down, the guitars get dreamy, and it enters a second chorus, ending with the great, almost sing-song line of “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time,” at which point the music feels like a tunnel of noise or a rush of blood to the head, like you just shot up heroin or something, then it suddenly shifts back to a leitmotif from earlier in the song, weaving the original verses and first chorus into the structure of the second half of the music, which again is like an entirely different song in and of itself. Then it shifts back to the second chorus again, the “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time” part, but now the singer is literally shouting this at you for some reason, and the distortion is turned up to like a thousand, and then the druggy tunnel noise comes in again on top of it all as if you’re having an overdose or something, and then you die, figuratively. The way it drops sections, then brings them back, then drops them again, and then pulls back even older sections to top it all off is, in my opinion, genius songwriting. And the song isn’t good just because the structure is genius; it’s also catchy, melodic in a weird way, and super energizing. It’s a car song for sure, meaning you should listen to it while you’re driving because it just chugs along at this incredible motor-like pace even when it’s doing all the slow druggy stuff. The song asks, “How many times do you want to die?” And I guess I want to die over and over again because I have listened to it 55 times this week as of writing this, according to my Last.fm profile.
But “The Royal We” wasn't actually what I wanted to talk about with this entry. I actually don’t like describing music with the written word. I end up using the same phrases and adjectives and whatnot for every damn song. Maybe I just need to build up my vocabulary, learn some music theory or something. I’m not sure. I suspect that music and writing, being two of the great human arts, can only be truly captured through themselves. Writing can never be music, music can never be writing, and neither can hope to fully convey the greatness of the other. That’s my theory, or maybe my excuse.
Anyway. I wanted to kind of talk about Silversun Pickups, as I've been listening to this band since at least 2006, and I have some nostalgic memories linked to their music that I'd like to try to capture here, stuff involving Chuck E. Cheese and basically stealing a kid’s GameCube so that I could play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess the day it came out.
First, it must be noted, I was an incredibly late bloomer. I watched Blue’s Clues and lied about it to other kids until I was like 13. I had a Blue’s Clues game for my Mac back then, with the discs hidden in my closet, and one time during a sleepover a kid found it and ridiculed me harshly; I'm not bitter about this, it's just something that happened, to give you an example. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 18. And I hung on to Chuck E. Cheese until I was 16, making my grandma Susu drive me and my two good friends, Miles and Matt, to the pizza-arcade combo every winter and summer break when I visited her. I guess my thought process at that age was, since I had had some great times at Chuck E. Cheese as a younger kid, I would try to recreate some of that old magic as an older kid. I hung on to childhood for as long as the world would let me. And this is something I still do now: obsessively try to recreate feelings and situations long past, usually through video games and music and mood lighting. This is one of my core traits. I'm a nostalgic idiot, always have been, even during those peak nostalgia-forming years when you don’t really need to be. I just was. I started pining for the old days like ten years early. And Miles and Matt would indulge me; maybe they were nostalgic idiots too, as they always entertained my childish late-bloomer inclinations. But it should also be noted that I was a bit of a weird late bloomer, because between hiding Blue’s Clues discs and trips to Chuck E. Cheese, I was smoking cigarettes and having sex and doing all that dumb shit teenagers do, meaning I was not immune to the typical trappings of rebellious youth. I was very concerned about image and being “cool” on what I thought were my own terms, but there was always this background feeling of shame, hence why I’d do things like hide the Blue’s Clues discs. Despite the fact that I would tell myself and those around me that I didn’t care what people thought of me, I did in fact care about what people thought of me. I cared very, very much, although I tried hard not to, often to my own detriment, as I was very aloof and standoffish back then. Which is not super important here. What is important, however, is the music and the memories.
Back then, in 2006, Silversun Pickups was by no means my favorite band, but I had their album Carnavas on CD, and I loved the hell out of that album. Between the years 2006 and 2008, that album was a staple of car rides and just in-general hanging out. I used to have one of those black zip-up CD cases, like a CD binder thing, that held about a hundred CDs. Mine had a few band stickers on it, and I had painted the Smashing Pumpkins SP-heart logo thing on the front of it. I remember I would take the discs and album art booklets out of the CD jewel cases and slide them both into the CD binder’s sleeves so that if you were paging through the binder itself you’d only see the booklet with the cool cover art, meaning if you wanted to listen to one of the albums you’d have to dig your fingers behind the booklet a little bit to slide the CD out. I think each page had two sleeves, so if you had the binder fully open you’d see four albums at a time. And I had a lot of cool albums in there, or at least I thought so: I had the whole David Bowie discography in there, a lot of The Cure, all of The Smiths’ stuff, several Smashing Pumpkins records, Synchronicity and Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police, some Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless of course, Silversun Pickups’ Carnavas was in there, a few Cursive albums, and a whole bunch of burned CDs toward the back, because back then I pirated music like a career criminal. That CD binder kind of showcased my ever-evolving musical tastes as a teenager because I got the case from an FYE in the mall when I was like 12 years old and kept it well into my twenties at least. On the first few pages, you had The Cure and some shitty emo bands, which was the kind of stuff I was listening to at 12, and then, as you paged through the binder, the albums got progressively more varied and interesting or whatever. I think I had that CD binder for a little over ten years before it got lost in a move, or maybe I tossed it, I don’t exactly remember. But thinking about it now, it’s a damn shame that I lost it, because that binder is like a sacred relic of my youth, now lost in some landfill somewhere probably. It’s funny how, at a certain point, you look at something and say, “Oh, this thing? I don’t care about this anymore. I’m just going to toss it,” only to find out later that you cared a whole hell of a lot, you just didn’t know it at the time. I’m not trying to justify hoarding, by the way. Materialism is bad for the soul, they say, but in this case, screw that, this is a spiritual matter. I would fucking love to have that CD binder again.
Anyway, that CD binder would sit in the front seat of the car of whichever parental unit was responsible for me at the time back then: if I was back home for school, the case would be in my mom’s car; if I was staying with my grandma Susu during summer or winter break or whatever, it would be in her car; and so on. Back then, I demanded full control of the stereo of whatever car I found myself in, and neither my mom nor my grandma seemed to mind this; in fact, they liked most of my music, except for the heavy, grungier stuff, or anything with screaming, or stuff with audible curse words, but the music I listened to rarely had profanity, so that was never really a problem, and I often played the heavier stuff regardless of their protests, which meant some car rides were full of sighs and sullen looks, but I didn’t care because, one, I was a selfish teenaged brat, and two, I fucking loved music. Still do. I’m always searching for new music.
Back in the mid-2000s, finding new music wasn’t so different from how it is today, though honestly, it might have been better back then. Sure, you didn’t have music streaming services, but you did have Google Search, Wikipedia, Apple iTunes, Blogspot, The Pirate Bay, and a handful of encyclopedic sites dedicated solely to music, like Allmusic.com, a website that has been around for a long, long time. I’ve been browsing Allmusic.com since at least high school, but the site is even older than that, with it first going live in 1994. I remember, during computer lab or whatever, instead of doing schoolwork, I would just go to Allmusic.com, pull up my favorite band’s page, then go through each band listed under the “Related Artists” tab, all to find new music. I would pick new bands to listen to based on a few different factors, most of which superficial as hell. Do I like the band name? Do I like the album art? Are the people in the band attractive, unique, or cool-looking in some way? How obscure is this band? And so on. Once I found a band that seemed interesting, I would decide which album to listen to either by cover art or by the Allmusic rating, then I’d do a Google search that looked something like this: “‘Silversun Pickups’ ‘Carnavas’ ‘Download’ ‘Blogspot,’” and nine times out of ten, I would instantly find a zipped version of the entire album. Because back then, in the mid-2000s, Blogspot was a prime source of free music, probably the best source actually, at least for people in the know. I mean, you could use The Pirate Bay too, to download an entire band’s discography all at once, which was something I did quite often, but you couldn’t find some of the more obscure stuff on The Pirate Bay; for that, you needed to browse Blogspots dedicated to niche music scenes run by hardcore fans. Back then I even created my own Blogspot for music downloads, which you can find on the Wayback Machine, but it was eventually removed from the platform for promoting piracy. I guess at some point in the last decade or so Blogspot cracked down. Back then, I didn’t think too much about the morality of pirating and sharing music online; I just did it because I loved music and wanted to listen to as much music as possible. The thought that musicians needed money or whatever never really occurred to me, for I lived a very privileged white-person life, but I did make it a point to buy physical copies of albums I enjoyed, not for ethical reasons though, but because owning a physical copy made me feel less like a poser and more like a true fan; plus, having the original album booklet and CD to slip into my binder was infinitely cooler than an ugly Memorex CD-R with the band and album name poorly scribbled in Sharpie. The whole process of finding new music back then was exciting and fun for me; it felt different from how discovering new music feels today for some reason. I think finding new music back then actually felt more meaningful because today these streaming services just push new stuff to you constantly without you having to put in any real effort; new singles come out, you listen to them once, you move on to the next one, whereas back in the mid-2000s, you had to put in real effort to download a song, and because of that, you also spent more time with that song, giving you more time to appreciate it. I realize I sound like an old man in a rocking chair smoking a pipe going “back in my day” between fits of coughing or whatever. But back in my day, if I found an album that I really liked, I would listen to it for months, to the point that it colored that whole epoch of my life in the hindsight of my mind’s eye. But nowadays, I’m more inclined to just hit “next,” because there’s seemingly infinite music at my fingertips and I might be missing out if I don’t go go go. I think the easier something is to acquire, the less you might appreciate it. As a society, we seem to conflate instant gratification with instant satisfaction, but these two things are actually inversely related: the faster the gratification, the weaker and more fleeting the satisfaction. The music industry today does not understand this; they are only concerned with clicks and profits. They don’t even care if you actually listen to the music or use the product or whatever, as long as you click and maybe view an ad or two. So basically: Reject modernity, return to Blogspot and physical CDs and MP3 players and stuff, for your very soul may be at stake.
Anyway.
It was during that winter of 2006, when I was staying with Susu, that I was really big into Silversun Pickups’ album Carnavas. That album sort of colored that whole period for me. I must have been around 16 years old, I think. Susu drove this tan BMW that my mom had bought for her, and Carnavas never left that BMW’s CD slot. I had first heard Silversun Pickups on the radio earlier that year. The single “Lazy Eye” got heavy play on Top 100 rock radio throughout the year, which, in hindsight, is kind of surprising because it’s not the sort of song you’d typically hear on popular radio; it sounds sort of like The Smashing Pumpkins circa Siamese Dream mixed with the dreaminess of Slowdive’s Souvlaki or something, both of which, at the time, were albums I really enjoyed, which is probably why the song appealed to me. The song was pretty popular back then, I think they even included it in one of those Rock Band games or whatever. It starts softly with a pretty simple guitar line that has this little twang to it, then the drums kick in, then the vocals, which are androgynous and airy and nasally and weird, and it stays soft for a bit until eventually it gets into all this fuzzy guitar stuff before just exploding with anger for some reason, with the singer just screaming suddenly like you just cut him in line at the DMV or something, and the guitars turn up the distortion and scream right along with him; all this happens while a druggy noise-tunnel effect is going on, which I think is created in true shoegaze fashion using amp feedback fed through weird pedals, and this persists until the very end of the song, which ends almost exactly the same way it started, with that same simple twangy guitar line. The song is actually a lot like “The Royal We,” just more melodic and less structurally interesting. The first time I heard “Lazy Eye,” I wasn’t very impressed with it until it exploded; the contrast between the pretty and the ugly caught my attention, at which point I was like, “Yeah, OK, I get this. I’m down.” And so then I immediately bought the album and slid it into an empty sleeve in my CD binder, which, back in December 2006, was in Susu’s old BMW.
The car wasn’t old for its time, though. It was actually one of those newer BMWs. I think it was actually a 2006 BMW Series 5, and it was this tannish beige color. In my memory, it has a matte finish, but I know that couldn’t have been right. I remember the inside of the car smelled weird, like mustard almost, because despite being a healthy older lady who looked far younger than she actually was to the point where most people thought she was my mom, Susu was always going to KFC and keeping the sealed plastic mustard cups for some reason, stashing them in the car’s glove compartment alongside those plastic silverware packets and piles upon piles of KFC napkins, which she said she kept “just in case I need them some day,” but I’m pretty sure she never needed them some day, because all that stuff just kept piling up. On the dash, there was this pug dog bobblehead; she had put some of that double-sided tape on the bottom of it so it wouldn’t slide off while the car was moving. I think she actually got the dog from KFC, or maybe it was Burger King; it was a Men in Black II Kid’s Meal toy. It had a tan body and a massive wrinkled head with these great big bug eyes, and it was sticking its tongue out at me.
Whenever I rode in Susu’s car, I would imagine that pug bobbing his head to the music I was listening to, and back in 2006, during winter break, I was listening to Carnavas. I remember riding in the passenger seat, Miles and Matt in the back, Susu up front driving us to Chuck E. Cheese. The lines on the interstate blurred together, the trees were streaks of green, and the sun set orange and pink on the horizon like a distant forest fire. The song “Melatonin” was playing, so the inside of the car was like a shimmering sea of adolescent distortion. I remember Matt saying, “Is this The Smashing Pumpkins?” and I said, “No, this is Silversun Pickups,” and Miles said, “Same initials,” and I said, “Yeah, I didn’t realize that, cool,” and Susu said, “Can you please turn it down?” but I didn’t turn it down because we were now arriving at Chuck E. Cheese.
I don’t really remember what we used to do at Chuck E. Cheese when we were all 16 years old and didn’t really belong there. I remember the general stuff, like the pizza, which I actually enjoyed despite its cardboard consistency, and I remember the arcade area, filled with children who stood up at my thighs because at 16 I was 6’1”. The arcades back then had like three types of games: the big mechanical Rube Goldberg-like machines that you insert tokens into at just the right time so that they slide down the rail in such a way that they end up in the hole that rewards the highest amount of tickets; the sit-down shooters with two big plastic guns where you and a friend sit down and blast zombies or dinosaurs or whatever on a big screen in front of you using said plastic guns, which were usually orange for some reason; and then the skee-ball ones that give you like ten brown balls to roll up an incline into numbered holes, but I would just climb up the incline and put the balls in the best holes because why the hell not. I remember one of the Rube Goldberg-like games kept shouting STEP UP AND PLAY SIDEWINDER in a funny western-cowboy accent, and that one had a brown ball that you had to navigate across a bridge using a single handle without letting the ball fall off the side. And I remember this Simpson’s-themed one that you just put tokens into at the right time and they’d slide down a ramp into one of many holes on a revolving prize-wheel-like thing, with each hole giving a different number of tickets, and I remember getting so good at this one that I could time it perfectly to get the token into the best hole each time, and the thing would just spit out strips and strips of those perforated ticket strips, so many that some smaller kids would come up to me and be like, “Hey mister, can I get some of those tickets?” and sometimes I would give them some, sometimes I wouldn’t, depending on how I was feeling that day. I was always getting a bunch of tickets. Miles was too. But I don’t recall us ever exchanging them for anything. I guess that was never really the point.
I remember, after this particular visit to Chuck E. Cheese, we all went to the GameStop in the strip mall nearby. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess had literally just come out for the GameCube. This game was on my radar, but I didn’t have a GameCube anymore, having sold it a few months prior for PlayStation 2 stuff. But I really wanted Twilight Princess, so I bought the game without having a GameCube. Well, Susu bought it for me, with my mom’s credit card. I lived a very white life. I remember Miles was like, “How are you going to play that?” and I was like, “Doesn’t your brother Gavin have a GameCube?” and he was like, “Yeah, but he’s been using it to play Animal Crossing a lot lately,” and I was like, “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” and, about an hour later, there we are, in Gavin’s bedroom, staring at his GameCube. “Can I borrow it?” And Gavin was like, “What for?” And I of course said Twilight Princess. And he’s like, “But you don’t live here.” And I’m like, “I’m here for the next week, I’ll give it back before I leave.” And he’s like, “But I’m playing Animal Crossing.” And I’m like, “You can play Animal Crossing whenever; me, on the other hand, I have a very narrow window in which I can play Twilight Princess, and that window is literally right now and for the next seven days. So why don’t you be a pal and just let me borrow the GameCube?” There was a lot of sighing and eye rolling, but eventually Gavin handed over the GameCube. He was three years younger than Miles and I, and I got the impression that he wanted his brother and his brother’s friends to like him, so he was usually pretty agreeable. But this time he pushed back a bit more than normal, and he was even grumbling as I gathered up his grey GameCube and all the cords and controllers and whatnot and lugged it all out of his room, after which time I immediately went to Susu’s house and started playing.
During that winter break, my hair was messy and my sweaters were too big and I was staying in Susu’s garage and I was on prescription Adderall. Susu had converted the garage into a makeshift bedroom of sorts. I use the word “converted” loosely because the room was not insulated, the garage door could still be opened and closed, a number of bikes and lawn tools were still stored in the corner, all of Susu’s sewing stuff including her sewing machine was in there, and there wasn’t a real bed, just a box spring with a thin mattress on top of it; but I didn’t care about any of that because there was a big gray Magnavox CRT in there, and back then that was all I needed to call a place my home. I had Gavin’s GameCube hooked up to the Magnavox, and my PlayStation 2, too. I also had a CD-player-stereo thing by the fake bed, which I would use to play Carnavas whenever I wasn’t playing Twilight Princess, which I was playing a lot, obsessively in fact. From the moment I got the GameCube hooked up, I was spending upwards of like ten hours per day just playing Twilight Princess, eating only snacks and one big meal a day, usually Spiral Kraft Mac and Cheese that I would make myself in a very specific way because I was, and still am, insanely particular about my food. My hair was messy, my sweaters were too big, and Twilight Princess quickly became one of my favorite games ever; it was like Ocarina of Time, just with more stuff to do. There was this unlockable combat technique called Mortal Draw, with which you could one-shot basically any enemy in the game if you hit the A button right before they attacked you while you had Link standing still with his blade sheathed, and this was like the coolest shit I had ever done in a video game up to that point in my life. By the time the end of winter break came around, I was still playing Twilight Princess, trying to get all the heart pieces. So on the last day, when Susu had to drive me across state back to my mom’s house, I took Gavin’s GameCube with me and never gave it back. I don't know why I did that.
So yeah, that was what I had going on back then: Chuck E. Cheese, CDs, Twilight Princess, Adderall, Kraft Spirals, Messy Hair, Sweaters Too Big, Stealing, and Carnavas by Silversun Pickups.
“Silversun Pickups avoid unpleasantness to such a great extent on Swoon that they rarely shift tempos or dynamics. They merely wallow in washes of sound, deriving equally from guitars and whispered vocals, never pushing forward, never achieving any sense of momentum, just glimmering in the sunlight. It's pleasant enough, particularly when the breathy vocals fade away to leave behind cascades of guitars, but even at its best, it's nothing more than an approximation of Smashing Pumpkins at their peak, with all the interesting parts stripped away.”
I totally disagree with this, and the second track on the album, “The Royal We,” totally proves me correct, for it is transcendental noise of the highest order. It’s got ugliness. It’s got tempo changes. It’s got loud fuzz and shimmering guitars and vocals that sound like sex. It’s got shifting dynamics. It’s got lyrics about drug addiction and overdosing. It’s got forward-pushing. It’s got momentum. It’s got all the stuff Stephen says it does not have. It starts with Silversun’s signature androgynous vocals, goes into a pumping cello-like guitar chug, layers in washes of feedback-laden fuzz, all while asking the listener, “How many times do you want to die?” over and over. But none of this really reaches the level of transcendental noise; that doesn’t happen until the second half. The thing about “The Royal We” is that it’s almost like two different songs. At the two-minute mark, the tempo shifts completely, which is something Stephen claims the band doesn't do, and then the song becomes something else entirely. Supposedly the song is about drug addiction, and the structure of the song is supposed to mirror a withdrawal-to-next-hit cycle, and it does this very well, because the beginning of the song is aggressive, nervous, impatient, “look over your shoulder,” then at 2:11, it’s like you just took a hit of whatever your drug of choice is: the song abruptly slows down, the guitars get dreamy, and it enters a second chorus, ending with the great, almost sing-song line of “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time,” at which point the music feels like a tunnel of noise or a rush of blood to the head, like you just shot up heroin or something, then it suddenly shifts back to a leitmotif from earlier in the song, weaving the original verses and first chorus into the structure of the second half of the music, which again is like an entirely different song in and of itself. Then it shifts back to the second chorus again, the “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time” part, but now the singer is literally shouting this at you for some reason, and the distortion is turned up to like a thousand, and then the druggy tunnel noise comes in again on top of it all as if you’re having an overdose or something, and then you die, figuratively. The way it drops sections, then brings them back, then drops them again, and then pulls back even older sections to top it all off is, in my opinion, genius songwriting. And the song isn’t good just because the structure is genius; it’s also catchy, melodic in a weird way, and super energizing. It’s a car song for sure, meaning you should listen to it while you’re driving because it just chugs along at this incredible motor-like pace even when it’s doing all the slow druggy stuff. The song asks, “How many times do you want to die?” And I guess I want to die over and over again because I have listened to it 55 times this week as of writing this, according to my Last.fm profile.
But “The Royal We” wasn't actually what I wanted to talk about with this entry. I actually don’t like describing music with the written word. I end up using the same phrases and adjectives and whatnot for every damn song. Maybe I just need to build up my vocabulary, learn some music theory or something. I’m not sure. I suspect that music and writing, being two of the great human arts, can only be truly captured through themselves. Writing can never be music, music can never be writing, and neither can hope to fully convey the greatness of the other. That’s my theory, or maybe my excuse.
Anyway. I wanted to kind of talk about Silversun Pickups, as I've been listening to this band since at least 2006, and I have some nostalgic memories linked to their music that I'd like to try to capture here, stuff involving Chuck E. Cheese and basically stealing a kid’s GameCube so that I could play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess the day it came out.
First, it must be noted, I was an incredibly late bloomer. I watched Blue’s Clues and lied about it to other kids until I was like 13. I had a Blue’s Clues game for my Mac back then, with the discs hidden in my closet, and one time during a sleepover a kid found it and ridiculed me harshly; I'm not bitter about this, it's just something that happened, to give you an example. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 18. And I hung on to Chuck E. Cheese until I was 16, making my grandma Susu drive me and my two good friends, Miles and Matt, to the pizza-arcade combo every winter and summer break when I visited her. I guess my thought process at that age was, since I had had some great times at Chuck E. Cheese as a younger kid, I would try to recreate some of that old magic as an older kid. I hung on to childhood for as long as the world would let me. And this is something I still do now: obsessively try to recreate feelings and situations long past, usually through video games and music and mood lighting. This is one of my core traits. I'm a nostalgic idiot, always have been, even during those peak nostalgia-forming years when you don’t really need to be. I just was. I started pining for the old days like ten years early. And Miles and Matt would indulge me; maybe they were nostalgic idiots too, as they always entertained my childish late-bloomer inclinations. But it should also be noted that I was a bit of a weird late bloomer, because between hiding Blue’s Clues discs and trips to Chuck E. Cheese, I was smoking cigarettes and having sex and doing all that dumb shit teenagers do, meaning I was not immune to the typical trappings of rebellious youth. I was very concerned about image and being “cool” on what I thought were my own terms, but there was always this background feeling of shame, hence why I’d do things like hide the Blue’s Clues discs. Despite the fact that I would tell myself and those around me that I didn’t care what people thought of me, I did in fact care about what people thought of me. I cared very, very much, although I tried hard not to, often to my own detriment, as I was very aloof and standoffish back then. Which is not super important here. What is important, however, is the music and the memories.
Back then, in 2006, Silversun Pickups was by no means my favorite band, but I had their album Carnavas on CD, and I loved the hell out of that album. Between the years 2006 and 2008, that album was a staple of car rides and just in-general hanging out. I used to have one of those black zip-up CD cases, like a CD binder thing, that held about a hundred CDs. Mine had a few band stickers on it, and I had painted the Smashing Pumpkins SP-heart logo thing on the front of it. I remember I would take the discs and album art booklets out of the CD jewel cases and slide them both into the CD binder’s sleeves so that if you were paging through the binder itself you’d only see the booklet with the cool cover art, meaning if you wanted to listen to one of the albums you’d have to dig your fingers behind the booklet a little bit to slide the CD out. I think each page had two sleeves, so if you had the binder fully open you’d see four albums at a time. And I had a lot of cool albums in there, or at least I thought so: I had the whole David Bowie discography in there, a lot of The Cure, all of The Smiths’ stuff, several Smashing Pumpkins records, Synchronicity and Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police, some Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless of course, Silversun Pickups’ Carnavas was in there, a few Cursive albums, and a whole bunch of burned CDs toward the back, because back then I pirated music like a career criminal. That CD binder kind of showcased my ever-evolving musical tastes as a teenager because I got the case from an FYE in the mall when I was like 12 years old and kept it well into my twenties at least. On the first few pages, you had The Cure and some shitty emo bands, which was the kind of stuff I was listening to at 12, and then, as you paged through the binder, the albums got progressively more varied and interesting or whatever. I think I had that CD binder for a little over ten years before it got lost in a move, or maybe I tossed it, I don’t exactly remember. But thinking about it now, it’s a damn shame that I lost it, because that binder is like a sacred relic of my youth, now lost in some landfill somewhere probably. It’s funny how, at a certain point, you look at something and say, “Oh, this thing? I don’t care about this anymore. I’m just going to toss it,” only to find out later that you cared a whole hell of a lot, you just didn’t know it at the time. I’m not trying to justify hoarding, by the way. Materialism is bad for the soul, they say, but in this case, screw that, this is a spiritual matter. I would fucking love to have that CD binder again.
Anyway, that CD binder would sit in the front seat of the car of whichever parental unit was responsible for me at the time back then: if I was back home for school, the case would be in my mom’s car; if I was staying with my grandma Susu during summer or winter break or whatever, it would be in her car; and so on. Back then, I demanded full control of the stereo of whatever car I found myself in, and neither my mom nor my grandma seemed to mind this; in fact, they liked most of my music, except for the heavy, grungier stuff, or anything with screaming, or stuff with audible curse words, but the music I listened to rarely had profanity, so that was never really a problem, and I often played the heavier stuff regardless of their protests, which meant some car rides were full of sighs and sullen looks, but I didn’t care because, one, I was a selfish teenaged brat, and two, I fucking loved music. Still do. I’m always searching for new music.
Back in the mid-2000s, finding new music wasn’t so different from how it is today, though honestly, it might have been better back then. Sure, you didn’t have music streaming services, but you did have Google Search, Wikipedia, Apple iTunes, Blogspot, The Pirate Bay, and a handful of encyclopedic sites dedicated solely to music, like Allmusic.com, a website that has been around for a long, long time. I’ve been browsing Allmusic.com since at least high school, but the site is even older than that, with it first going live in 1994. I remember, during computer lab or whatever, instead of doing schoolwork, I would just go to Allmusic.com, pull up my favorite band’s page, then go through each band listed under the “Related Artists” tab, all to find new music. I would pick new bands to listen to based on a few different factors, most of which superficial as hell. Do I like the band name? Do I like the album art? Are the people in the band attractive, unique, or cool-looking in some way? How obscure is this band? And so on. Once I found a band that seemed interesting, I would decide which album to listen to either by cover art or by the Allmusic rating, then I’d do a Google search that looked something like this: “‘Silversun Pickups’ ‘Carnavas’ ‘Download’ ‘Blogspot,’” and nine times out of ten, I would instantly find a zipped version of the entire album. Because back then, in the mid-2000s, Blogspot was a prime source of free music, probably the best source actually, at least for people in the know. I mean, you could use The Pirate Bay too, to download an entire band’s discography all at once, which was something I did quite often, but you couldn’t find some of the more obscure stuff on The Pirate Bay; for that, you needed to browse Blogspots dedicated to niche music scenes run by hardcore fans. Back then I even created my own Blogspot for music downloads, which you can find on the Wayback Machine, but it was eventually removed from the platform for promoting piracy. I guess at some point in the last decade or so Blogspot cracked down. Back then, I didn’t think too much about the morality of pirating and sharing music online; I just did it because I loved music and wanted to listen to as much music as possible. The thought that musicians needed money or whatever never really occurred to me, for I lived a very privileged white-person life, but I did make it a point to buy physical copies of albums I enjoyed, not for ethical reasons though, but because owning a physical copy made me feel less like a poser and more like a true fan; plus, having the original album booklet and CD to slip into my binder was infinitely cooler than an ugly Memorex CD-R with the band and album name poorly scribbled in Sharpie. The whole process of finding new music back then was exciting and fun for me; it felt different from how discovering new music feels today for some reason. I think finding new music back then actually felt more meaningful because today these streaming services just push new stuff to you constantly without you having to put in any real effort; new singles come out, you listen to them once, you move on to the next one, whereas back in the mid-2000s, you had to put in real effort to download a song, and because of that, you also spent more time with that song, giving you more time to appreciate it. I realize I sound like an old man in a rocking chair smoking a pipe going “back in my day” between fits of coughing or whatever. But back in my day, if I found an album that I really liked, I would listen to it for months, to the point that it colored that whole epoch of my life in the hindsight of my mind’s eye. But nowadays, I’m more inclined to just hit “next,” because there’s seemingly infinite music at my fingertips and I might be missing out if I don’t go go go. I think the easier something is to acquire, the less you might appreciate it. As a society, we seem to conflate instant gratification with instant satisfaction, but these two things are actually inversely related: the faster the gratification, the weaker and more fleeting the satisfaction. The music industry today does not understand this; they are only concerned with clicks and profits. They don’t even care if you actually listen to the music or use the product or whatever, as long as you click and maybe view an ad or two. So basically: Reject modernity, return to Blogspot and physical CDs and MP3 players and stuff, for your very soul may be at stake.
Anyway.
It was during that winter of 2006, when I was staying with Susu, that I was really big into Silversun Pickups’ album Carnavas. That album sort of colored that whole period for me. I must have been around 16 years old, I think. Susu drove this tan BMW that my mom had bought for her, and Carnavas never left that BMW’s CD slot. I had first heard Silversun Pickups on the radio earlier that year. The single “Lazy Eye” got heavy play on Top 100 rock radio throughout the year, which, in hindsight, is kind of surprising because it’s not the sort of song you’d typically hear on popular radio; it sounds sort of like The Smashing Pumpkins circa Siamese Dream mixed with the dreaminess of Slowdive’s Souvlaki or something, both of which, at the time, were albums I really enjoyed, which is probably why the song appealed to me. The song was pretty popular back then, I think they even included it in one of those Rock Band games or whatever. It starts softly with a pretty simple guitar line that has this little twang to it, then the drums kick in, then the vocals, which are androgynous and airy and nasally and weird, and it stays soft for a bit until eventually it gets into all this fuzzy guitar stuff before just exploding with anger for some reason, with the singer just screaming suddenly like you just cut him in line at the DMV or something, and the guitars turn up the distortion and scream right along with him; all this happens while a druggy noise-tunnel effect is going on, which I think is created in true shoegaze fashion using amp feedback fed through weird pedals, and this persists until the very end of the song, which ends almost exactly the same way it started, with that same simple twangy guitar line. The song is actually a lot like “The Royal We,” just more melodic and less structurally interesting. The first time I heard “Lazy Eye,” I wasn’t very impressed with it until it exploded; the contrast between the pretty and the ugly caught my attention, at which point I was like, “Yeah, OK, I get this. I’m down.” And so then I immediately bought the album and slid it into an empty sleeve in my CD binder, which, back in December 2006, was in Susu’s old BMW.
The car wasn’t old for its time, though. It was actually one of those newer BMWs. I think it was actually a 2006 BMW Series 5, and it was this tannish beige color. In my memory, it has a matte finish, but I know that couldn’t have been right. I remember the inside of the car smelled weird, like mustard almost, because despite being a healthy older lady who looked far younger than she actually was to the point where most people thought she was my mom, Susu was always going to KFC and keeping the sealed plastic mustard cups for some reason, stashing them in the car’s glove compartment alongside those plastic silverware packets and piles upon piles of KFC napkins, which she said she kept “just in case I need them some day,” but I’m pretty sure she never needed them some day, because all that stuff just kept piling up. On the dash, there was this pug dog bobblehead; she had put some of that double-sided tape on the bottom of it so it wouldn’t slide off while the car was moving. I think she actually got the dog from KFC, or maybe it was Burger King; it was a Men in Black II Kid’s Meal toy. It had a tan body and a massive wrinkled head with these great big bug eyes, and it was sticking its tongue out at me.
Whenever I rode in Susu’s car, I would imagine that pug bobbing his head to the music I was listening to, and back in 2006, during winter break, I was listening to Carnavas. I remember riding in the passenger seat, Miles and Matt in the back, Susu up front driving us to Chuck E. Cheese. The lines on the interstate blurred together, the trees were streaks of green, and the sun set orange and pink on the horizon like a distant forest fire. The song “Melatonin” was playing, so the inside of the car was like a shimmering sea of adolescent distortion. I remember Matt saying, “Is this The Smashing Pumpkins?” and I said, “No, this is Silversun Pickups,” and Miles said, “Same initials,” and I said, “Yeah, I didn’t realize that, cool,” and Susu said, “Can you please turn it down?” but I didn’t turn it down because we were now arriving at Chuck E. Cheese.
I don’t really remember what we used to do at Chuck E. Cheese when we were all 16 years old and didn’t really belong there. I remember the general stuff, like the pizza, which I actually enjoyed despite its cardboard consistency, and I remember the arcade area, filled with children who stood up at my thighs because at 16 I was 6’1”. The arcades back then had like three types of games: the big mechanical Rube Goldberg-like machines that you insert tokens into at just the right time so that they slide down the rail in such a way that they end up in the hole that rewards the highest amount of tickets; the sit-down shooters with two big plastic guns where you and a friend sit down and blast zombies or dinosaurs or whatever on a big screen in front of you using said plastic guns, which were usually orange for some reason; and then the skee-ball ones that give you like ten brown balls to roll up an incline into numbered holes, but I would just climb up the incline and put the balls in the best holes because why the hell not. I remember one of the Rube Goldberg-like games kept shouting STEP UP AND PLAY SIDEWINDER in a funny western-cowboy accent, and that one had a brown ball that you had to navigate across a bridge using a single handle without letting the ball fall off the side. And I remember this Simpson’s-themed one that you just put tokens into at the right time and they’d slide down a ramp into one of many holes on a revolving prize-wheel-like thing, with each hole giving a different number of tickets, and I remember getting so good at this one that I could time it perfectly to get the token into the best hole each time, and the thing would just spit out strips and strips of those perforated ticket strips, so many that some smaller kids would come up to me and be like, “Hey mister, can I get some of those tickets?” and sometimes I would give them some, sometimes I wouldn’t, depending on how I was feeling that day. I was always getting a bunch of tickets. Miles was too. But I don’t recall us ever exchanging them for anything. I guess that was never really the point.
I remember, after this particular visit to Chuck E. Cheese, we all went to the GameStop in the strip mall nearby. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess had literally just come out for the GameCube. This game was on my radar, but I didn’t have a GameCube anymore, having sold it a few months prior for PlayStation 2 stuff. But I really wanted Twilight Princess, so I bought the game without having a GameCube. Well, Susu bought it for me, with my mom’s credit card. I lived a very white life. I remember Miles was like, “How are you going to play that?” and I was like, “Doesn’t your brother Gavin have a GameCube?” and he was like, “Yeah, but he’s been using it to play Animal Crossing a lot lately,” and I was like, “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” and, about an hour later, there we are, in Gavin’s bedroom, staring at his GameCube. “Can I borrow it?” And Gavin was like, “What for?” And I of course said Twilight Princess. And he’s like, “But you don’t live here.” And I’m like, “I’m here for the next week, I’ll give it back before I leave.” And he’s like, “But I’m playing Animal Crossing.” And I’m like, “You can play Animal Crossing whenever; me, on the other hand, I have a very narrow window in which I can play Twilight Princess, and that window is literally right now and for the next seven days. So why don’t you be a pal and just let me borrow the GameCube?” There was a lot of sighing and eye rolling, but eventually Gavin handed over the GameCube. He was three years younger than Miles and I, and I got the impression that he wanted his brother and his brother’s friends to like him, so he was usually pretty agreeable. But this time he pushed back a bit more than normal, and he was even grumbling as I gathered up his grey GameCube and all the cords and controllers and whatnot and lugged it all out of his room, after which time I immediately went to Susu’s house and started playing.
During that winter break, my hair was messy and my sweaters were too big and I was staying in Susu’s garage and I was on prescription Adderall. Susu had converted the garage into a makeshift bedroom of sorts. I use the word “converted” loosely because the room was not insulated, the garage door could still be opened and closed, a number of bikes and lawn tools were still stored in the corner, all of Susu’s sewing stuff including her sewing machine was in there, and there wasn’t a real bed, just a box spring with a thin mattress on top of it; but I didn’t care about any of that because there was a big gray Magnavox CRT in there, and back then that was all I needed to call a place my home. I had Gavin’s GameCube hooked up to the Magnavox, and my PlayStation 2, too. I also had a CD-player-stereo thing by the fake bed, which I would use to play Carnavas whenever I wasn’t playing Twilight Princess, which I was playing a lot, obsessively in fact. From the moment I got the GameCube hooked up, I was spending upwards of like ten hours per day just playing Twilight Princess, eating only snacks and one big meal a day, usually Spiral Kraft Mac and Cheese that I would make myself in a very specific way because I was, and still am, insanely particular about my food. My hair was messy, my sweaters were too big, and Twilight Princess quickly became one of my favorite games ever; it was like Ocarina of Time, just with more stuff to do. There was this unlockable combat technique called Mortal Draw, with which you could one-shot basically any enemy in the game if you hit the A button right before they attacked you while you had Link standing still with his blade sheathed, and this was like the coolest shit I had ever done in a video game up to that point in my life. By the time the end of winter break came around, I was still playing Twilight Princess, trying to get all the heart pieces. So on the last day, when Susu had to drive me across state back to my mom’s house, I took Gavin’s GameCube with me and never gave it back. I don't know why I did that.
So yeah, that was what I had going on back then: Chuck E. Cheese, CDs, Twilight Princess, Adderall, Kraft Spirals, Messy Hair, Sweaters Too Big, Stealing, and Carnavas by Silversun Pickups.
