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Once I had my heroes

By George Chen

MUSICAL EMBARRASSMENTS SURROUND me when I go back to my parents' house. There is a dusty cardboard box that has cutouts from back when Leopold's in Berkeley stood where Tower Records is now. There's a Blow Monkeys 12-inch in there – unopened, mind you, but still: at some point this made sense as a gift item. I have some ungodly ska paraphernalia, which I dream of eBaying one day when the mortification fades. Nostalgia does not seem to fit the semantic bill for my personal issues with these items. How about an eerie resonance of past potentials unfulfilled, alternate timelines that spring out of old objects and locales? Ghosts of past selves with bad taste.

This last week has seen a flurry of those past selves swarming around me. I get distressed by some of them, like being on the campus where I'm trying to get readmitted for school after many years. Some pieces of the past are comforting, like seeing Mission of Burma at the Fillmore. This was a reunion I never counted on but always felt a need for. When bands like Television and Wire started reforming I thought, "Why not Burma instead of Bow Wow Wow?" The answer was obvious: Roger Miller had tinnitus and would never play loud guitar rock again, or so they said. What a mysterious curse, I thought, to have the noise of your old band forever ringing in your ears even as you tried to move on.

The anticipation level was high, even though the cavernous Fillmore made the whole experience somewhat impersonal. Space didn't make a dent in the enthusiasm level – words were mouthed, fists pumped in the air, and the band played fantastically. It fell short of what I needed, which was something to take me outside of my life in that instant. That might not be your requirement for a show, but it was what I wanted that night. When you've waited a lifetime for something, getting it can be anticlimactic. Still, I was happy, and there was no way that anyone who had been a fan could have been disappointed by their performance. I sang along and even did the stupid hand gestures of the longhair in front of me, clapping his hands to the slow songs like he was his own Coors commercial. It was annoying but, ultimately, forgivable.

The band that played right before them, Silkworm, were less well received. That might be an understatement: they had to talk down a few hecklers who were not having it. I had trouble explaining to the people I was with how, once upon a time, their In the West and Libertine albums were just as important to me as Burma's and how the departure of Joel Phelps marked the end of an era. "No, their early stuff was really good," I responded to a friend dismissing them as Built to Spill and Pavement knockoffs. "They were around at the same time as those bands." It didn't much help the argument, only reinforcing Silkworm's reputation as also-rans, the deadpan Dukakis of indie rock. My interest in the genre has been usurped by other passions, so even I found the samey-sounding Fillmore set a bit of a lag, with a rote formula played efficiently. I wanted to support the band's endurance, though. I tend to side with the underdog. I am a sucker for movies in which someone's father is a tollbooth worker – a clichéd signifier for "I gotta get out of this town" class struggle, Hollywood shorthand for a loser with heart. I tend to like bands that break up before they even record, let alone put out a substantial discography. Silkworm have no drama to speak of, and they have weathered a boom and crash in their sliver of market share. It's a market that is terribly fickle and makes longevity seem awful lonely.

Take for example a recent review of Sonic Youth in the Village Voice. A young scribe named Amy Phillips calls for "sonic euthanasia," pleading with the band to break up based on its latest album, Murray Street. It's hard to follow her argument, though, because it doesn't seem to be a review of Murray Street. It's about how Sonic Youth used to mean something to her in high school and how everything they've done since 1995 is a letdown. The flurry of letters this review inspired are pretty amusing. Byron Coley writes, "Is it my imagination or is Amy Phillips's review a rewrite of a Gina Arnold review from four years ago? Phillips's review shares the same general tone of a woman wronged by her youthful enthusiasms."

The piece is amazing in its brazen dismissal and simultaneous canonization of S.Y., as well as for its affected Valley Girl-speak, describing songs as "tiny ships in a sea of okayness." In a way, it is the same smart/stupid move that kept Arnold in the papers for years – she developed a loyal following that picked her writing apart. Stirring up controversy is a simple, effective way to gain readers, but the arguments being made don't hold outside of Phillips's subjective experience. Pleading with Sonic Youth to break up is an unnecessary overreach. Besides, it's like asking Lou Reed to break up, or Paul Westerberg. What no one seems to have told Phillips is that your heroes inevitably fail you, especially those formed in that extended limbo between adolescence and adulthood. The band's entire body of work is treated as an identity that the writer tried on and discarded after its cool cache had reached an expiration date. Artists do not owe their audience anything, which is a tough idea to get around as art can be an intensely personal experience. It merely attests to the power of their work that we do make heroes out of them.

Sonic Youth as an entity is fallible, to be sure, but so is everything you believe in when you are young. Not to harp on the age thing too much, but if Phillips, who by my rough math is between 21 and 23, feels let down by Sonic Youth, she has a load of disappointment ahead of her. While I am not much older, I feel a generation gap – or, since generations don't seem to mean anything anymore, a microcosmic cultural gap. I may have been disappointed with the output of EMF or Jesus Jones, but I shudder to think what lies in store for the younger crop of music fans that suckle at the teat of the Strokes, International Noise Conspiracy, or Smash Mouth. The Sonic Youth legacy should be looking pretty damn stellar compared to what this lot will come up with in their forties.

Mission of Burma's back catalog could survive the taint of Moby covers because they spared themselves the chance to become played out. My friend from Boston said he grew up with them on the radio, the way those of us from the Bay Area grew up with Journey. I wish I could say that I had been hip to Burma in high school, or elementary school, and that it meant something about how cool I'd been back in the day. In all honesty, I made the mistake of using a Mission of Burma flexidisc as a last-minute secret-Santa gift mandated by my seventh grade class. The recipient laughed at it and crumpled it into a ball. I don't remember what I received that Christmas, but I don't think anything could replace that.

Amy Phillips, I would not be so condescending as to tell you to please give up writing because, as with my longhaired, fist-pumping beer-commercial friend, I'm in a forgiving mood. You needed attention and you got it. Congratulations. If you want to outlast your own expiration date, show us what it means to really love something and accept that it will disappoint you anyway.