Dark was the Night

“Our main gripe with Wynton is his self-serving rhetoric about what constitutes jazz. As he erupted on the scene in the ’80s, Marsalis gained an unprecedented bully pulpit through the media and his association with Lincoln Center. He used this power to redraw the boundaries of the entire genre, declaring that only acoustic music that swung was actually jazz. This argument was plain insane, but a surprising amount of otherwise intelligent people bought it. The result was that generations of jazz giants such as Sam Rivers, Marion Brown, and Cecil Taylor were denied work – and worse, their music was derided and further marginalized.

It’s been widely pointed out this is analogous to how Ronald Reagan redrew the political map during the same period. Reagan espoused a bogus return to “traditional values,” and effectively used this term to belittle opponents and consolidate power for himself and his cronies. Wynton similarly used his curatorial duties at Lincoln Center to provide work for his colleagues and only allowed institutional legitimacy to trickle down to those who met his favor.”

The D:O dudes bring their 80s jazz retrospective to its conclusion with a consideration of the decade’s biggest benefactor, for good and for ill. There’s much more to read and hear over there, but this particular passage sums up so much. Really, this sort of reading is applicable to the ideological gates necessary to pass through on the way to entering the canon of any era, of any form of music.

It made me think for a minute about where indie rock is right now, particularly with the impending release of 4AD/Red Hot’s Dark Was the Night 2CD volume. It’s first and foremost a charity endeavor, and the lineup they’ve assembled is impressive, and bound to raise a ton of money for AIDS research. I know already of several non-geek friends who’ll be getting it as a gift this year (they’re previewing new songs every day pre-release on Myspace, btw).

But it’s impossible for me– mainly because of Red Hot’s involement– to think about this compilation without thinking of another of the group’s curated CDs of fringe-mainstream music, released about 15 years ago. I got No Alternative (along with Loveless) for Christmas in 1993 as a gift from my step-brother (who’s now in this band, plug). Looking back at the tracklist, man. I’m certainly looking at the collection through the dewy mists of nostalgia, but the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Glynis,” the Breeders’ live version of “Iris,” Nirvana’s “Verse Chorus Verse,” the live version of the Beastie Boys’ “It’s the New Style,” Pavement’s R.E.M. tribute “The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence,” and best of all Uncle Tupelo’s incendiary cover of CCR’s “Effigy” are among the best stuff any of those bands ever recorded, and only served to further push me away from my waning fandom for West Coast hip-hop and toward the Alt-Nation (it’d be a year or two before Loveless hit me really really hard, through a cloud of bong smoke in my freshman-year dorm single).

No Alternative was a fund-raiser first, but it was also a great snapshot of where guitar rock stood at the time; the DIY-ish American 80s were a faint memory after the post-Nirvana major label land-grab, with Straitjacket Fits and the Verlaines, repping Flying Nun, adding a nice bit of context and “history” to the proceedings. The mix felt eclectic, most of all; especially for an era when eclecticism was far from the default mode of music enjoyment it is today.

Which is where I come back to Dark is the Night, released when eclectic listening practices are the default mode, even for casual listeners, and there’s more independently released music, of different, exciting varieties, than ever before. Then, I ask, why does Night, with a few exceptions, feel so, I don’t know, safe if not a bit timid? The performers:

I’m not trying to infer that No Alternative’s lineup is any more diverse or eclectic than Dark’s as a straight-up comparison (it’s not). What I am doing is accounting for inflation, more or less–the exponential increase in new, diverse acts, the incredible diversification of possibilities for publicity and discovery–and noticing that this list is indicative of what’s risen to the top.

There’s no one person who creates canons nowadays, but the same tendency still holds. Just like the way that Marsalis was dialoguing with Reagan-era conservatism and traditionalism in constructing a new canon for jazz in the 80s, the myriad of publications and Web venues that pick and choose from the (again, exponentially-increased and variegated) orchard of independently-released music are drawing on the same tendencies that made superstars out of Neil Young, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, etc. in the early Seventies, the first point in pop and rock when the market, and the music, exploded.

What I’m implying is the existence of a latent market that hasn’t ever gone away for pop music: folky, singer/songwritery, even occasionally jammy music. Intimate, organic, traditional-feeling music. It’s the reason that, out of 2008–one of the most fragmented years for music in recent memory–Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver emerged as the two breakthrough artists, growing through the cracks caused by intense vote-splitting. They’re the two who represented sepia-toned American “values” and aesthetics most clearly; who, as “indie” artists, gave casual music fans a safe alternative to digging too deeply in the stacks, while retaining a soupçon of hipness. And artists who fit perfectly with the overriding aesthetic of Dark Was the Night, which, love it or leave it, is a perfect snapshot of where indie in the 00s is, on the verge of the next decade (and when the current year’s consensus album might well be the one that emerged from folk and has gradually eliminated guitars altogether).

The music that’s risen to the top from the indie underground been called “indie-yuppie,” it’s been castigated for its overwhelming whiteness, and within it, there is more than plenty of great art. But where it comes from–the desires of a purchasing public, the bottom lines of label owners and taste-makers–is most certainly nothing new. But thankfully, the spirit and dynamic homogenization it relies upon is finally being leveraged for a great political cause.