Month: July 2018

The Negro Problem
Post-Minstrel Syndrome
1997, Aerial Flipout

One of the reasons why I stopped collecting records is because music, for the most part, stopped contributing anything to my life that I needed.

That’s not a criticism of music. That doesn’t mean that I dislike music now. Music didn’t fail me. I just stopped needing it.

I still hear things, new and old, that I like all of the time. I’m still married to a few longtime favorites (see my Robert Pollard series, for example). I’m also not an old crank who jerks off to the bands he loved twenty years ago and shuns anything new. (A lot of the new indie rock I hear is just as good, maybe even better, than what I came up with in the 90s; I like that they often embrace the synthesizer sounds of the 80s, which 90s indie bands naturally tended to avoid.)

We all follow our own paths and on mine these days I rarely put on music as a voice that I need to hear. Looking back, music was often a balm for my daily depressions. It got me through problems with relationships and jobs and self-loathing. It calmed my nerves and provided comfort, as well as a very real endorphin rush when I’d spend a little too much money on it at a record store counter.

These days, I still get the daily depressions, but now I consider it my responsibility alone to get myself out of it. I need to move and think and write and crack jokes. Other people’s music can’t help anymore. Other people usually can’t even help anymore. It’s all on me.

Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #4: THE NEGRO PROBLEM, Post-Minstrel Syndrome”