My Band is the Resurrection

Journal sielwolf's Journal: My Band is the Resurrection 8

Journal by sielwolf on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @10:06PM

My band is your favorite. But that isn't important. My band is your girl's favorite, the one her hand will hover over in the car for a moment, then return to the wheel. She'll drive, eyes on the road, and begin to sing along without noticing. You watch the buildings or the fields or the brown cobble beaches pass by.

A few years ago you heard my band was your favorite band's band. My band wasn't your favorite (yet) and though we where more contemporaries of your favorite band you could still see the influence there. You had our first album then, the first big one actually. Our first single was all around you, everywhere but you didn't notice. My band had a leak online or a free iTunes B-side or a prominent part in a mix on a podcast that you heard and that few seconds gripped you. You knew right away it was us though a part of you naively wondered if that other band might have leapt instantly forward in a great progression. But that wasn't the case. Now you don't listen to them anymore. After a point you found them dry, uninteresting, distasteful. My band was the realness. It took a big wet diarrhea on all thos ersatz LPs and let them drowned in it. Listening to all the others was to get what you wanted pawned second-hand.

My band is alone at the top of your list. You don't admit as much. You just like playing indecisive with your girl. "I don't know," you say. "I really don't have a favorite anything." But you do. And my band is that shit. Maybe someday you'll tell her. But now you're having too much fun.

My band gets begrudging respect from that bartender. One or another of my band's songs gets tabbed on the jukebox. Not just the studio releases but a couple old demos repackaged with covers are on there. Some of the waiters did it and no one stopped them. My band has crossed over and for once the hipsterati don't pull anchor. The bartender leans over the tap and declares that he prefers this other band. Of course he has to qualify it considering how that band he mentioned is obviously indebted to my band and this other band has even said as much. But he repeats it: he prefers someone else. He doesn't sound convincing. When he doesn't look you in the eye you see he hasn't convinced himself of it yet. You chalk it up to boredom and devil's advocacy. You find your girl in the crowd and hand her her drink. She begins to talk but you really aren't listening to her; this bridge in the song, right- here, is the fucking best.

Two weeks before the new album drops my band gets the cover treatment from the Wire. A week later they're featured in Vice and Spin. My band makes a great interview. Everyone seems ecstatic to just talk to us. My band's samples (which no one else has heard) has them wildly excited. The articles are fun. They are about music, movies, topics at large. My band sounds happy to be there, gracious for our place in the greater lore of human sound and all the periodicals are happy to oblige with inkjizz.

My band gets great reviews. When everyone was biting the Velvets, my band was continuing from Television. When everyone breathlessly rediscovered Bryan Ferry, my band had already covered "Love is a Drug" on our very first garage demo. When PFM interviewed Broadcast about the Wall of Sound, my band came up as did our meticulous reverence for old Lesley Gore vinyl. My band is the new Gershwins. My band is the next Jacksons. My band is the heir to Frank Zappa. My band belongs in the National Archives and Alan Lomax should have recorded it. It is lamented that John Peel isn't alive to hear it (though they did find a CD-R in his car that had just four songs on it. Our track had been left on repeat. He had never gotten to track four).

When the next release came out Jack White played it endlessly from a cassette deck on the set of Jim Jarmusch's new film. The Dungeon Family remixed the basslines and gave them out for free on their website. The Heatmakerz wish they came up with the idea first. The third song is an instrumental which became the most popular riddim in London. My band gave the go ahead for Greensleeves to release a compilation of the versions. The compilation went gold. Grime MCs destroyed it on laptops in Bristol. News stories recorded the world's biggest soundclash in Jamaica where two deejays battled endlessly over it for five straight hours. Producers interpolated it on old 808's in Lagos and Addis Ababa. Some laptop commander in Osaka chopped and screwed it becoming an overnight sensation. My band split a white label with him which became the hottest platter in every club in Berlin.

My band has the top three singles of the year. My band sells over 20 million records. My band is in every chart but you don't mind because it hasn't started showing up in ads for Carnival Cruise Lines or trailers for shit Rob Schneider movies. My band is on every end of the year top album list. My band is #4 in an NME list of the top British bands even though we aren't British. My bands songs are used in five national elections in South America. All the candidates win except for one in Guyana. He lost when his competitor switched to an old standard of ours in the closing weeks.

You go to my band's show. You are wondering what to expect because you've hear so many stories. My band has been touring for over a year. Four times around the globe, 285 shows (including three on New Year's). My band performed at the MTV Europe Awards, a performance which become one of the most downloaded clips on Youtube. By the end of the week all the other MTV stations had it in their regular video line-ups. My band wouldn't give the rights to Murray-Burim to have it featured in The Real World. But they got around it by having one of the castmembers "accidentally" tune to it in their SUV.

My band's performance is like nothing else you've seen. Big shows, little shows. My band doesn't have any encores. My band ends our show and then comes out onto the floor and we take requests from the audience and do an acoustic set. My band's preperation included a set incognito at the Whiskey in LA. You hear that was like this but at least forty times better. You are exhuasted, elated. You want to evangelize. You wake up the next morning to see your girl sitting at the foot of the bed holding her ticket stub. You too get up to make sure last night had been real.

The world goes on. Life evolves. We, you, go to the dirt. Yet my band is forever young, new to generation after generation. Wars, governments, peace, science. My band goes from music to legend to myth. The sun dims, life starves, humanity is forgotten. The cosmos ponders this and decides that, because of my band, our struggle hadn't been in vain.

You can't explain it what it is. My band has no guitars, no drums. No bass, no keyboards. No 1200's, no MPCs, no 808s, no 303s. My band has backup singers: two young women in matching outfits that are styled differently so you can tell them apart. Neither sings. They are high up off to the right of the stage. They slink their hips side to side on the pistons of their legs. They never stop; they dance in place endlessly. My band has a 128 channel mixing board that goes unmanned.

On the stage there is a single microphone of perfect brushed silver. Out over the crowd, from way overhead, a single spotlight falls on the microphone. This light is impossibly brilliant. You can see the dust and the heat from the packed bodies captured in its radiance. You'd think that standing under it would blind you. To look down and away and that the light would penetrate right through your skin and bone and burn the eyes from your head. The stage is empty except for this microphone and this light. There is silence. From the crowd, from the stage, from everywhere. It is a hush low and complete. The hush is deafening. All sound seems to be pulled to the horizon and disappear from existence. All sound is killed. There is nothing but the silence; it's loud roar all about you. In it there is a sound. That sound is everything you've at once experienced and imagined you've heard. Every sound in your head. All at once in a single sharp squarewave of noise. My band is everything you have ever heard and the absence of all else. Everything is compressed down to this one moment.

*bam* this DJ just saved your fucking life.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.