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Instead of sleeping that night I revised my end of the conversation in my head over and over, a lifelong pastime I always rationalized as productive since the lessons could apply to future interactions, though that never seemed to happen.
I enjoyed myself despite a blooming awareness that I had no idea what I was doing.
Look, the song whispered to me, that day in my living room. Life can be so big.
It’s just that authenticity seems to me only one metric by which to judge music, and I don’t see why it should swallow all the other ones, including beauty and fun.
“If the rage is manageable now, it’s because of music,” he said. “Because of good music that made me feel okay, even when there was a monster inside of me.
“Jesus, what are you saying?” “I’m saying I like to argue when I drink,”
“This one is optimism,” I said. “Right,” Joe said. “The happiness of knowing that happiness is coming.”
I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable. Screw that, I thought, closing my laptop. I was a New Yorker now.
Living in New York made you feel heavy and lonely but full of promise,
I liked New York, I remember deciding in that moment. I liked working at home, then slipping out anonymously into a loud, churning world. It was just two different flavors of aloneness, but they complemented each other: when I had maxed out on solitude, the city made me feel observed and alive.
I felt a fleeting sense of being at home on this island, where it seemed I could find everything I needed—pianos, beer, a fresh blank page—for the mere cost of inserting myself into unwelcoming environments.
“Sometimes, you know, you’re with someone and you’re convinced that they have something to…to tell you…. So maybe nothing’s happening, but you keep telling yourself something’s happening. You know, innate communication. He’s just not saying anything. He’s moody or something. So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping, you know. And then, all of a sudden about four o’clock in the morning you realize that, flat ass, this motherfucker’s just lying there. He’s not balling me. I mean, that really happened to me. Really heavy, like slam-in-the-face it happened.
But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels somehow wrong—sad, almost—that it didn’t come from your own brain. Like if you had arrived at this expression yourself, you would have more effectively metastasized the emotions that made you love the song so much.
“Because you don’t know what he tastes like. When there’s nothing concrete to miss, that makes it easier to get over, in my experience.”
“It’s like September eleventh but fun,” which seemed like something that would never, ever be said again. It made me want to write a song, an inverse of “Bay Window,” about the specific camaraderie of New Yorkers in moments of anarchy.
Years later, the scene I had inhabited that night, and so many of my nights on the job, was christened “indie sleaze” by the internet. Entire Instagram accounts were devoted to remembering the era; I showed up in the flash-heavy photos occasionally, usually in the background with my giant backpack. Indie sleaze is remembered as an attitude—a fuck-it-all embrace of grimy fun—as well as a musical moment defined by the party-friendly indie acts of the aughts: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, M.I.A., CSS. This is accurate but incomplete, omitting the massive amounts of ’80s and ’90s Britpop those kids consumed
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But I wrote about how Britpop was everything that year. I wrote that only the English could capture the ironic humor, style, and detachment necessary for a young person to survive the aughts in America.
I went into the whole album, calling it the hipster manifesto of our time, On the Road for a generation who didn’t want to end up living in their parents’ basement like Kerouac. I wrote that it had taken a decade-old record to help us figure out what we wanted, and what we wanted was fun—real fun, which requires freedom, and belonging, and affordable housing, and peace from wartime. The Bush years were ending, I wrote; you could feel it on the dance floor.
Hey not sure if you’ve heard but I have a life, I wanted to write.
It was hard to know where the dancing ended and the waiting for a drink began; some people appeared to be doing both.
The Why: always the golden question. If marketers could understand why kids liked Arcade Fire, they figured, they wouldn’t have to pay for the rights to an Arcade Fire song in their ads; they could commission their own knockoff version for similar effect. They wouldn’t have to buy up small-batch distilleries; they could capture the essence of Arcade Fire in a brand, slap the label on a bottle of generic rotgut, and stick it on the shelf next to Grey Goose. The Why was where the real money was.
It was hard to know what kind of greeting would be appropriate for a history like ours.
