eMusic Yearbook: 2004
Featured Album
James Joyce wrote that his weapons as an artist would be “silence, exile and cunning.” Silence isn’t generally useful for musicians, and cunning comes with the territory for anyone who wants to play the pop-music game of one-upmanship. In 2004, though, a lot of the best indie records latched onto exile as a weapon, or as a metaphor, or even as their central subject. The international political landscape had collapsed into a mess of lies, bombs and fear with a “Mission Accomplished” banner plastered over it; the technological and cultural context for music was changing so quickly that nothing about it seemed reliable any more. So underground musicians – whose place in culture was as unstable as it could be – had nothing left to do but run away.
In fact, the cornerstone of 2004′s biggest indie album, the Arcade Fire’s Funeral, is literally about geographic exile: “Haiti, mon pays/Wounded mother I’ll never see,” Régine Chassagne sings. “Neighborhood #2″ imagines a boy going on “a great adventure,” severing his ties with his family: “Our mother shoulda just named you Laika.” (Laika, the first dog in space, never came back, of course.) The rest of the album, for all its hopeful crescendos and yearning voices, is all about leaving, parting, separating from loved ones.
There wasn’t a lot of overt political dissent in the American indie music of 2004, because dissent at that particular moment felt useless. (The Thermals were probably as close as it got – “God And Country” found them declaring “Pray for a new state/Pray for assassination.”) As disaffected U.S. citizens started to mutter about moving to Canada in 2004, some of the best American indie songwriters seem to have been obsessing over the idea of physical exile, too. The Mountain Goats ‘album of that year announced in its title that We Shall All Be Healed and in the fine print of its lyrics that no healing of any kind was going to be happening. Its characters try to run away to Belgium, of all places. That doesn’t seem to work out; “Home Again Garden Grove” imagines a homecoming as a hideous defeat. The narrator of the final song begs “please don’t send me back to where I came from” — for him, that means prison, with its courthouse bus and orange jumpsuits.
But where do you go when you leave? You go out. The Fiery Furnaces ‘Blueberry Boat begins with “Quay Cur” — of course, it starts at the place where you get on a ship! – and by the time the song has ended, Eleanor Friedberger’s character has stowed away, sung a verse in pidgin Inuit, and declared that “I’ll never, never, never feel like I am safe again.” That’s only the beginning of the album’s hyperactive, restless globetrotting; if you went to all the places the album mentions in its lyrics, you’d have to paste extra pages into your passport.
The Hold Steady was started by a couple of Minneapolis bandmates who repatriated themselves to Brooklyn. Their ’04 debut, Almost Killed Me, circles restlessly around the idea of alienation and displacement, from its first line (“woke up in the ’20s”) to its last (“I remember we departed from our bodies/We woke up in Ybor City”). Craig Finn mentions place after place, locales across “this place they call the United States,” from “Hostile, Mass.” to “a war going down in the middle western states” to the West Coast, where kids are “screwing in the surf and going out to shows.” None of them are where he belongs, which is the point.
There are other kinds of exile, too – from musical tradition, from modernity, from the marketplace. A lot of 2004′s best independent records made a point of being alienated from everything else happening in indie-rock: Joanna Newsom’s tweaked, meditative, poetic The Milk-Eyed Mender; Xiu Xiu’s urgently uncomfortable Fabulous Muscles; Deerhoof finding the intersection point of children’s music and Captain Beefheart on Milk Man. Madvillain’s Madvillainy had pretty much the same stance with respect to the hip-hop scene: producer Madlib and rapper MF DOOM made a great rap record whose biggest shock was that it deliberately turned its back on the ongoing conversation of hip-hop.
Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, his brilliant mashup of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles ‘White Album, was a declaration of independence from the labels-and-discs system that had formerly been the only way music was distributed: it could never be legally released, and for a few months everybody seemed to be blasting it out of their windows anyway. M.I.A.‘s debut, a mixtape with Diplo called Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1, was another party-rocker that you couldn’t buy in stores, a brightly painted ATV held together with bits of Bangles and Clipse records and snatches of Brazilian baile funk. Maya Arulpragasam framed herself as a guerrilla sympathizer in exile, although when she sang “guerrilla” it sounded like “girly.” One of the most exciting things about Piracy at the time, though, was that it seemed totally stateless – it borrowed from dozens of traditions but didn’t particularly belong to any of them.
That sense of statelessness also turns up on one of the freshest indie-rock songs of 2004, the Avalanches ‘remix of Belle & Sebastian‘s “I’m a Cuckoo.” The original version, released the year before, was a comfortably sturdy song about vague discomfort by one of the most British bands alive; for the remix, the Australian group the Avalanches violently dislocated the arrangement, replacing the rock band with flutes, accordion, and the Southern Sudanese Choir. The style it ends up in doesn’t particularly have a name, or a geographic base. But it sounds like everybody’s having a good time. That year, that was the best anyone could hope for.
