Spring will arrive Chicago. I promise it will get here.
I get a lot of crap from my friends for my unrepentant winter-boosterism and fairly so, but everyone knows that the best part of a good Midwestern winter is how much sweeter it makes the spring.
There's something so completely and utterly-joyful about the first warm, sunny day after a long winter. When the grass is still brown and the trees bare but the air tells you that better things are coming. If there were a way to bottle the feeling of walking around in a tee shirt for the first time, it would be the hottest thing since sliced crack.
"When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis
Famously Jeff Tweedy didn't go into the Mermaid Avenue sessions with Billy Bragg too excited about the prospect of recording old material. He felt that there wasn't much relevance in reclaiming songs about fascists and union marches from the Great Depression. He felt that Woody was more than that and that living in the past would do him a disservice. As a child of Bush II, of Abu Gharib and "enhanced interrogation", of the Family Research Council and American apartheid, basically someone who came of age under Reagan II and has seen far too little rollback since, I have always strongly gravitated towards messages in those songs that Tweedy sees little reason for.
Elvis Costello never said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", despite what you may have heard. I'm glad too, because although many of music's joys are ineffable, that's no reason not to try to put them into words. Michael Azerrad knows this better than most people, as the author of Our Band Could Be Your Life, the seminal history of the "post-punk" or "alternative" or "D.I.Y." or "whatever name you care to give it" movement of brash, independent and unfiltered music that bubbled up around the country during the 1980's before jumping the charts in 1992 (to very mixed results).
The subtitle of Azerrad's book is "Scenes From The American Indie Underground" and it's not unfair to say that the bands chronicled in this book functionally started the musical genre that is now ubiquitously and unhelpfully referred to as "indie rock." Of the 13 bands profiled only one, Sonic Youth is still going. A few such as Mission of Burma, Big Black, the Butthole Surfers and even the Replacements have reformed (although the latter was a two song, studio-only affair). But the influence they project onto the scene today is almost incalculable.
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