Daily Breakdowns 006 - Losing My Edge

It's not a good start to one's fortieth birthday when he forgets to be the Tooth Fairy.

Actually, this is the second day in a row. My daughter pulled her own tooth out on Sunday, and before I could stop her, blasted the faucet on the tooth in the palm of her hand to clean it, sending it down the drain. Even after taking the pipe off, it was nowhere to be found, so her grandmother, visiting this week, suggested a note to the Tooth Fairy about what happened, signed by all of us. Great idea. But Sunday night my daughter fell asleep on the couch and we forgot to put the note under the pillow. Fair enough.

Last night, both of us fell asleep on the couch. I woke up about 12:30 and left her there as I stumbled off to bed. I didn't fall asleep right away and could here her coming to her room after 1:00. I didn't think about getting any money in there until I woke up again about 6:30, and she was already awake and sad. I told her it could be that the Tooth Fairy was busy last night, or maybe you have to be in bed before midnight, but of course I regret the Tooth Fairy rules getting more and more complex for a six year old.

This leads me, a little awkwardly, to something I'd planned on writing about today, anyway, which is the childlike faith, and childish expectations, we place in and on our artists. This sprang from a post by Tim O'Neil on his blog, The Hurting about the band Wilco and how, since he hadn't liked their last two CDs, was ready to drop them. I commented on this, because it resonated with me not only because Wilco is one of my favorite bands (and yes, the new CD is, I think, one of their weaker efforts), but because of the obvious disappointment and, well, hurting on the part of O'Neil. It reminded me of myself at various times in the past, when a band I loved such as New Order, Echo & The Bunnymen, Squeeze or The Cure faltered with a respective album. Their music spoke to me and I trusted them to keep doing it, keep in line with what I needed to hear at the moment, and suddenly we were out of step. It feels like kind of a betrayal. How dare you try to become more commercial, or write more love songs or soccer anthems or have that lame producer do a dull remix of you single? How dare your b-sides start to really sound like b-sides and not great songs that could have fit on the album?

Wilco, despite not being a big, chart-topping band, have a lot of credibility (as Tim notes, they're often considered an artistic counterpart to Radiohead, as R.E.M. was to U2 in the '80s and early '90s), they are a well-documented band, with several documentary/concert films depicting not only the strength of their live performance but the changes in personnel and the change in frontman/songwriter Jeff Tweedy from substance abuser to apparently happy, clean, suburban rocker dad/husband.

This gets to one of the problems of fandom, in that we all have our favorite eras of an artist or band, but seem to resent when that era ends and the artist/band naturally moves on to try to do something else that interests them. We want rich musicians, or filmmakers, or comics creators, to continue to be as experimental, or angry, in their 30s and 40s and they were in their 20s. Everything involved with U2's Pop album and tour was seen by many longtime fans as an affront to them, even a betrayal, as U2 weren't supposed to like techno and glam and have a sense of humor and theater; they were supposed to write anthems and wave flags around and make speeches. The internal and external tensions involved in Wilco's recording of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot resulted in excellent music, but those tensions could not be duplicated, nor could anyone reasonably expect Tweedy to want to repeat them. Basically, for better or worse, the guy is making the music he wants to make, with musicians with whom he's comfortable. It may very well be that more interesting music could arise from a different band member or producer with different sensibilities than Tweedy's, but that's the way it is, right? Whether it's a band or a website or your office job, sometimes you have to go with what's easier to deal with every day than fraught dynamics that may produce startling work if you don't kill each other. What one has to realize is that every artist who does meaningful work--who earns a following because that work resonates with the audience--is bound to eventually do work that confounds, disappoints or even infuriates that audience. I much prefer electric Bob Dylan to the folk-era Bob Dylan, as some may have only come around to him since his '90s comeback that draws more on the blues and Tin Pan Alley traditions.

I want to get into this further tomorrow, especially as it relates to comics, but hey, it's my birthday, and I'm getting a massage.

Christopher Allen
August 18th, 2009