Sometimes I ask music historian Andy Zax about music-biz stuff, and every time it’s entertaining. Our talk below took place in July of 2012; I was working on a piece about multiartist compilations when we got into talking about licensing, a fairly narrow topic he knew firsthand and well. It sheds some light, as well, on the changes in the music business over the last twenty years.
The internet was a pretty magical place to find yourself in the late ’90s and early ’00s. So many people did so many weird and creative things as they explored this new medium, trying to figure out what it was, trying to determine what it would be. It was like a speakeasy, or a door under the stairs that led to an entirely other world. For many people it was scary, an unknown thing they were happy to not understand. But for a certain set of people, it was a new home.
Twenty-three years ago I became a woman, in a way. This advent of femininity did not happen in a decorated ballroom or at a presentation about “protection” presented by the school nurse; it happened at a hockey arena on Hempstead Turnpike in Uniondale, New York, during the first rock concert of my lifetime. Because during this night—on which Warrant and Mötley Crüe played—I got to see Tommy Lee’s butt for the first time.
As members of ’90s emo band Texas Is The Reason slowly walked out of the dark to their instruments at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, you could hear the dense, spiderwebbing guitars of their one instrumental, “Do You Know Who You Are?,” issue from the speakers in neat overhead streams. The stage was traced with small circular lights, as if powered by tiny, diminished suns. During their two-show 2006 reunion, the band were enhanced by dynamic, interweaving spotlights; this setup felt as if they were consciously creating a new environment, tended by warmth.
Guitarist Norman Brannon played the opening chords of “Antique”: a few drifting chords that seem very near one another, that feel naturally related, like bodies of water. Garrett Klahn sings in one note that sounds painfully excavated; it resembles a stream pushing gravel. All of the band’s music has a watery aspect, actually—each song gives off the sense that it will feed into a larger or smaller embodiment of itself.
Why is looking back so popular in 2013, when we’re supposedly living in the future?