Near to the Wild Heart of Life picks up nearly eight years later, and it’s just as personally disruptive as its nominal nihilist cousin. I loved it and hated it at the same time. My personal relationship with it was, then, personally commemorative of a jettisoned inanimate lust. Japandroids’s first album, Post-Nothing, arrived at a liminal time I had not yet fully divested myself of my awareness of, and obsession with, the rock tradition. The rendering of autobiographical sketch and political confession of faith is here due in part to the fact that I was introduced to Japandroids at that very adolescent moment: right as I was first exorcising the albatross of a previous rockist text, one that had managed to dominate much of my teenage years - and still, in a historical way, influences me. “The future’s under fire / The past is gaining ground / A continuous cold war between / My home and my hometown” Which begs the question, was it ever, really? It rather lies in a fact that resonates, I think, with people of a similar age and background: that most rock music just isn’t revolutionary, or rather, participatory for me anymore. It’s not that I now simply dislike guitar-based music. Regardless of this characterization and identification, my swollen predilection for drum and wire has - crises of identity aside - waned with age, and for a reason. Like all teenagers, I wanted to be different. That is, the supposed agent of an ancient gyration, whose taste and sensibilities exist outside the ordered rigor and craftsmanship of a monolithic “real music.” And so I, disgusted at the stereotype and its applicability or lack thereof, sought refuge in a mastery of an alternate history.
I used to be a rockist.Īll this complicated by the fact that I am a biracial African American. That is, a navel-gazing Baby-Boomer retrospective, a hopeless sensibility passed on through the most accessible sources and arbiters of popular music culture, Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All-Time,” etc. So by the dawn of my adolescence - a time when one is better embroidering a self-concept with all its appropriated and internalized peripherals - I came to imbibe and live through what was readily available outside the nuclear unit: mostly what came in the mail. Beyond the trappings of A/C radio, it was an ocean. Growing up, my family didn’t keep up with music much.
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