BY BEN MAZER

In print | Published April 23, 2009

A few weeks back, on a Friday night, WSRN put on a show in PPR basement. This mild act of secession from Olde Club came as a final recognition of the new musical scene emerging both nationally and at Swarthmore. This movement doesn’t have any particular name associated with it, but, in short, the music we heard was lo-fi, fuzzy, experimental rock n’ roll. We heard loops, pop hooks, inaudible vocals, liberal use of distortion and accidental use of feedback. We heard an evening of tribute to the cassette tape; one of the musicians even sold her music on the forgotten medium, to the accolades of the other performers. (She upstaged most artists of this genre, who use the trendier vinyl record to achieve lo-fi authenticity.)

This music is certainly not noise, somehow seems more than garage rock and refreshingly has no nihilistic agenda attached. The genre is represented by U.S. Girls (who played in PPR last semester), Buckets of Bile and Drawlings (who played this time), and their better-known contemporaries Jay Reatard, Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit, Wavves and Blank Dogs. There are many others, and WSRN’s staff has been dutifully collecting them on the playlist.
This collection of music has grown considerably over only a couple of years. The movement is characterized by a willfully naïve pleasure in rock music. We aren’t seeing any particular political or artistic stand, except that music is fun to play. There isn’t, however, any nostalgia or posing along the lines of a Ramones or White Stripes, just experimentation. There were no leather jackets and sunglasses, but plenty of worn-out corduroy and old t-shirts.

These artists would enjoy playing regardless of how many people were listening, and they don’t expect much widespread attention. When I asked him about the show, Pat Kolodgy of Handglops said, “Playing in PPR basement is fun.”

PPR basement is a great space for the new musical scene at Swarthmore. It captures the “dorm room” aesthetic of the music, but some modifications had to be made. If you were at the show, you would have noticed a pillow hung behind the artists. It was for their protection. Pat told me that “you gotta watch out for that pipe sticking straight outta the wall. I busted my head on that thing pretty hard.”

Friday’s PPR show represented this equanimity well. Swarthmore’s Bromancer (Selmaan Chettih ’10 and Louis Jargow ’10) and Handglops (Pat Kolodgy ’09 and Zach Weinstein ’11) performed to a small group of friends and WSRN DJs, but with sincerity and talent. Bromancer ran through a three-song set with precision, smiled and then joined the audience. Handglops played with their usual timid ferocity and afterward gave away their album for free.

Swarthmore’s music scene has for a long time been dominated by bands whose stage antics seek mainly crowd approval. Many of these bands are technically accomplished, but ephemeral. We may not remember our PPR bands much longer, but their experimental instincts must be given some credit.

WSRN has been decaying in the same way as Olde Club. The station is left trashed, the DJs don’t properly learn the equipment or plan a playlist, and students just don’t listen. This isn’t failure, it’s just part of an apathy common to Swarthmore, where projects that require private dedication cannot survive. At Swarthmore, we all want to start our own organization, not continue someone else’s; we over-think and over-plan and cannot devote too much time to “meaningless” endeavors. We have a phobia of “wasted time.” That’s why we achieve so much.

But in this environment, it’s unsurprising that musical scenes have trouble thriving. I mean, after all, thinking you’re doing something ground-breaking with delay pedals and a snare drum is egotistical. And it’s certainly not “recognizing your own privilege.”

But it is fun. It’s fun to practice in your room for hours and to put on ad hoc shows for your friends; it’s fun to project the Talking Heads and throw a dance party (which also happened in PPR recently); it’s fun to bullshit about actual bullshit, instead of politics or philosophy. Those of us in PPR that weekend heard both creativity and satisfaction from the artists, and it made me happy to see them happy.

There’s certainly some showmanship and affectation in this lo-fi music that we could criticize, but after listening to and talking with the musicians who played in PPR, I had no desire to. This musical scene will withstand a Swarthmorean intellectual assault simply because it’s arisen in such a non-Swarthmorean way: it’s not multi-cultural, it’s just “rock;” it’s not intellectually humble, and it hasn’t been thought through. But this scene has security. It really isn’t there to impress anyone or fulfill some abstract existential desire (hint: this desire is the main force filling up Olde Club and Paces weekly). Some people in the basement danced, and some didn’t, some stayed and some left early, and no one cared about what they “should” have been doing. Basically, the music we heard in PPR was not neurotic, and I just thought that was pretty neat.

Ben Mazer is a junior. You can reach him at bmazer1@swarthmore.edu