Music Revisionism: Who Decides What’s Good and What’s Bad?
The idea of music not being considered “good” until those who listened to these artists in their young, formative years became editors and reviewers at music publications much later on in life is cyclical. Albums like The Velvet Underground & Nico and The Stooges’ Fun House were either panned by the critics of the era or ignored completely before the two acts became the driving influences for the explosion of punk rock in the late 1970s.
Weezer’s second album Pinkerton, released in 1996, was a step away from their MTV-ready, hits-filled debut record two years prior. Pinkerton saw frontman Rivers Cuomo moving away from the innocent, bubblegum pop of “Buddy Holly” to singing about his unrequited love for a lesbian and wondering about the masturbational habits of a teenage girl from Japan. That escalated quickly. In an infamous Rolling Stone interview, reviewer Rob O’Connor calls the record “juvenile” and “corny.” The mixed reception took a toll on Cuomo himself, leading to a hiatus for the band and him saying, “Pinkerton was such a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people and continues to happen on a grander and grander scale and just won’t go away.”
15 years later, Cuomo and the band were playing Pinkerton in its entirety, along with a complete rendition of their self-titled debut album, as part of the “Memories Tour,” a recognition from Cuomo that his most personal work was transcendent. It retrospectively is considering one of the hallmark alternative albums of the 1990s, since receiving a new, revised “five stars out of five” review from Rolling Stone and was one of most influential albums on the commercially viable third wave of emo movement at the dawn of the 21st century.
This revisionism has been even more evident this summer with blink-182's first album in five years, California, and the band’s subsequent tour. Long considered critically the dumbass little cousin of pop-punk who rode the coattails of the genre’s rebirth at the hands of Green Day in the 1990s despite the smash commercial success of 1999's Enema of the State, they’ve outgrown that label as their initial fan base has aged as well. As subsequent 2000s pop-punk bands combined teenage humor, catchy hooks, and crunchy power cords (not exactly reinventing the wheel, but something blink-182 excelled at) in order to land at the top of the charts and an entire generation sang along to “Say it ain’t so, I will not go…” on the car radio, the conversation around blink changed during their post-2005, pre-2009 hiatus.
Now blink gets not one, but two features in The New Yorker.
Music history has made it clear that everything that was once bad doesn’t stay bad forever. In terms of what later becomes “good,” meaning, for lack of a better definition, is critically acclaimed and looked positively upon by the music community, there seems to be two reasons for an album or an artist seeing their status change for the better years later: (1) the act sold a lot of records and the people who bought them up originally now comprise the collective of music journalists in the media, leading to new reviews and retrospective takes from publications; (2) the act was highly influential on later successful, critically or commercially, artists.
Now that we know what used to be “bad” and is now “good,” I wonder what “bad” artist the music community will revise the history of next? The easiest way for me to start down this path is look at what music I, being a person of impeccable taste, obviously, don’t like that is blowing up the charts or garnering the acclaim of critics. One band’s chart-topping status fits the bill: Twenty One Pilots is the first artist ever to have a different number-one song on both the pop and alternative charts.
Twenty One Pilots is a harmless, yet annoying, duo from Ohio who sound like turn-of-the-millenium Incubus mixed with Sum 41 and The Lumineers. The two members of the group, Josh Dun and Tyler Joseph, wear ski masks on stage and refer to their fan base as the “Skeleton Clique,” which makes them sound like spiritual descendants of the whack-a-doos who comprise Insane Clown Posse’s Juggalos.
They pride themselves on being a mishmash of genres, a fix for the festival-going millennials who dig radio-friendly alternative bands, pop rap, and the EDM stylings of a sweaty frat party. It’s as bad as it sounds. Their most identifable hit is “Stressed Out,” a nostalgic song about turning back time “to the good old days.” That’s a common theme in some of my favorite tunes of all time, from Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” to Japandroids’ “Younger Us” and more.
Not all songs looking back on the artists’ youth need to be anthems about drinking and partying in high school and your early 20s like those though. Just look at Big Star’s “Thirteen,” one of rock-and-roll’s most beautiful ballads, a tale about an elementary/middle school dance. Twenty One Pilots is going back even younger. They drive big wheels around the cul-de-sac of their painstakingly-boring suburbia in the song’s music video. The chorus of the song goes, “Wish we could turn back time/to the good old days/when our momma sang us to sleep/but now we’re stressed out.” How... how old do they want to be? A baby? Do they miss not having control over when they’re going to the bathroom? Nostalgic for when their mothers would feed them Gerber sweet potatoes and then burp them? What is this? Am I the only one hearing this?
Combined that with the supposedly-edgy concept of the “Skeleton Clique” and the faux-Slipnot/heavy metal on-stage theatrics and they’re left as a bunch of babies performing in ski masks. There’s nothing gritty or dangerously wonderful about that.
But what if I’m wrong?
What if some of the two million people who bought Twenty One Pilots’ latest album, 2015’s Blurryface, grow up to be writers and editors for Rolling Stone, Spin, or Stereogum? What if they look back on Twenty One Pilots and “Stressed Out” as a reminder of their adolescent fun just like tons of other music critics and I look back on blink-182 anthems like “Dammit” or “Carousel”? Will I then look like the fools who ignored The Stooges or Pinkerton?
I certainly hope not. By that point in time where Twenty One Pilots’ legacy has been definitively determined, I’m sure there will be new artists I’ll be arguing about the merits of to occupy my time anyway.
