Insistor—Tapes ‘n Tapes

#365Songs: January 20

Every year indie music dies.

#Damn #ThoughtsAndPrayers

And yet it always returns from the dead, defibbed and Frankensteined… only to be declared dead again the next year.

I remember when I first called the priest. The indie music bands from the 90s were receding into the background of whatever the oughts had wrought. I’m not even sure we knew what “indie music” meant during Y2K. It was a notion, a sense of otherness, a sense that bands made music that didn’t want to be recognized or make money or pander for radio airplay. Right. Like they didn’t want to be heard or make money or just earn a decent living. Whatever the fuck.

This was about the same time that I first met Smitty and we exchanged portable hard drives filled with the shit to which we were listening at the time.

We didn’t have Spotify’s catalog of one beeeeellllion songs ever at our fingertips. We had to work to find and hear bands and read and share music with friends — and now, looking back, it felt like the last gasp of a bygone era.

When people would sit in the same room and say “Listen to this.”

And it was during this time I realized that indie music wasn’t dead. Indie music had just cocooned, re-emerging as something else entirely. Opinions may differ, but the indie rock that emerged from these embers remains, perhaps, the most fertile, creative, and prosperous time for the genre.

One of the albums that marks this time specifically is Tapes ‘n Tapes’ The Loon. Like the bark of Pavlov’s dog, the song “Insistor” triggers that time and place like no other song from the era.

And when you rush I’ll call your name
Like Harvard Square holds all inane
And don’t you know I’ll be your badger
And don’t be terse and don’t be shy
Just hug my lips and say good lies
And know that I will be your bail bond

It’s a chorus embedded into some moldy corner of my being. I don’t know and don’t care what it means. It just is. A perfect moment, frozen in time.

Just hug my lips and say goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Goodbyebyebyebyebyebyebyebyebye

~

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