Sunday, May 13, 2018

"This is the story of every band..."

My first interaction with Virtue wasn't necessarily positive. I couldn't get past the fact that the owner of the coolest voice in rock insisted on ironically auto-tuning every other word. "For fuck's sake, Julian, why won't you sing?" I thought and that was it. I moved on.

A few days later I read an album review in Stereogum. Actually, it's not much of a review. It's more of a long-read meditation on what it's like to get older. I'm going to try to sum it up, and I'm going to fail, but here it goes:

When you're young, you form a band. Eventually that band becomes a trap you can't get out of without ruining everyone else in the band. So if you're any type of non-sociopathic human, you don't leave. You just kind of coast for the next few... holy shit... decades.

The band in question is, of course, The Strokes. But what I couldn't get over was how Nelson wasn't just writing about The Strokes or Julian or even The Voidz. He was writing about every band, every business, every partnership everyone has ever been in. Hell, some of the paragraphs could've been about a marriage.

I went back and listened to Virtue again. It was like I was listening to a whole new album. Then I read the article again. (And at 11,000-ish words, that's a commitment.) Then I listened to the album. Then I watched some Voidz videos and tried to teach myself a few of the riffs. Then I read the article and listened to the album and that's basically been how I have been spending all my free time recently.

It's probably a stretch to say that Virtue means as much to me now as Arena did in 1984. But it's pretty important.

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