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The CMJ Big Break? Not Such a Big Deal
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Bands aren’t waiting for their big break anymore. Or if they are, they’re keeping mighty busy in the meantime. That was the gist of this year’s CMJ Music Marathon, the showcase for independent music that expanded to five days this year, presenting music day and night from last Tuesday through Saturday.
Since 1981 CMJ’s gatherings have been offering a dual message. (CMJ originally stood for College Media Journal; it’s still a trade magazine that monitors college radio.) The marathons encourage the small-scale, do-it-yourself approach that has been enshrined and maintained by punk and indie rock. At the same time they tease with the prospect that being chosen to perform on a club bill assembled by CMJ — which winnowed 1,000 bands from 4,500 applicants — and being heard by the people who come to New York for the convention could lead to anything from a shared tour to a recording contract. This year the mass market seemed further away, while the indie circuit was bustling.
The lineup, as always, was overwhelming. There weren’t many large shows with bands that have escaped the club circuit, although the thoroughly independent Swedish electronica duo the Knife chose CMJ to make its North American debut with a moody, high-tech production. The dance-rock band the Rapture played CMJ’s opening-night party with a set of pure funk that showed how years of touring can make a band trade arty indulgences for muscle. And the Fall, which was formed in 1976 by Mark E. Smith and has influenced countless indie-rock bands, played a perverse half-hour set on Saturday night. Although the band riffed clean and hard, with two bass players, half of the brief set was other bands’ songs.
Recording contracts aren’t as glamorous as they used to be, not with major labels floundering. MTV and commercial broadcast radio haven’t helped by narrowing their offerings to a few nearly incompatible genres: self-pitying emo rock, bump-and-grind rhythm-and-blues and catchphrase hip-hop. At the CMJ showcases, some bands were still aiming for careers in current mass-market rock. They were the ones slavishly imitating Fall Out Boy’s punk-pop hooks and making music-video rock-star faces.
Of course hardly a band at CMJ would turn down a Top 10 single or a gold album on principle. Nor will any rule out other possibilities: a spot on a video-game soundtrack, in a commercial or on television, all of which can be hyperlinked back to the band. Most of the performers I heard — which were of course only a small fraction of the showcases — were making their way without Top 40 expectations.
The do-it-yourself circuit was once a patchwork of live shows and sporadic college-radio exposure, but the Internet has changed that. Now, the most obscure band can put up a page on myspace.com and have its music streamed on any Internet connection, any time. So a showcase at CMJ or its springtime counterpart, South by Southwest, is no longer such a make-or-break moment.
But a live performance, something more tangible, hi-fi and sloppy than a faceless MP3 file, can still make a band vivid. Born Ruffians, a band from Toronto, writes crisp, staccato songs about awkward feelings, harking back to the early Talking Heads. The songs can easily stand on their own. But onstage the band’s lead singer, Luke LaLonde, brought an extra dollop of endearing, unabashed nerdiness to the music.
Monsters Are Waiting plays stubbornly midtempo, neatly constructed pop songs featuring Annalee Fery’s breathy, girlish voice; onstage her gawky art-girl cool was counteracted as the band started with terse little riffs and stirred them into postpunk jitters. And it takes a live performance, pulsating in a room full of head-bobbing listeners, to appreciate 120 Days, a Norwegian band that takes the throbbing repetition of rave music and German synthesizer rock and adds some fervent vocals.
As big-time commercial pop rushes headlong into just a few niches, that leaves just about everything else for independents. They can try revivalism or avant-gardism, hugely ambitious concepts or cagey shtick, painstaking sincerity or elaborate artifice, verse-chorus-verse pop or amorphous noise. Styles discarded by the pop mainstream survive in the indie sphere. Underground hip-hop, which has pretty much settled for the college crowd while complaining (in rhyme) about how “the real hip-hop” has been abandoned, maintains the ambitious wordplay and political intentions rarely heard from hitmakers. Performers like Cadence Weapon — from Canada, which he proudly rhymed with “janitor” — and Darc Mind made the syllables fly. Commercial hip-hop hooks were exploited in meta-style by Girl Talk, the one-man laptop band, who mashed up samples from hits — dispensing a new hook every 10 seconds — for a knowing but still dancing crowd.
There are times at CMJ when it seems that just one band is playing set after set: a band with four guys in T-shirts, two of them strumming a slow-building guitar drone. Not that drones are so bad. The Archie Bronson Outfit, an English power trio, turns bluesy one-chord riffs and reedy, yelpy vocals into ominous, violent visions. Chin Up Chin Up stacked minimalist guitar lines and matter-of-fact vocals into intricately driving songs; Silversun Pickups merged swelling, droning psychedelia with grungy resentment.
But indie rock knows better than to settle into its own stereotypes. Across CMJ were bands sprouting extra instruments — cellos, accordions, trombones, glockenspiels — and coming up with songs that weren’t content to stay within one style or half a dozen.
In a short set on Saturday afternoon, for example, the Annuals, from North Carolina, encompassed the rippling introspection of the Beach Boys, the anthemic power of U2, the busy arpeggios of Yes and the lurching momentum of the Replacements — and topped one song with a slide whistle. Quirky, heartfelt and a little messy, it was indie rock with boundless ambitions, few of them commercial.
