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The Rest is Metamodernity
The Rest is Metamodernity; Bedroom Pop and the Post- postmodern Affec t July 2015 — Perched at a drum set, I contorted my body forward while Sam held an iPad as far as my headphone’s cord extended. I needed GarageBand’s metronome in my ear, but the short cord length had forced us into a stationary gymnastics routine. In search of an optimal recording angle, a push-pull of the cable between my head and Sam’s hands ensued. We twisted around, following the iPad's internal microphone while I attempted a steady tempo. Earlier that day we had decided to make our own song on a whim, but the process was slow with each take ruined by our laughter over the janky recording method. With summer in Minnesota as a backdrop, our listless high school ennui was in full swing. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were trading jabs in the early stages of the Democratic primary, the US Supreme Court had ruled same-sex marriage a constitutional right, and Donald Trump had just announced what critics were derriding as a longshot presidential canidacy. With only drumline practice and Sam’s Jimmy Johns delivery job on the schedule, we had a great deal of time to kill. I mumbled some lyrics about the seasonal languor, and turned up the reverb until the song became a wash of major seventh chords. We had no audience or promotional outlet, but the creative process was cathartic. This was music for our aimless drives past the cornfields which skirted our hometown. We shared the track online and continued collaborating as the decade elapsed. July 2019 — Around 11 PM, we walked on stage in Los Angeles, eight dates into a national headlining tour for that same project. I had just returned from The Roxy’s green room to grab my in-ear monitors, taking note of a framed photo of Bob Marley standing in that same space. He was grinning, unphased to be playing one of the Sunset Strip’s historic venues. After all, I real-
ized, it was only historic thanks to legends like him. The gravity of that stage was hard to ignore. Vansire, the random-word-generator name for our small-time project, didn’t seem to belong on a list boasting the names of Bob Marley, Frank Zappa, and Bruce Springsteen. Sam’s brother Isaac passed me a setlist from stage left where he helmed bass. The curtain rose to reveal a big crowd, and I counted off our opening tune. The show was plagued with poor on-stage sound. Sam couldn’t hear his synthesizers the entire performance, culminating in an arm-swooping TURN IT UP gesture that went unnoticed by the person running monitors. Tensions with the staff were already high after our openers had been stuck with a line check due to a communication error (a hastier, undesirable alternative to a full soundcheck), followed by a mishap where one of their guitarist’s amps had been left in an alleyway unattended after a stage change. The show finished, and employees began hollering at the crowd to clear out. Fan hellos were cut short and we started the load out, eager to head towards our final destination that night, a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles where our friend Warner lived. We were going to sleep in a massive pillow fort. It was suspended from the ceiling, and according to Warner it had a human capacity of “twenty chilling, ten sleeping.” Mid-gear schlep, Sam heard a burly stagehand mutter to another, “I don’t know what the fuck kids are thinking these days,” seemingly baffled that a venue’s-worth of attendees would come see our performance. When Sam came into earshot, the guy clammed up. All parties were silent until our gear was back in the trunks of the minivans we were using to travel. In a completely different, less personally insulting way, I shared the same question as the stagehand. What the fuck were these kids thinking?
May 20th, 2020 By Josh Augustin; Vansire
