{"id":8094,"date":"2013-11-28T16:42:51","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T16:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=8094"},"modified":"2013-11-28T16:42:51","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T16:42:51","slug":"fear-of-music-highway-61-left-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2013\/11\/28\/fear-of-music-highway-61-left-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"Fear of Music – Highway 61 Left Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wayne03\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Desperately Clinging on to What is Left of the Past, Or Not<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Devin King<\/strong><\/p>\n

I used to live by the airport, and I would lay out in the field and watch the airplanes take off. It wasn\u2019t symbolism or some sort of literary wankery, it was just a thing.<\/p>\n

I remember listening to Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?<\/em> and watching the airplanes overhead, though that probably never happened. Memory is parallax; sometimes those things that you fondly recall weren\u2019t really that fond, or didn\u2019t even happen that way. So watching the planes and listening to indie music are two things that I used to do, and whether it was this album or another under the planes is irrelevant I guess. It was an indie boom around that time, so it was all kind of the same in the end.<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

So now I\u2019m out of university and I have a job and a kid and I don\u2019t go watch the planes anymore. And it\u2019s hard to listen to music, let alone keep up that pace of discovering new music. I can see how people give up on things, there\u2019s only so much time. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m going to ignore my baby so I can sit quietly and totally absorb that new Washed Out album. It\u2019s just not a thing I can do anymore. He needs to be in bed at certain times to be a healthy tiny human, which means I also have to be here with him, which means it\u2019s harder to go anywhere generally, especially if it\u2019s going anywhere longer than a couple of hours. Time is a problem. So here I am in amber, me and Jimmy Shaw.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s got to be hard for Metric, too. They\u2019re getting older and, let\u2019s face it, not nearly as good as they ever were. How do you deal with that, living in your own shadow? It doesn\u2019t seem to bother the Rolling Stones, I guess.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s super easy to just stop paying attention to what\u2019s happening now and cling to the fondness of your youth. I can totally see why someone like Rod Stewart is still popular. There\u2019s tons of people who don\u2019t just rely on the music of Rod Stewart; he keeps that tiny bit of their past alive that makes them feel like maybe \u2013 maybe \u2013 they\u2019ll be able to feel the good old days again. Maybe all the bills and aches timetables and world problems will just go away. It will all have been a dream. They don\u2019t need Frank Ocean. No matter how good he is, he can never fill the role that Rod Steward always will in their psyche.<\/p>\n

\u201cNostalgia is death.\u201d That\u2019s the guy who chose to release an album of Christmas songs rather than look back on his works like Highway 61 Revisited<\/em> and Blonde on Blonde<\/em>. In the end, he\u2019s right. That weird, shimmery, romantic feeling I have of that time and that music is not only a strange figment, but toxic. Because like listening to that Metric song at the airfield, it didn\u2019t happen. It\u2019s just a strange sense of reaching back to something that I only have an approximated feeling of. And I can never go back there. No matter how hard I try. It would ruin me.<\/p>\n