What We Are Listening To: MC’s New York Office #18(?)
In 2012, I was seventeen years old, turning eighteen.
It was a magical time, riddled with violence, drug use, insecurity, almost-sex, betrayal, and indecision. See? Magic. I was peak-shithead then, but I got better. I met a couple of fucking weirdos who made me feel at home in all of my insecurity and creative longing - strange men-boys who knew what I meant when I said nothing at all, sitting quietly on a windowsill breathing smoke out into the night, trying hard to be anything other than home asleep. I turned twenty one in 2015, and that was when I began to recover from that shithead turbulence.
Ten years is a nice round number for reflecting, and conveniently, that period of time was precisely ten years ago. And thus, I have been listening to the music of that era, marked most strongly by Mac Demarco and King Krule who had at that time released their debut and sophomore albums and which tentpoled the end of my youth and the beginning of adulthood. More specifically, of the years in which I got frickin’ laid.
An idea I have had for a long time but never quite got the feet for: the phenomenon of Mac Demarco copycats who popped up smoking cigarettes and wearing the ugliest shit they could possibly find at the thrift, and they all seemed to be in California writing songs about being in California, and they were all signed to Burger Records at one point or another, and therefore, they were all (apart from a select few which I treasure) cancelled at one point or another. This era is one worthy of examination as it coincides with the ever-changing musical market’s big shift to direct-to-consumer social media-facilitated marketing plans, the rise of streaming rather than downloading illegally, and perhaps most controversially, the growth of a collective conscience born just before it’d be snatched from the nation with the inauguration of Trump like the soul out of a Harry Potter character… or whatever.
It’s worth commenting on, even if it only means throwing soil onto the buried careers of those little fuckers, but until my writer’s mind cracks the code on laziness, I’ll just keep leaning back into a bed of nostalgia and Big Boy Burger wrappers.
