- Northern man

Though, I wouldn’t be too surprised if your drink ends up with a little extra something in it… you never know with me.

@zatannazee

Blimey! 50 shows, eh? Gotta hand it ‘t ‘y, Zee. Y’know how ‘t keep th’ crowd entertained.

I’ll be there.

No, I won’t be hexin’ no one this time.

As many may know, it's only been a matter of months since magazines like Spin have been putting up pictographic charts, declaring the return of vinyl, and now they've taken it one step further and have jumped on the cassette bandwagon. It actually seems like since Spin put out that small article about cassettes and labels like Burger Records that everyone's been touting the return of cassettes, as if it's something new. But, the truth is, bands have been selling and trading tapes and Burger Records has been fine long before Spin declared it. So, I won't waste anymore time and declare it again. 

I'm actually leery in general whenever anyone touts the return of anything. Usually, it never went anywhere, the general public just stopped paying attention to it for a little while. Cassettes have only slipped out of the general conscious for only a couple years, even less than vinyl, so to say that they went anywhere is like saying Joaquin Phoenix has a chance of coming back. 

But with all of this, I was a little torn over whether or not to listen to tapes again. What really sold me was, besides labels like Burger that are doing a fantastic job reissuing albums previously on vinyl now on tape, there's some smaller labels like Trashcan City Tapes putting out some exclusive material on cassette. So, as soon as I got a twenty-year old Reader's Digest cassette deck in a garage sale for two dollars, I had no other option but to make a mixtape once again. 

Mixtapes used to be the only thing I liked about cassettes. I actually hated them, because I used to be a chubby little boy with a strong strain of Polish blood running through my veins, and no hope of figuring out side A from side B, and the only time I listened to them was when I was dancing in my room by myself to the Newsies soundtrack. Subsequently, as surprisingly good as I was at making mixtapes, they usually just included songs from the Newsies soundtrack and Hanson. But those were really a different time.

But as hesitant as I am still of getting confused mixing up sides or taping over something important by accident, I see something of the mass-productive beauty of cassettes. If vinyl and cassettes are both works of art, vinyl would be a 17th century Old Master painting, a lot of skill put into the work and appealing to the eye, but subsequently very hard to reproduce or make, while a cassette would be a Warhol soup can, anonymous and easy to reproduce, but art nonetheless. 

What Abs...

I will admit that I occasionally have bitter feelings when someone says one of my favourite indie bands will "make it big" someday, but I've been trying to at least hide those feelings, because they are incredibly foolish. It still is hard, because it seems from the moment you step down into a basement show, you never quite want or your bands to leave, literally and figuratively. So yes, essentially, today's post will delve into bands having commercial success.

Hating an underground band that achieves commercial success for the sake of "ethics" is foolish, because you should be happy to see your favourite band finally get some recognition and acknowledgement from a larger source; they're not selling out. Though that's not to say many independent bands look for commercial recognition, in fact, most of themselves are quite leery of any lucrative commercial ascendancy, and treat it like the one kid in 4th grade with head lice, or to put it plainer, "cooties." Quite simply, independent musicians are afraid of getting cooties. 

It may even very well explain the reason why some bands release their albums on cassette or vinyl only, to purposely avoid the attention of the mass market, aside from principles (and because vinyl truly is the only way to listen to an album). That's also why some bands rather smack around buckets repetitively and sing like a dying cow on record than sing with Christina Aguilera. Of course there's other reasons too, but we'll leave that for now.

When you get to the root of the fan's problem, it's not so much bred out of a fear of veneration itself, or the band becoming rich and famous, but the ego and attitude that so often comes with fame's lustrous monetary value. At least that's what one would hope. As dapper as Maroon 5 may appear to your adolescent fancy on the red carpet, it's a far cry from the ideals and romanticism of indie music: the scratchy records, torn up jeans, converses, and concerts without any lighting whatsoever in the confines of a smelly festering basement. 

I for one fear someday seeing on of my favourite musicians showing off their five cars or pool in the shape of Henry Kissinger on Cribs, as they saunter lackadaisically from their atrium, to their gold-plated boudoir, then to their tea room plastered with posters of Scarface, and after a quick trip on their fuzz pink wallpapered elevator, back up to their bedroom with its gold-plated walls where supposedly the "magic" happens, when all the while they really don't own any of the cars, nor the conservative swimming basins that are not even filled with water but a plastic poly-carbonate meant to look like water, because while they undoubtedly spend like Matthew McConaughey in Abercrombie and Fitch on Black Friday, musicians don't make money like they used to anyway. And yes, you'll be happy to know I had to Google how to spell Matthew McConaughey.

Luckily or unluckily, however you choose to view it, indie bands tend to stay poor and working-class, while bands in the mainstream are usually designed from the beginning to make their major record labels money. So if you are like the music fan equivalent of a snooty Republican scared of a fellow Conservative becoming increasingly independent at all or of an enemy liberal with similarly conservative financial ideals, then you have nothing to fear. There is rarely, ever, any cross over anymore. The mainstream music scene is so designed and planned that the only musicians you will ever see in the limelight are those bred by the producers and record executives themselves. 

As I said earlier, I used to be quite the dirty hippie, but while I do listen to more early punk or garage punk nowadays, I don't consider myself much of a punk. I'm not very angry, just a very cynical and snobby New Yorker reader who listens to Richard Hell. But I can't help but noticing through the transition that there isn't a whole lot of differences. Fundamentally, a lot of the punks and hippies ideas are the same. 

Sure, there are major differences, and they should be addressed right away to avoid unnecessary comments and backlash. Well costume choices are right away evident, because let's face it, they are both a bit at times. But truthfully, hippies often did nothing, thinking if they sat in a forest dropping acid, things would eventually get done, while punks are bent are destroying anything in their path they don't agree with.

Sure activists did a lot, but hippies and activists were two different things, and while hippies were smoking and licking anything that might resemble something edible that could potentially get you high, punks are admirably often straight edge. And sure, hippies had five hour solos in every song within set list consisting of thirty five songs, and while punks have sets lasting thirty five songs as well, they are usually so short you were on your way back home while it was still light out, trying to convince yourself you had a good time or that the night even happened at all. 

But there are some striking similarities in their ideology, especially considering that at least the UK punk scene, if not every scene, verbally and stylistically separated themselves as much as possible from the hippies and flower power. Patti Smith has said herself that both scenes were linked by an anti-establishment mentality, and before joining the Clash, Joe Strummer was even something of a hippie at one point. So even if they resisted as much as possible, and even one of their founding fathers, the Velvets, were the antithesis of the hippies while it was actually going on, they had a lot in common.

Not to mention, the majority of both camps were strongly left, even going as far as advocating socialism. Of course you have anomalies, like oddly conservatives punks such as Johnny Ramone, but people who were also apolitical are found in both the hippies and punks. You could even go as far as saying that most hippies were just that, or at least apolitical by proxy because they were too stoned to protest, and with modern subgenres like garage punk and commercial pop punk, many of today's punks have no care or necessity for indulging in politics. 

The original hippies and punks also shared some rather questionable life choices. UK punks often lived in dilapidated houses or worse, eating whatever they could to survive, and hippies lived in the exact same conditions, or even a tent in the forest, because they thought it'd be a good way to connect with nature until it started to rain, and it's been said that by the end of the 60s you'd never see any stray cats walking the streets of Los Angeles because the hippies had turned to heroin and speed... and had eaten them all.