For the first time in many years, I am excited about what is happening in Minneapolis underground music. We are on the verge of a transformation—the re-emergence of an aesthetic that has lain dormant for many years.
First, a bit of biography. Fifteen years ago, I stormed out of my parents’ house in suburban St. Paul wearing a black nightgown, black lipstick, and black pleather boots, and took the bus into Minneapolis to meet my male friend, wearing a similar outfit, for a tour of the Beat Generation art exhibit at the Walker Art Center. That was a definitive day in my life—the day I decided to defy my rigid Catholic upbringing and pursue a life of deviant aesthetics and relentless questioning of authorities, commonly accepted truisms about life, and my own memories and senses. I believed in rooting out the hidden truths, those inconvenient or uncomfortable facts most people would rather ignore, and exposing them to the world. While a lot of that was teen rebellion, there was a deeper drive at work that has remained with me all of my adult life. I was—and still am—drawn to esoteric spiritual traditions, philosophy, political activism, and dark music in which anguished people sing about the themes that plague them—love, death, and everything in between. The underground cultures were fertile ground for such drives back then—my friends and I would gather at coffee shops and talk long into the night about political scandals, sexual taboos and fetishes, the occult, and a youthful yearning for meaning reminiscent of any one of Holden Caulfield’s reveries. We would attend the loud rock shows of local bands and the gallery openings of local artists, spend hours poring over Nietzsche and Camus and Freud, trying to understand why people love one another, what forms such loves take, and how they shape our psyches. And we were angry about a lot of things—the hypocrisy of Those In Charge, the suffering of the have-nots, the greed of the haves, the needless cruelty toward animals, the abuse of helpless children, and the wasteful and mindless destruction of the planet. And driving all of these forms of inquiry was a desire to know the world and ourselves, to decide for ourselves who we wanted to be and how we wanted to live.
Music was a primary guide for us on this path to self-awareness. We were exposed to great music through institutions like Rev 105 and Danceteria and Ground Zero. Many of my friends chose identities for themselves based around a particular style of music, but I was one of the kids who could never identify with only one subculture because I loved just about everything I heard—industrial bands like KMFDM, Front 242, Type O Negative, RevCo, Ministry, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult; punk music like The Dead Kennedys and Rancid, but especially riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Sleater-Kinney; ambient and darkwave music like Dead Can Dance, The Cranes, Lush, Ladytron, Bel Canto, and the Cocteau Twins; and dream-pop/shoegaze like Tortoise, Mojave 3, Yo La Tengo, and Slowdive. Locally we had goth bands like Autumn and Glass, dream-pop like February, shoegaze like Colfax Abbey, Low, and Dwindle—all deeply imbued with both thought and emotion. It was a great time to be a young musichead. And I rode these sound waves to minor notoriety as a DJ on my college radio station, sharing the music I loved with my community.
Now, fast forward about six or seven years. It’s 2000, a beautiful summer night in Minneapolis. Which band should you go and see? A lot is happening. There are many talented bands out there—The Fog, The Selby Tigers, The American Monsters, The Soviettes, and any one of the Rhyme Sayers Collective. We’ve already seen the rise of the Turf Club as the cool place in St. Paul to see a show. A lot of the music—from the local bands to the national acts coming through like the Hives, the White Stripes, Jet, The Strokes—is technically good, but I feel that it’s missing something.
During 2000-2002 I was a DJ on the underground airwaves—the Twin Cities pirate radio station. A lot of cool stuff happened during those years—we had people like Billy Bragg doing call signs for the station and the DJs did interviews, hosted live music, and gave updates about the latest goings-on in protest culture. But I couldn’t get into the new local music, and I couldn’t figure out why not—so instead I mostly played the old stuff from a few years back, along with an eclectic mix of other styles like funk and traditional Balinese music and Egyptian techno. After stumbling around for years and thinking back on it, I recently figured out what bothered me back then—most of the music of that time was lacking in what the great Bruce Lee called “emotional content,” something that for him made all the difference between the good and the great. He didn’t expand upon what the term meant, but I have always suspected that he meant a rarified state of mind that emerges from deep understanding of the self and allowing one’s innermost feelings to flow through their processes and color the work they are undertaking. The music of the early 2000s was groovy and fun, and some of it was angry, but most of it was deeply cynical and went out of its way to mock any genuine sentiment. Even in the little bit of music I heard in which I detected the presence of emotional content, the songwriter seemed to assume a great deal of apathy as a starting place in the minds of her or his listeners. As someone who grew up on New Wave as a child and went to finishing school with industrial, darkwave, and the like, I often felt alienated by what I saw at shows and heard on the radio. Of course there were bands and artists like Mason Jennings, Tulip Sweet, and All the Pretty Horses that kept on writing emotional music despite what everyone else was doing, and they were the bands I would seek out when I was feeling lost and alone, but back in the 2000s they were the exceptions rather than the rule. I had always felt wounded before by the shallow, sentiment-mocking scenesterism that sometimes came through in the bastions of Minneapolis music culture—Rev105, the music writing in the City Pages and The Onion, Cake Magazine, and the like—so my complaint is not that these ideas are new. It’s that these attitudes of cynicism and apathy had become normalized to such an extent in the local music scenes that it often felt like there was no longer any room for people with strong feelings.
At last our musical time machine jumps ahead to today. We’ve seen a resurgence of dark music in the Minneapolis music scene—music for people who don’t just want to party—they want to be transformed by what they hear. Artists and bands like UZZA, Poor Weather Club, Lookbook, Dearling Physique, and of course All the Pretty Horses are leading the charge. There’s even another blog out there where you can find out about the goings-on of this scene—www.darktwincities.com. And I am excited to say that, for the first time in my life, I’m adding something to the mix. I’m in a band with a friend and trusted collaborator, Courie Bishop, and this musical partnership is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done as an artist. (More on that later.)
I look forward to writing about everything I see, hear, and feel as the new times unfold. It seems as though there are once again hidden truths waiting for me to uncover them—and as they are revealed to me, so shall I reveal them to you, my dear reader. Onward into the unknown!