by Spitz, Marc
But first let’s travel back for a moment, to those innocent days when one couldn’t simply steal something musical with a click. The sheer scarcity of Tigermilk thickened out the already carefully constructed Belle and Sebastian myth for the increasingly intrigued public. The band doesn’t appear on the cover. Who were Belle and Sebastian? A folk duo? Who was making this gorgeous, erudite, gentle but wry music? It was impossible to hear “The State I Am In,” “She’s Losing It,” “We Rule the School” (embedded with a sort of early ethos or statement of band-purpose: “Do something pretty while you can”), and the hilarious, heartbreaking “I Don’t Love Anyone” (“No, not even Christmas . . . maybe my sister”) without putting down your pint or your book and asking, “What is this?”
“We helped them distribute it and send it to people,” D’Andrea says of Tigermilk. Of the thousand copies printed, Stow College kept two hundred, and two hundred were sent to tastemakers. “Influential people we could think of in Britain and America,” he clarifies. Recipients included Seymour Stein, the legendary Sire Records founder. “We thought we’d get a licensing deal in America,” D’Andrea says. “That this music would go down well.” A copy went to Morrissey. Others were sent to reputable Indie shops in London like Rough Trade. An original copy of Tigermilk today will likely cost you more than a Vespa scooter, but at the time, many of these offerings went straight into the bin, ignored.
“Most people looked at this thing and said, ‘Why don’t you send me a tape? Why’d you send me an LP?’ We thought they’d be charmed by that,” D’Andrea says. One who certainly was charmed was Mark Radcliffe, an influential DJ at BBC’s Radio One, who played the album once and instantly received more late-night calls than he’d ever had before.
If you happened to live in Brooklyn in 1996 instead of London, Belle and Sebastian’s debut was just as explosive as Oasis’s Definitely Maybe. If you lived just about anywhere else, you probably never heard of Belle and Sebastian unless you were a cool college kid with a good dial-up connection. And if you owned an original copy, you owned it on vinyl and knew you were one of just one thousand to be able to touch it. Most people only had a bootlegged tape. Still, in the twilight of the pre-Internet era there were parties designed specifically for the communal listening of Tigermilk, which seemed in itself to be a part of Murdoch’s master plan. A new cult was born around the band, and the fact that nobody could see them and they refused to tour only fed the fervor. “It was like back in the Sex Pistols days,” says D’Andrea. “You couldn’t see them live, so you wondered.”
Inspired and excited by the buzz, Jeepster tried to plead one final time to the band, “‘You could license it to us and we can put out a decent amount of records!’” D’Andrea recalls. “‘Oh, no,’” came the reply. “‘We’ve already gone on to the next one.’”
The second album, which was briefly going to be called Cock Fun, was built on what was already a key Belle and Sebastian formula. Murdoch’s voice, clean, sad, a little acid, is at the top of the mix, speaking directly into your ear like a good friend. “It’s about capturing somebody’s attention and keeping it,” he has said of the mix. At times these were pop songs. Others featured only a piano backing, as on “Fox in the Snow.” Whereas Oasis’s third album, Be Here Now, filled every empty space in the sound mix with a wailing guitar solo or helicopter special effects, feedback, and drums, this was just the opposite. Be Here Now was an inflated, coked-out monster and has been credited with killing Cool Britannia in one bite, a cyanide capsule of unrealized potential. Belle and Sebastian, Britpop’s gentle antithesis act, wouldn’t even release a single from their second album, now titled If You’re Feeling Sinister, and remained faceless, almost invisible. Sinister did land them a deal for American distribution with Matador Records, but this didn’t alter the band’s approach to engaging with the media, whose curiosity was now fevered.
“Shops phoned us directly try to find out something about the band,” D’Andrea recalled. “They kept reordering Sinister, which was now selling a couple thousand copies a month—not doing any promotion, just by being out there and people talking about it.” Murdoch had been proven right. If you are good enough, they will come to you.
For every fan who ached over piano ballads like “Fox in the Snow” or spine-stiffening anthems such as “Dylan in the Movies” and sad relationship status reports such as “Seeing Other People,” Belle and Sebastian’s unapologetic preciousness inspired the kind of hate and backlash that the Smiths faced the decade before and that Coldplay would reckon with at the beginning of the new decade. Recall this exchange from the Stephen Frears and John Cusack adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity:
Barry: Holy Shiite. What the fuck is that?
Dick: It’s the new Belle and Sebastian.
Rob: It’s a record we’ve been listening to and enjoying, Barry.
Barry: Well, that’s unfortunate, because it sucks ass.
Zeitgeist-wise, Belle had favor, though: there was an electric renaissance in full swing by the end of the 1990s, a disparate scattering of rock snobs, geeks, and losers now aligned via the still primitive, mostly dial-up Internet. Once online, they would rally (or spar over) the likes of Belle and Sebastian or other stubborn, precocious artists like Beck or Radiohead, who had wisely ditched Britpop much in the way that Bowie ditched glam twenty years earlier in favor of future music. OK Computer made jaws drop. If You’re Feeling Sinister made hearts flutter. Still trapped in their bedrooms, often slaves to their parents’ phone kibitzing, the geeks were inheriting a whole new virtual world. Slowly these small and rather dinky networks of music obsessives grew more and more sophisticated.
Spearheading this movement toward a kind of digital music-geek salon was a working-class kid living with his parents beyond the Minneapolis city limits, working and sometimes loitering in record stores and listening to Meat Beat Manifesto through his headphones. His name was Ryan Schreiber, and he was perhaps the modern age’s first fan-as-prodigy. His talent was his ardor.
“Music at that point was already my whole world and my whole life,” Schreiber says, “before I was able to speak. My earliest memories were sitting at a record player and listening to the records my family would bring me. I did have some friends, but my fonder memories were watching MTV and listening to Top 40 countdowns. My parents really worried there was something wrong with me. I’d be in my bedroom and they wouldn’t see me all day.”
Schreiber had just graduated from high school and spent his time buried in music magazines, fanzines, and any info about bands from alt-weeklies that he could pick up in his local coffee shop or record store, his favorite being Cheapo Records, where he’d sometimes try to dub new releases in their listening booths with a smuggled cassette but was usually busted by the management. Still, he spent so much of his allowance at the store that the owners couldn’t afford to ban him: more often than not he left with the newest issue of whatever music publications came in that week.
“I always obsessively consumed them,” he says. “And I noticed that a lot of these zines had interviews with some of the artists that I was really into.” Schreiber was also lucky enough to have a local radio station (KJ 105) that played British Indie, like My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain: “I was educating myself on this music.” At the time, you could still be considered a bit of a freak for liking this stuff. “I wasn’t the most popular kid in high school. I was sort of a loner. The music is so readily available now that it’s hard to imagine a time where if you listened to Elvis Costello it was a liability.”
Schreiber owned a big Mac computer with dial-up and determined that rather than paste and staple his thoughts on pop, it would be faster, cheaper, and more immediate if he placed them on the Web. “I just didn’t have any faith in my ability to print and distribute material,” he admits.
He learned the ins and outs of the nascent Web while working in Down in the Valley, another local record store, and was soon proficient enough to build a site. “At
the time, there was nothing at all on the Web dedicated to Indie music. [There were] some fan pages for artists but none of them were trying to be publications,” he says. “I really wanted to make the site into an actual zine. I started writing record reviews of records I would buy.” The only other sites going at the time, Sonicnet and Billboard, were in New York City, with strong ties to the industry. Nobody was sending Schreiber, out in the Midwest, anything at all.
The site, originally called Turntable, launched in earnest in the fall of ’95 and almost immediately ran out of music to review.
“I actually went in to the Minneapolis Public Library and asked the very nice librarian to look up telephone numbers for me for record labels in New York City. They were very sweet about it.” Schreiber would cold-call these companies and explain his situation, and ask for access to their artists as well as new music. Sometimes they would send out promotional CDs; mostly they’d blow him off. “I was realistic about who I would be able to get time with—being an Internet publication was like a novelty to people. Labels didn’t even have e-mail addresses yet.”
Some forward-thinking Indie bands (Low, Jawbreaker) happily agreed to talk to the enthusiastic and autodidactic nineteen-year-old. “Other people were like, ‘You’re on the what?’ ‘I’m on the Internet.’ What is that?’ Nobody was reading it anyway, so we could do whatever we wanted to do and say whatever we wanted to say with no fear of repercussion.”
Only Schreiber’s parents suffered, as in order to post on his site their son would often have to engage the phone line for hours on end. “They were so mad. The line I was calling was long distance too.” But slowly, instinctively, the kid was building a brand and gaining followers. This became evident when he received a cease-and-desist letter from a company already registered as Turntable. He chose his new name, Pitchfork, as a sort of homage to one of his favorite zines, Puncture, and the suggestion of an “angry-mob mentality” of people chasing Frankenstein through the streets with “sharp weaponry.” He’d see a lot of pitchforks sticking out of hay bales as he drove from the suburbs into the city to see shows. “What solidified it as a sign was watching Scarface for the eighth time—in the opening scene they are interrogating him and he has a pitchfork tattoo and they know it means he’s an assassin—and so I was like, ‘This is so cool.’”
Slowly Schreiber acquired a staff, starting with like-minded soul Jason Josephs and expanding to a skeleton crew of mostly writers with backgrounds at alt-weeklies and decent dial-up connections. “I didn’t have any money to pay them. I’d give him free CDs. That ended up being the arrangement with everyone for a while.”
Pitchfork was updated monthly, then daily, and by the time Schreiber started receiving comments from people just as obsessed with music, books, and film as he was, he knew, “This is what I want to do with my life.” And soon the notorious decimal point, the most Twee and precious of record-rating systems, was born.
While every music-media outlet had its established rating system—the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, the self-described “dean” of rock writers, had his letter grades; Rolling Stone had its stars; and Spin, for a time, its red-to-green color-coding—Pitchfork went one step farther, pioneering the decimal system. 6.8? Why not 7? Shit!
“We were looking at all those other rating systems and thinking, how do we make something a little different to distinguish and separate ourselves? We had a ten-point scale and we opted to break it down into decimals so it would be that much more accurate. It’s kind of a scientific thing, sort of a gut thing. Reviewing so many records, as we did, we wanted to separate a flat 7 from an 8.”
The site went from five hundred readers a day to thirty thousand a year later. “I thought, Well, we can’t really get much bigger than this. Yo La Tengo and Built to Spill, these are artists who only sell thirty thousand copies of their records. This is the whole world. Today it’s like five million visitors a month.” It’s also become shorthand for a kind of Brooklandian obsession with new music and obscure cult bands. There’s an annual festival, feature-length documentaries, and as of the summer of 2013, a sister site, the Dissolve, devoted to film geeks. It’s even been parodied on the Indie-Twee-skewering sketch show Portlandia, the ultimate honorific. The site is precious and essential as responsible as Napster and file sharing for putting down the big, bloated print magazines one after another, leaving only Rolling Stone and N.M.E. standing.
As the Web became more accessible, it turned into a sort of global bedroom for the burgeoning Twee Tribe. Now lonely people obsessed with bands, books, films, and art could find each other and pair off in a blink. Even analog forms were reaching out beyond the metropolises: public radio stations like Chicago’s WBEZ produced This American Life, which began national syndication in 1996. This weekly story-driven show applied the same outsider-observing-life approach that became a kind of “What a Wonderful World” for Indie kids that wasn’t saccharine or repellently chilly. There was sadness in the voice of host Ira Glass that was probably reflexive, but that made him seem invested—not only in the subject but in the weirdness of the “American life” too. Glass seemed big brotherly and became a friend to millions as the decade wore on; someone they would never meet like Morrissey or Stuart Murdoch but someone who knew them, and whom they felt they knew as well. Its thematic shows soon bred its own roster of Twee Tribe heroes, personal essayists like David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, herself a former college Indie-rock radio DJ.
“Music was important in that subculture, but it wasn’t all-important. Elvis Costello was God, but so was Kurt Vonnegut,” says Vowell of this new world in which technology seemed to be surging by the minute, taking away the very notion of obscurity and cultishness with every inch it gained.
Chapter 11
Sic Transit Gloria
1996–2001
In which moviegoers are given an alternative to the established Indie-film tropes of gunfire and pop-referencing quips of the Tarantino variety, and another great 1990s auteur emerges as the quintessential Twee director and, stylistically, the constructor of his own self-contained cinematic universe, one that addresses, again and again, the coming storm of adulthood and the passing of time.
Another wave, as influential as the Nouvelle Vague, came in the 1990s with regard to cinema and produced a half dozen or so highly influential auteurs and one bona fide superstar to rival Quentin Tarantino, who, let’s be frank, led his own one-man wave that was as anti-Twee as possible (save, to be fair, a bin-digging series of soundtracks).
From slight, bespectacled Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse in 1995 through Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, Whit Stillman’s trilogy-closing The Last Days of Disco, and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, from the polarizing (the cutesy-poo French farce Amélie and the often powerful, sometimes cringingly precious Miranda July debut Me and You and Everyone We Know) to the near unanimously acclaimed (The Squid and the Whale), these films defined a certain collective shriek that would resonate for a decade and find favor with directors from both the super-low-budget mumblecore school, profiled a bit later, and the Hollywood-studio-approved Judd Apatow conglomerate of actors and filmmakers. The noise was a reaction, primal but still somehow polite, to the simple passing of time as well as the question: What does one do when the body ages and yearns and grows and becomes less beautiful, and the world does the same? Simply, how do you, in the words of Belle and Sebastian, “do something pretty while you can,” when you are acutely aware that the hourglass has been turned over?
“We’ll be forty in five years. Forty is basically fifty, and then after that, the rest is just loose change,” spacey, kinky-haired Hamish Linklater frets in Miranda July’s 2011 film, The Future.
“What the fuck is going on?” Ben Stiller rages at his aging body and coming irrelevance in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, released the previous year.
Even rugged matinee idol George Clooney’s titular Mr. Fox in Anderson’s stop-motion animated adaptation of Roald Dah
l’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) doesn’t want to stop his youthful practice of stealing chickens even though it’s become a threat to his safety. “In the end, we all die, unless you change,” his wife, voiced by Meryl Streep, warns him.
“Sic transit gloria,” as Max Fischer says in Rushmore, which we will get to in a little bit: a Latin term for “Thus passes the glory (of the world).” Fischer saves Rushmore Academy’s Latin program, but nobody is spared from Father Time: he’s the shark or the giant gorilla or the vampire in these “monster movies.” And his victims aren’t always human. Ways of life, modes of behavior, and in the case of Anderson’s latest film, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, once elegant Old World palaces, are prone to falling into “shabby decay.”
They are all, in their own ways, as angry and defiant as Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider or Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. They simply don’t know what to do with that anger. “Bottle up and explode,” as Elliott Smith sang. That was one option. It was like every film became an Indie-rock version of Laurence Kasdan’s The Big Chill overnight, and instead of Motown, we got Smith and his sulky brethren to score them.
In the main, the mid-’90s saw an ongoing cultural debate about violence in cinema, peaking with the 1994 summer release of Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone’s Quentin Tarantino–penned, kaleidoscopic take on Terrence Malick’s Badlands. But as with the years after Punk, and artists like Elvis Costello, the most potent form of violence is the roiling, internal kind. It’s a quieter mayhem, and it informs just about every Twee hero of this era. Call it “talky violence”—the cinema of Hartley and Stillman, Baumbach and Solondz and Jonze, everyone but Coppola, whose characters don’t seem to speak much at all, or Anderson, whose characters are sometimes struck dumb by the enormity of it all. Still, these are characters in states of severe unrest, and instead of shooting, they shoot their mouths off or shut them for prolonged spells to make their points.