[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It was cleaner, for one thing.Shinier.And it was much more international, with British storeslike All Saints and Topshop and restaurants servingTaiwanese bao (buns) alongside the M Burger chains.• 101 •E X I L E I N G U Y V I L L EAnd the same went for Wicker Park.When I knew it, inthe early 1990s, Wicker Park was one of those slightlydangerous, edgy, neighborhoods where lofts and practicespaces were cheap to rent, where young women didn’twander around alone at night without an escort, andsometimes even the escort was nervous.The store frontswere run down and the bars were all dives; there werecoffee shops rather than cafés and one bought one’sclothing second hand.Now, there’s an American Appareland an Urban Outfitters shop, in between cute clothingboutiques and fancy brunch spots.According to the realestate site Trulia.com, a single family home there goesfor over a million dollars.The nightclubs and bars still cater to hipsters, but the hipsters are more legion and the restaurants are cleaner and more upscale.Wicker Parkis the Gangnam of Chicago, full of Wi-Fi-enabled cafesand the young people who frequent them.What’s happened to Wicker Park has happened tosimilar arty neighborhoods all over America.In the late1990s and the early 2000s, Chicago’s boats were lifted with the rising tide of the economy.From the mid-1990s untilthe dot-com bubble burst (and the Twin Towers camedown), America experienced high employment and lowinflation, and perhaps that accounts for an accompanyingsea change in the values that young people leaving college professed to admire.Perhaps after Reagan and the ickyconservative policies he represented began to fade out,the rebel individuality and artistic iconoclasm that once seemed cool to champion stopped being as appealing asnew opportunities in capitalism and the internet.Who’dwant to be in a band when dot-com entrepreneurship andthe joys of the social network beckoned?• 102 •G I N A A R N O L DIn short, after the advent of digital technology changedmuch of the media landscape, the world we lived inthen—our little group who’d always been and alwayswill, until the end—no longer needs to exist in the sameway it did.Since digital downloading has ‘freed’ musicfrom the corporate world, the indie scene such as it wasis now a meaningless construct.It’s over.No kidding:it’s over—as far away from now as World War II was atmy birth.And yet, as I wandered about the new Chicago(with my newfangled headphones in my oldfangled ears),I wondered about Guyville.In one sense, I am sure thereare a lot of new Guyvilles in the United States.But if we take Guyville to be a metaphor for a bohemian Americanmusic community and an aesthetic bounded and policedby male-determined standards of what’s good and what’sbad, then I would say that it is foundering.Whatsurprised me about that realization is that there is some poignancy to its loss.When I began this book, I did not set out to writea screed on third-wave feminism or a nostalgia-riddenlament on the death of indie rock.Instead, I’ve triedin these pages to show what it was about those timesthat made this record unique, why Liz Phair herself wasconsidered an outlier and a traitor by some, and whyothers (me, for instance) embraced her story as one indire need of telling.What I discovered while writing itwas that, despite the fact that its context is so specific, the record doesn’t really need that back-story to stand on its own musical merits.The narrative and emotional appealsit makes are strong enough to stand the test of time.At the same time, the telling of this tale has served as a reminder to me of how much has changed in music.The• 103 •E X I L E I N G U Y V I L L Echange from Victrola to gramophone to hi-fis to CDswas nothing compared to this one.Ironically, despiteits reliance on computer and internet technology, themusic scene of today is in some ways closer to the worldof pre-amplification, when music was purveyed solely inlive settings—in living rooms, opera houses, band shells, and other stages.In olden days, music appreciationnecessarily occurred in front of the performing artist;it didn’t exchange hands in the form of a commodity (arecord or CD) with a price tag on it, but was consideredsomething of great value nonetheless.Digital downloading has simultaneously moved theworld of music both farther and closer to that ideal.It is farther, because listeners can transfer and access millions of songs in seconds
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]