In his year-end review of Marah’s 2008 album a couple days ago, my colleague Paul Cantin mused about how we tend to look forward to a new year with a sense of hope, optimistic at the promise that a fresh start to the calendar may bring.
Pardon me if, as this particular auld lang syne approaches, I’m not so sanguine about the immediate future.
While the bright light of Obama’s election is perhaps a major turning-point in American politics and society, it seems clear that, as the president-elect himself has cautioned, the economy is very likely to still get worse before it gets better. That reality seems as clear for the music and journalism industries as it does for the banking and auto industries. (Though musicians and journalists aren’t about to be the recipients of any government-bailout windfalls.)
So what surprises do the next dozen months hold, for those who love to listen to the kind of music we cover (whatever it may be), and for those who enjoy reading about that music in the newfangled website/bookazine adventure that is No Depression in the, uh, Near Depression?
Well, let’s take a sneak-peek at our history-to-be, with the help of a double-secret internet portal (development codename: TheFuture’sNotWhatItUsedToBe.org) that allows us to access the pages of various websites up to twelve months in advance. (A tip of the hat is due here to the eminent sports-and-music scribe Phil Sheridan, who used to write a very similar column and perhaps still does for the last page of Magnet magazine at the start of every year. Essentially I stole this whole idea kit-and-caboodle from him.)
January 2009: Plans for a celebrarory night-before-the-inauguration Chicago-roots-music-oriented shindig at Washington, D.C., nightclub the Black Cat Lounge (featuring the Waco Brothers, Freakwater, Andrew Bird, Judson Claiborne, and others) are scrapped when gas prices suddenly jump to $7 a gallon and none of the bands can afford the cost of traveling to the nation’s capital. In a pinch, a ragtag band of politicos is thrown together to take the stage instead, with longtime George W. Bush associate (and former songwriter for Buddy Miller’s first band) Mark McKinnon fronting a crew that includes Congressman John S. Hall of the band Orleans, the ghost of Lee Atwater on lead guitar, and Bill Clinton on saxophone. Al Franken emcees, though it remains unclear whether he’s been elected to the Senate.
February 2009: Mere days before its scheduled release on the 24th, Neil Young’s Archives project is postponed once more, with feeling. The new release date is announced as April 1, which just seems foolish. Not to mention that April 1 isn’t a Tuesday, and everyone knows that all albums are released on Tuesdays; failure to adhere to the strict Tuesday release-date procedure has been reported to result in a major threat to the United States economy. (Hey, wait a minute….)
March 2009: Austin’s venerable South By Southwest conference and festival announces that the continued collapse of the music industry has reached such proportions that SXSW is no longer viable, and cancels the event. Somehow, everybody shows up in Austin in mid-March anyway (gas having plunged back down to 98 cents a gallon in late February), with thousands of bands performing for free at daytime parties in art galleries, barber shops, and urgent-care clinics across the city. At night, however, Sixth Street is a virtual ghost town; not a single note of music is played anywhere in the city between the hours of 8pm and 2am.
April 2009 (and, no, Archives did not come out on the 1st; it’s rescheduled for July 14): Inspired by Axl Rose’s superhuman feat of getting Chinese Democracy in stores a mere 15 years after Guns N’ Roses’ last record, reclusive Texas songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey at long last resurfaces with the 37-years-in-the-making follow-up to his legendary self-titled debut. Though it took Ramsey more than twice as long as Axl, the effort seems to have paid off when early reviews contend the record is easily more than twice as good as GNR’s. (Damning with faint praise, perhaps.) Shortly thereafter, M. Ward & Zooey Deschanel hit the charts with their cover of the new album’s adorably quirky tune “Possum Hate”.
May 2009: Billboard acknowledges the fastest-growing sector of the music marketplace by unveiling a new chart called the Buzzin’ 100 Ringtones, focused on the best-selling five-second snippets of popular songs. Topping the first chart: #5, those four notes from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; #4, “Freebird” played in its entirety but sped up 700 times faster than normal; #3, Roger Daltreys’s scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (cuts off halfway through); #2, Bachman Turner Overdrive’s cameo on The Simpsons singing the words “workin’ overtime” from “Takin’ Care Of Business” (prefaced by Homer Simpson demanding, “Get to the ‘working overtime’ part!”); and #1, a mashup of artists singing one word each of the chorus lyric from Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”, with Ray Lamontagne singing “I,” Ben Sollee singing “Think,” some dude on YouTube singing “You’re,” and Cat Power singing “Crazy.”
June 2009: Sales of vinyl LPs officially re-overtake CD sales but vinyl-makers voice serious concerns about the future viability of their business, citing the growing market in wax cylinders, as evidenced by a much-ballyhooed series of new releases by the boutique indie Mississippi Cylinders featuring recently unearthed tracks by a half-dozen of Portland’s least-known bands from the once-thriving klezmer-kazoo scene on Yamhill Street circa 1956. LP-industry execs travel to Washington via hot-air balloon to ask Congress for assistance.
July 2009: Neil Young scraps his plans to release his Archives set on Blu-Ray in favor of the new Green-Ray, which is deemed a much more environmentally friendly format. In a subtle twist of irony, 2 million recently purchased Blu-Ray units shortly thereafter turn up in landfills. The new release date is November 24.
August 2009: In memory of their departed compadres Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, old friends Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson announce plans for a Highwaymen tribute/reunion concert. Predictably, they recruit Merle Haggard for one of the two fill-ins, but the surprise choice for the other spot is T. Boone Pickens. (Which still leaves Kristofferson the roughest singer of the bunch.) Pickens gets to work immediately in converting Willie’s entire fleet of buses from biodiesel to wind power.
September 2009: The continuing struggles of the music industry hit home hard with the Americana Music Association, which is forced to outsource its annual convention from Nashville to New Delhi. The organization’s revised title for the circumstances, the Indiana Music Association, causes much confusion with airline itineraries and John Mellencamp fans, but Terry Allen’s song “New Delhi Freight Train” enjoys a minor resurgence as a result of the relocation.
October 2009: Big & Rich officially change their name to Small & Poor. (Oh, and: Texas 57, Oklahoma 16.)
November 2009: Shockingly, Neil Young’s Archives box finally hits the shelves on November 24 as (belatedly) promised. But its value takes a hit the next day, when the all-things-Neil site Bad News Beat, following their standard practice of lifting content in its entirety from other sources, transcribes every bit of text from the 234-page hardcover book included with the set and posts it on their homepage. Neil’s camp attempts to address the situation but is confounded to find that the BNB site’s “contact” links are a black hole to nowhere.
December 2009: Our web-portal window into the future gets fuzzy because all of the websites by the end of next year are just links to other websites linking to each other, with nobody actually having any original content to publish anymore. Musicians have given up everything other than just singing on their front porches, but on the bright side, they’ve found day jobs with Obama’s Energy Progress Administration, helping to build a new national infrastructure independent of the need for oil. Somehow there has risen from the depths of these trying times a sense of hope for the next new year. And, with everything having been pretty much fully deconstructed, the groundwork has been laid for the new Roots Rock Scare of ’10.
We’ll see you there.
