An Alternate History
I was born in 1978. I started grade school in 1983; high school in 1992; college in 1997. I got married in 2003; became a father in 2007 and again in 2009.
These are dates. These are years, specifically, and they are landmarks. I know that I started grade school in 1983 because I know that I am old enough that grade school would have begun in 1983. 1983 represents a span of time, and within that time billions of people participated in billions of things, and one of those people was me and one of those things was starting grade school.
- “Stars” — Hum
- “I Am Controlled By Your Love” — Helene Smith
- “Final Hour” — Lauryn Hill
- ”Good” — dälek
- “Days Like These” — Low
- “Last Good Growth” — Boilermaker
- “Water’s Edge” — Tsunami
- “Greyscale” — Jejune
- “Elderberry Wine” — Wednesday
- ”Love-I-Tis” — Johnny Ross & The Soul Experience
- “Daylight” — Aesop Rock
- “Night Light” — Aesop Rock
- “Writer’s Cramp” — Hüsker Dü
- “Song Three” — I Hate Myself
- “Little Chang, Big City” — Seam
- ”Any Day Will Be Fine” — Mojave 3
I actually remember starting grade school, in a sort of hazy way. That is an important moment in my life — it’s a moment that plays in my mind as a kind of patchwork. I remember having a full set of brand new school supplies, and being kind of weirded out by the room, and feeling a little scared because I didn’t know anyone. I remember these things because they were all moments — they were things of importance.
But I don’t specifically remember them just because they happened in 1983. 1983 is just a year. It is not a moment.
In 1993, in Duluth, Minnesota, three members of Zen Identity — a post-punk-esque band in a post-hardcore scene — split away and started a new band. Their goal was to weird out crowds by doing the opposite of what was expected, and they called their new band Low. And, while the lineup fluctuated over the years, there were two primary constants: drummer Mimi Parker, and her husband Alan Sparhawk.
Low’s entire thing was to slow the fuck down. They used brushes instead of drumsticks and wrote songs that sounded best when using brushes instead of drumsticks, drawing out a kind of restless-yet-peaceful vibe that both promised and withheld a release. Instead of working with time, Low worked with moments, evoking a kind of intensity that was a stark contrast to the Hüsker Dü-inspired bands making up most of the Minnesota scene at that time. It was about space. It was about patience, I guess.
In 1994 they released their first album, I Could Live In Hope. I was still a freshman in high school. It’s an incredible album that evokes a certain timeframe. It’s of that year, and it transcends that year. And I know that because the first time I heard it was about six months ago.
The moments in our lives do not make a straight line. They bounce back and forth, because moments don’t happen in order. They are divorced from the construct of time. For every “Daylight” there’s a “Night Light.”
Don’t get me wrong — we organize these moments by date. Most minds crave the kind of strict adherence to a recognizable pattern that a calendar provides, and so when we think of things that happen we think of them based on when they happened.
I always wonder about the idea of “nostalgia,” and how things we never experienced can give us the same rush as the things that were already sewn in to the fabric of our identity. Maybe this is where that idea comes from.
Anyway, it’s probably time I start talking about record labels.
Most music labels are independent businesses. While the bulk of recorded popular music might be released by one of the three major recording conglomerates — UMG, Sony, and Warner had a combined 70% global market share in 2022 — the rest of it is released by one of thousands of different smaller niche record labels. For those of us who grew up in a smaller music scene, these labels are akin to a kind of cult. Dischord. Sub Pop. Epitaph. You rally around those labels and you religiously follow those labels, because you know that those labels are most likely to bring you what you need.
By nature of their size, smaller labels cannot be all-encompassing, which means as independent labels find their niche they tend to become hyper-focused. Being a fan of a specific punk label leads to a kind of “sameness” — smaller labels tend to release similar artists, and those similar artist go on tour together, and they rise and fall with not just the quality of the artists, but with the relevance of the genre itself. As a young Revelation Records die-hard, I found myself hyper-focused on a specific kind of emo and hardcore music, and while Sioux Falls became a weird oasis for punk tours traveling across the country, we were still only visited by artists that were supported by approving record labels.
So, despite being a super-fan of certain bands and genres, I still suffered from the lack of exposure that plagues pre-internet life in a minor metropolitan area. I found music that moved me, and I built a kind of identity around how that music moved me, but I was not actually aware of the full spectrum of the music itself. Of the other bands I might love. Of the directions I could take from there.
I bring this up because I’ve spent the past month diving deep into the Numero Group back catalog. Numero Group — a Chicago-based record label — initially made its name through a set of compilations that promised to provide “an alternate history” of popular music, and they did that by uncovering and re-releasing “lost” music from bands that didn’t get the attention they deserved — especially soul and R&B, but also a genre-less mix of whatever sounded cool. If you need to hear what White Zombie sounded like before they went full spooky glam, Numero’s got you. If you’re curious about the funk scene in Minneapolis before Prince became A Thing, Numero’s got you.
And, recently, if you’re wondering what you missed in the emo and post-hardcore scene when you were stuck in Sioux Falls during your teen years, Numero’s got you.
The brilliance of Numero’s model is not that they’ve hyper-focused on one scene for maximum benefit, but instead that they’ve built a brand and culture around knowing that every genre kind of blends together, eventually. This isn’t Numero co-founder Ken Shipley’s first record label — he was involved with a largely emo-focused label in the 90s — and in part because of that, Numero’s catalog is a multi-headed machine of scene restoration, charting not only the history we might have otherwise missed, but also the connections between the sounds and the scenes themselves.
The past month hasn’t specifically been about finding new emo bands, though it has been helpful to rediscover Boy’s Life and Boilermaker and Jejune. It’s been about expanding into a few genres that were to me, until recently, single-entity sounds. I have always loved Seam; I did not know, however, that I loved the entirety of a genre that I now know is called “slowcore.” (lol music genre labels are so dumb.) I have come to really respect My Bloody Valentine, but until recently I didn’t know that shoegaze is 1) wildly popular again and 2) a natural progression from everything I’ve always loved.
This is all so very esoteric to those of you that DO NOT CARE FOR A SECOND about the complexities and nuance of music genres and record labels and band composition, so thank you for humoring me, but the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t feel like any of this is a new discovery. While at some point in my life I might have felt embarrassed for missing this music when it was first released, or might feel like — GASP, NO — a poser … I don’t.
I don’t, because it’s backfilling the space, as if it’s always been there.
It’s probably scar tissue from the kind of self-flagellation that comes as a part of being in any exclusive scene — the “if you weren’t there, you really don’t understand” part of things. Instead, I see this as my own personal alternate history, part of my DNA in the same way as the music I listened to in the past.
And that’s where the moments come in, I suppose. We create our own alternate histories as we reevaluate what’s happened before. We realize there was a wider world that we never had time for. It doesn’t mean we’re too late, or that we were wrong before, but that we’re filling in the gaps. We’re shifting and adjusting our idea of what those years meant — 1983, 1997, 2009 — with greater context. With improved vision.
You didn’t need to be there to embrace the values and sound of any mid–90s scene — or 80s, or 60s. It’s not just music, either: you didn’t need to be there to feel the pain and injustice of systemic racism, and you didn’t need to be there to understand how scary the AIDS epidemic was to the gay community in the 90s, and you don’t need to experience everything happening now at a personal level to understand how fucked our world is getting.
Firsthand experience is not the only input for our personal histories. You can take moments and assign them wherever it makes the most sense. We don’t stop learning once the original moment has passed. We can still shape those moments into an alternate history. And if we’re not already collecting parts of the past to help fuel our future, then what the hell are we doing here anyway?
In 2021, Low released their final album: HEY WHAT. It’s weird, but it’s also perfect — it’s everything they were building up to, it feels like: the entire history of a band that I did not experience firsthand coming to a head on an album that I didn’t even really listen to until just this past month, despite it being critically acclaimed, and despite drummer Mimi Parker dying of ovarian cancer shortly after its release.
When you think you’ve seen everything, you’ll find we’re living in days like these.
Regardless, HEY WHAT is part of my alternate history now. I know this because when I hear it, I mourn a drummer I never knew and didn’t have a chance to appreciate in real life. When I hear it, I recognize the quiet parts, and I really recognize the crushing distortion. I see our world and can identify the parts where the beautiful harmonies show up, just as I can recognize the pain, the possessed discordant church organ inside all of our hearts.
I identify with the idea that life wasn’t designed to work in a straight line: it’s quiet, then loud; peace and noise. I know this song is a part of me, and has been my entire life, during that second verse, when then the distortion gets dialed to a peak and the lyrics fight to be heard.
It isn’t something you can choose between.
It isn’t coming in twos and threes.
Always looking for that one sure thing.
Oh, you wanted so desperately.
There are no sure things, but it doesn’t matter because we’d never experience them when they happen. Not fully. That’s not how things work. Despite what LinkedIN might tell you, you can’t just go get the life you’re looking for.
Instead, you experience what you can — the years pass, the landmarks are written down — and then you back fill the rest of the moments when they finally arrive. It’s about patience, I guess. It’s about waiting for the moments to arrive, and appreciating them no matter when that is.
Dissonance > Consonance
It might come as a surprise, but I couldn’t let this new obsession end without making an all-encompassing 1000+ song, 72 hour playlist. It’s called Dissonance > Consonance, because I definitely was alive during the early blog compilation days and I still have some of that model of naming things stuck in my mind.
- Dissonance > Consonance (Spotify)
- Dissonance > Consonance (Apple Music)
I hope you enjoy it — it is four or five genres of music that seem very different yet all come from the same base roots and all work together wonderfully, and it’s as close to a mission statement as I think I’ve ever found.