Metropolitan Blog of Babylon: September 2011

I Can Hear the Heart Beat as One will probably go down, according to most music critics whose taste isn't swayed by what's catching the attention of the low bar set by music listening public, as one of the best rock records of the nineties.

Unlike certain indie rock bands who have become either insanely popular like the Arcade Fire (sentimental bourgeois crap) or Tv on the Radio (talented musicans who create unoriginal hipster crap), Yo La Tengo has never been overhyped and whatever hype they may have received, it has been warranted.

Coming out of Hoboken, New Jersey has made Yo La Tengo an even more valid and enigmatic force. Instead of bumming around gentrified locales as Williamsburg or the Lower East Side, Yo La Tengo's place of origin is where their musical journey through an Americana begins and then terminates on that precise spot on a Venn diagram where city, suburban town and rusticated country meet. If one is to take a cross country trip staring in New York City, Long Island, or Westchester, it does not really begin until one crosses the Hudson and arrives in Jersey. This is the place where Yo La Tengo, fronted by the music critic's musician, Ira Kaplan, begins to carry out its vague purpose that reflects the cosmopolitan pulse and ethic that always gets mistaken for just existing in the infinite concrete in urban environs of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Known for playing covers that slide back and forth on the spectrum of rock, R&B, and punk, evident by their legendary appearances on New Jersey's WFMU, the longest running American independent radio station, highlighted on Yo La Tengo is Murdering the Classics, Yo La Tengo's music is more likely to tell the story of a Jewish kid graduating high school in West Virginia like Soupy Sales or a young French doctor sent to Detroit to study the health of autoworkers who later unforunately became an anti-Semite than middle-class art student who recently graduated, moves to the city and tries to make it as an artist while doing busy work for his uncle's law firm.

"We're an American Band" is the second to last closing of I Can Hear the Heart Beat as One. It's not a tongue-in-cheek response, but perhaps a serious challenge to the Grand Funk Railroad song of the same name. Yo La Tengo's version, written sometime in the 90s, just like the video for "Sugarcube" predicts the commericialization and branding of indie rock, a term that would become as empty and meaningless as the term alternative rock was when the faces Kurt Cobian and Eddie Vedder were plastered all over Mtv. Furthermore, "We're an American Band" is an unconcious fuck you to the excesses of the old rock & roll cliches epitomizing the American capitalist consumption that Grand Funk Railroad glorified in 1973.

With lyrics such as "So hard to choose between conceit and rock, Some college in the spring, the sound is all wrong/Reset the mate to our Flamin Groovies song/Driving, night again, they're late, car crash/We'll turn to look unless we're going too fast", Yo La Tengo's "We're An American Band" is about the real shit, the everyday shit, working class shit, middle class shit. If Yo La Tengo made a hip hop record it would be Boogie Down Production's "Love's Gonna Get You." Grand Funk Railroad's American band shares a semblance with the rich boy fantasies of Puffy or even the throngs of the Brooklyn bourgeois, new arrivals to the borough who have driven up the cost of living for the borough's natives. It's the same newly arrived Brooklyn bourgeois who came to Prospect Park one summer night a few years ago to watch Tv on the Radio play, believing their tastes were so much different than everyone else, but unbeknownst to them, their tastes were trite and the least bit unique.

* It should be noted that Yo La Tengo has covered Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band". Why Yo La Tengo has remanded releveant is because they know when to not take themselves too seriously, unlike that whiny elite prep school punk ass bitch, Win Butler.