Built to Spill: Keep It like a Secret Tour
Sunday, Oct. 6, 8 p.m., $28–$32
Monday, Oct. 7, 8 p.m., $20–$23
Cat's Cradle, Carrboro
Hey, remember the late 1990s, when rock was rap, rap was pop, and teen song-and-dance acts reigned, selling music on plastic discs that cost a thousand dollars? When “All Star” and the internet were both just fads, not eternal all-consuming scourges? When the nation was seized by the mass delusion that American Beauty was a good movie?
Even if you weren’t born yet in those heady days, you probably feel like you remember them if you frequent pop-culture websites, which just wrapped a positively orgiastic summer of 1999 nostalgia. Roughly two decades has long been the nostalgia cycle’s sweet spot: In the ‘00s, VH1 debuted I Love the ‘80s. In the ‘80s, The Wonder Years enshrined the ‘60s, as Happy Days had done in the jaded ‘70s for the innocent ‘50s—a time when people were probably pining for, I don’t know, phosphate sodas and the telegraph and rolling hoops with sticks.
But online culture media has both cemented and weaponized twenty years as the magic number, and the retrospective format is a reliable click storm across every vertical. Of course, I read all of them (and pitch some of them) with candy-rush relish, and also with a certain gnawing unease as a sense of temporal monotony sets in. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like next summer, when the Y2K think pieces hit—all the space that will go to Santana and Rob Thomas’s “Smooth” instead of, you know, good new art?
Perhaps it’s because there’s nothing new under the sun that everything old sends us over the moon. In this, as in most aspects, the late-twentieth-century thing called indie rock mirrors the pop landscape it was sold as being set against.
This week at Cat’s Cradle, two bands are playing modest nineties indie classics in their entirety, with Built to Spill performing 1997’s Keep It Like a Secret on Sunday and Luna performing 1995’s Penthouse on Monday. Both are fairly winning propositions—the former was a moment when Doug Martsch’s concern chilled on the Midwest-size guitar theatrics to craft concise songs, while the film-noir dream-pop of the latter, from the heyday of Dean Wareham’s post-Galaxie 500 band, remains charming and redolent of a fedora-wearing kind of nerdy nineties cool.
These shows are part of a trend of classic-album performances—the music you loved, played by older people for more money. I don’t remember exactly when it began, but the first big one I remember was Belle and Sebastian performing If You’re Feeling Sinister live at the Barbican in 2005.
Though this aspect of nostalgia is a live phenomenon, it feels related to the online one sealing up our memories behind us. It’s a little alarming and very seductive. The risk of always looking back is missing what’s coming next, as the past exerts a continual drag on the present. But there’s something about knowing exactly what you’re getting. It’s like Nietzsche wondered: If someone told you that you had to live your life over and over, the same each time, would you call them a demon or an angel? If current trends continue, we’re all going to find out.
bhowe@indyweek.com
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