F*** Parquet Courts!
I’ve been meaning to rewatch the Noah Baumbach classic, Frances Ha, which I believe will provide historians with the perfect visual and spiritual definition of the ‘hipster bro’. I get that I’m a little late here but this is the point — that it took me way too long to get the point of Parquet Courts: a band unfairly labelled champions of the hipster bro, upon their scintillating debut.
In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig is gradually punished for flaking around a city that never sleeps, for far too much of her adult life. As her best friend advances towards the finer things, or just stability, she slaloms from one couch to the next — never really addressing her own need for regular income, or the fact that without purpose she will continue to slip down the socio-economic ladder. If you ask me, a hipster bro knows just enough about modern society to only ever align themselves to things — be it underdog sports teams, bohemian fashion houses, or kooky guitar bands — that themselves seem aligned to things so slight as to seem like nothing in particular. If there is visible effort behind a stance, or loyalty towards a product, or any discernible emotion about anything, then that is likely the incorrect way for a young person to subsist in the 21st Century. Solid matter doesn’t fare very well in a world whose geography is partly digital, and (thus) shape-shifting too constantly to represent any one finite quality.
You could get yourself a job, sure. Just don’t be an ass and die for the company. You could care for someone, but try not to embarrass yourself with, like, actual romantic gestures. When you first hear the cavalier croon of Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage, you can be misled rather easily into thinking this is indeed the champion sound of the hipster bro — that they too, with rambling ass-hat poetry and amusement park synths and doodled album covers, are trying way too hard not to give a shit.
On closer inspection, or perhaps several years later, one finds that there’s a real core to these New York kids; a process beneath the silly swagger. I am training myself to reject buzz novels — I am too often disappointed, or underwhelmed — the way I quite easily rejected buzz albums in my 20s. Looking back at my townie years, whence I argued constantly with varsity friends about picking the right side in the cosmic battle between the underground and the mainstream, I see I was a pretty ruthless arbiter of taste early. If I didn’t feel the beat in my chest immediately, if a riff didn’t tickle the tip of my spinal cord, I was out. But I’ve said more than once on this website that something weird happens to your chest and your spinal cord as you age. The first thing I look out for in a great rock song now, and thank God there are valiant children trying still, is an insightful bass guitar — because it turns out this is where good bands put the extra cheese, the pickle extra, justify the secret sauce.
I said ‘fuck Parquet Courts’ once, because everyone said they were the past, the present, the future we all wanted, all at once. They would save rock ’n’ roll. All the silly superlatives we gladly assign to another shiny new act within a few months. I thought Savage routinely sounded hungover. I thought the songs sounded all the same, all organy. Then I disappeared for a few years, used Apple Music to get into Lou Reed and the Stones, and resurfaced willing to analyse old quarrels. (I never ‘got’ The Flaming Lips ’til recently either, only ever enjoying this one shred I can’t for the life of me locate now … )
I’ve only recently signed my ears over to Spotify, and technically it hasn’t been smooth-sailing. But I am observant of what the service has done to my music-collecting behaviour; how I’m once again inclined to give good people one whole song to impress me, instead of downloading an entire album just because it’s all right there. Applied to the Parquet Courts experience, I’m finally in on the joke, and also the moments the joke is actually a dry, pithy takedown of the hipster bro psyche. The line “Cellphone service is not that expensive/ But that takes commitment and you just don’t have it,” is delivered with exactly the energy of someone that’s run out of valid arguments against passive behaviour, and I like to think to was sung to me for taking so long to get here.
Parquet Courts is self-defensive, that’s what I mean, and that’s such a rare stance to angle a bunch of lyrics from. That they’re in the room with you, hipster bro — I suppose at some new cola-&-wine enclave, or some gallery exhibit, or some arthouse screening — is actually an admission of hypocrisy. But that these songs are wispy arguments affords Courts all the self-awareness to suppose they’ve roused themselves from counter-societal sleep. Your anti-war stance doesn’t mean shit if you’ve never lived through one. Your Black Lives Matter poster is but crayoned activism. Your insistence on defining and calibrating your more selfish emotions, just so you can ‘do you’, is frankly a little unsettling.
On top of everything, it turns out Parquet Courts are exactly the band I needed to see out the rest of my youth — to close out a career amongst the trends. Oasis were great for puberty, Arctic Monkeys made me try things, and the Strokes fortified my value system. But everything I could possibly want in a band that isn’t the Rolling Stones is in Parquet Courts: hammy vocal delivery (check); riffs that allow for shoulder-to-shoulder, heel-to-heel shimmies (check); and a refined, gentlemanly wit pastried inside some riotous bass.
All hail Parquet Courts: this website’s favourite freaking band.
‘Sympathy for Life’, an album, drops October 22nd.
