Beer and Pavement

I don’t know whether I read it or saw it, but Kurt Cobain once referred to the popular rock music of his time as “beer and lifestyle music”. You know, music that wasn’t serious. Bands focused on getting wasted and doing lots of chicks¹. It was about fun. No one needed a serious REM or U2 to ruin the enjoyment.

That was so long ago that music has come full circle. Beer and lifestyle music is OK in serious music circles. This happened years ago, but it’s not always done well. Jon Spencer did it well for one, maybe two albums². Bob Pollard practically made a career out of music for beer drinking. Beer and lifestyle music has come a long way since the days when Kurt Cobain despised it.

Enter Japandroids. They write serious songs about beer and lifestyle³.

I loved, loved their full-length debut, Post-Nothing. The unbridled exuberance of youth of this record is completely captivating. They make me believe again. Japandroids make me want to mosh and throw half-empties at bands again⁴. The music has that effect on people.

So, tonight, I saw this twosome that sounds like a five-some play a local club.

They went bat-shit-crazy. There was a mosh pit. A mosh pit.

I was so giddy, I bought my third choice of t-shirt and a 7″ I never intended on purchasing.

So, if by some chance you have the opportunity to see a Japandroids⁵ show, do it. And don’t do it for me. Do it for you.

Notes:
¹This has not changed and probably never will. The point is more that bands wrote songs about this shit. It was pretty shallow stuff, really.
²Mo Width was great, but I haven’t listened to it in years due to a cassette dub that was lost to my car stereo years ago. Orange is a classic forever.
³Or I’ve fallen for their trap of making me feel young again.
⁴I moshed at one time, but I never threw a half-empty.
⁵I never did get back to beer and lifestyle music, did I? Basically, Japandroids make it seem cool for the first time ever. I think I need to address this issue in a future post.