The noise chirps and whistles at you to come over, into your own wired cellar of a mind. Enter into an endlessness you’d only imagine to be somewhere outside. All in a small breadth, “In My Head”. Eliot is one of many who plays a role in the developing music community of LA—an atmosphere that’s abundant with the creations of the young generation.
Absent Fever and the physical label JAXART Records have teamed up to present a compilation of 7 artists of LA up-comers and explorers. The compilation, called Generation Y Not, will be made into 1,000 CD’s distributed and given away for free around the US. To introduce you to the artists of Generation Y Not, 7 videos were made by the even younger videographer pxl, the fourth of which with Eliot (who also runs the collective 6bit).
Generation Y Not is available digitally on Absent Fever’s bandcamp, with more details regarding the physical release coming soon, and 3 more videos on their way.
/// Video by pxl ///
Honeydrip - Dull Tydes Bring Us All Down Sometimes
“Dull Tydes Bring Us All Down Sometimes” is one of seven tracks on Generation Y Not. Generation Y Not is a compilation of seven young LA based musicians (Honeydrip included) that is being released tomorrow digitally via Absent Fever and on 1,000 free CD’s via JAXART Records.
Seduced by the dirty-minded, spoiled, cynical animals. The dirty-doers that seduced us past any slept-with sort of seduction. It was a seduction like a childhood sweetheart - though we were trying too hard to be all but childlike. The friendless friends and the backs of the cars that bragged ironic maturity. We were a miserable crew with black and blue backs of eyes and knuckle alps, with a sex induced drowsiness, and half-dark politics. Mouths pale and poisoned, talkative enough to soon be the seducers ourselves. Surely we were to blame, but wouldn’t want it any other way.
Generation y Not
Below is the very first post I did for the newly launched DIT blog collective PORTALS that I’ll be contributing to :::
Punk bands like The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Television, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and heaps more pursued the conviction that “if nothing gets challenged, nothing gets changed”. Punk culture of the 80’s was the teenager opposed to the bourgeois - it was the outcasts and the isolated, the vicious and frustrated, the protective of their youth. Each youth generation opposes mediocrity; mediocrity is the explicit opposite of adolescent sentiments. While teenagers, like myself, are experiencing the affliction of discovering their identities, the pressures of conformity, and the trouble of expectations, a society of mediocrity feels fictitious. If the youth of the 80’s popularized the opposition to the bourgeois, I wonder what the youth of the present is repelling.
Youth will always be defiant of the adulthood they are expected to enter; but there’s a hugely significant difference in the vocalization of that defiance today. The distinction is the identical vocal opportunity of the present. If I’m 16 and my blog has the same readership contingency as anyone’s, then what implication does that have on the 16-year-old musician? The most prevalent bearing of that opportunity is in resources. The 16-year-old musician has the equivalent music production opportunities as his seniors on a fundamental level. This makes debatably the most colossal impact on the beat scene. An immense amount of what’s blogged about on sites akin to PORTALS is sample-based, and in synchronicity with that, teenagers make an apparent portion of the music blogged about. In my mind, that doesn’t seem aberrant in the least bit. To me, it feels conspicuous – but only because I was born into the generation of the accessible.
The idea of youth having the same volume of expression as adults is hastily becoming less and less an exception to the norm. Less and less are we identified as young and held within the connotation that we’re the atypical of the teens. Industries fetishizing youth and using age as a marketing tool is becoming less rampant in the music world – and more so in the blogging community where artists are discovered in the open playing field of the Internet. And so if the voice of youth is becoming more and more received, I wonder if the youth of today is repelling mediocrity or if we’re becoming that commonality. This idea of becoming what you’re contrary to is something that bands like Nirvana spoke of. Kurt Cobain said that the mass recognition Nirvana received in the consumerist world was unequivocally what they contested. I wouldn’t say though that the prospect of adolescents and adults being comparable in the music world is carried with such a negative connotation. I’d say that it’s an inevitable fate.
Because of the technology operated sphere my generation was carried into, it would be unfeasible for youth today not to have the inclination to share themselves on the internet. If young artists were not blogged about, it would be obvious that those who steer the music community were deliberately disregarding a group that compensates for a vast portion of music. I think that the larger music sites are just now beginning to honestly ratify young artists. While smaller sites tend to cover younger artists more frequently, likely because they’re less steered by those of the industry. The influx of youth involved in music is immense, and no longer solely as the consumer, but furthermore as the creator. The question now is what qualifies the legitimacy of music? My response would be that nothing qualifies validity; the validity in music is as unrestricted as its distributor, the Internet.
Below are 3 tracks by 3 artists who have been born into a generation parented by the internet:
Honeydrip - “I Know” (click the link to listen)
Caves - “1993” (click the link to listen)
XXYYXX - “Never Leave” (click the link to listen)
