There it is. A real-life physical object. Not
something I downloaded or burned or ripped. I mean, obviously I already have it
illegally downloaded on my computer. How else would I know it was good before I
bought it? But whatever, now I own it. It can’t be accidentally deleted or lost
in a tragic computer crash. It’s official. I bought a CD in the year 2014. I
bought it with fifteen dollars of paper money. No card-sliding or
pin-numbering. I used Money to get this. And now it’s Mine.
But before you justifiably call me an old
fart, or another stupid 90s hipster, or a hoarder, I’ve gotta further explain why
this retro chic exchange had a true purpose and meaning.
I had grabbed this dandy little creature from
the merch guy at the Carsick Cars/Dean Wareham concert at the Bowery Ballroom
in New York City on April 5, 2014. After retrieval, I stared at this CD for a
sec in total awe and disbelief and told the guy, “Hey, this is important stuff
here.” And he said, “Yeah, I know.” And this lady standing behind me, she kinda
screamed, “YES,” in agreement.
I nodded at the enthusiastic stranger and
added, “I can’t believe I’m holding this. I never thought…” I shook my head and
stared more and then finally stumbled onto Delancey Street and got on with my
life.
What I was trying to spit out to the fellow
fan was that I never thought that I’d ever see Carsick Cars play music again,
and in fact I thought they were plain nevermore, and maybe never had been, and
all this time they were a figment of my imagination. But now they were here and
I had genuine non-Internet proof!
Carsick Cars are from Beijing, China. If
there are any journalistic Internet articles about Carsick Cars, chances are, the
articles will immediately inform you about Carsick Cars’ country of origin. That’s
their most easily marketable characteristic. This was nearly the only
significant information I could find out about Carsick Cars on the Internet. They’re
from Beijing, China.
What many of these articles fail to mention
is that Carsick Cars have one of the coolest noisy guitar sounds that I’ve ever
heard. And that’s the type of music that I listen to most of the time, weirdo
noise guitar punk garage rock, so I feel OK about shouting from the hilltops
that their guitar sound is fucking awesome and better than most guitar sounds
and I’ll even venture to say that I never find them boring.
More than five years ago, November 13, 2009,
I saw them in person at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Looking back, the
performance seems like another post-college mirage, something that happened to
me, but felt more dream-like than real. I had just graduated the past spring
and was still getting over the fact that I no longer had a college radio show and
I was living at home again and living at home was inevitably giving me
flashbacks to high school. I had PTSD. I went back to western Massachusetts to
see if I still had a soul.
My friends and I happened to stumble upon
Carsick Cars playing at the dining hall. Who knows why we were on the Hampshire
College campus, but what I do know was that a throng of young Chinese women
reacted to Carsick Cars like they were The Beatles. By the end of the show, I understood
their enthusiasm, and even felt encouraged to jump around to the last couple of
their songs, and didn’t even feel self-conscious.
Soon after that show I fell in love with
Carsick Cars’ records. Their 2007 self-titled debut has their greatest song,
“Zhong Nan Hai,” but their masterwork is the one I’m holding in my hands in
that picture: “You Can Listen, You Can Talk.” It was released in 2009 to such
little acclaim that I was almost certain I had made up the entire episode in my
mind in order to placate my otherwise depressing existence at the time. But there
it is, in my hand, courtesy of Maybe Mars, a Beijing CD label.
I’ve listened to that record so many times
that I can’t even properly describe it without drowning in clichés or “sounds
like” laziness. I can merely cite statistics to support my obsession: I’ve
listened to their best two songs, “Zhong Nan Hai” and the title track from “You
Can Listen, You Can Talk”, exactly 132 times each, according my iTunes library.
These, of course, are my all-time most-played songs. (I sent the music to our
fearless leader Ben, and he said they were like Sonic Youth, but with better
songs, even though most of the singing was done in Chinese. I thought this was
an apt description.)
These two records have lasted through the
past five years, enduring my descent into almost complete disillusionment with
modern popular culture and my ever-changing taste. Yet, over that time, I never
read, or saw, or heard anything about them anywhere, ever. Even Google couldn’t
tell me where to find Carsick Cars. I was stunned that one of my favorite bands
barely existed.
Then, suddenly, a few months back, without
any warning, there was a lead: during one of my Internet band-searching
sessions I found out that Carsick Cars were back. And they had a new album coming out, called “3.”
Plus, allegedly, Carsick Cars were playing with Dean Wareham in New York City
at the Bowery Ballroom. Of course, I had to go, to make sure they weren’t a
hallucination.
Sure enough, on April 5, 2014, there they
were, standing onstage upstairs at the Bowery, belting out the hits from their
three records. And of course they ended with “You Can Listen, You Can Talk” and
“Zhong Nan Hai.” They sounded great, like they hadn’t been on a mysterious
five-year hiatus. It was like they had been playing and touring and impressing
for the past five years and were setting the world on fire and were the hottest
buzz-band in the world.
In conclusion, Carsick Cars are real. Even if
they disappear for another ten years, I have their CD. It wasn’t a dream. It
was real. And the Internet can’t ever take that away.
Note: Dean Wareham was also unbelievable that
night, but you knew that already.
