Times New Viking is an Ohio rock trio that delivers raw rock ‘n’ roll. Jumping from different labels over the years including Matador and Merge, the band has released five proper albums in a little more than five years. On its last album, Dance Equired (Merge), Times New Viking dropped the lo-fi fuzz in favor of more melodious songs. These art-school grads from Columbus, Ohio, are still making music, and the band’s Elizabeth Murphy will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with her.
“Every time one sees a bad television show, one is watching a nation get ready for the day when Hitler will come. Not because the ideology of the show is Facistic; on the contrary its manifest ideology is inherently liberal, but the show still prepares Facism because it is meretricious art and so sickens people a little further. When people get collectively sick, the remedy becomes progressively more violent and hideous. An insidious, insipid sickness demands a violent far-reaching purgative.” —Norman Mailer
“It seems likely that many of the young who don’t wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don’t have the patience to make art.” —Pauline Kael
“Art used as an adjective meant that they were bypassing even the most rudimentary knowledge in the field.” —Pauline Kael
Murphy: They found out about weird. It is now employed to market mainstream pop stars, sell products and reinvigorate the populations of cities, replacing cool as the go-to adjective to stimulate sales. And it’s about time. The institution of cool has reigned longer than Kim Jong Il’s shades. Almost a century strong (it used to go by “hip”), cool really became the market ideal when youth culture mobilized in 1945 and became the consumer force it is today. Teenagers will unfortunately be here forever but cool was overdue to retire.
It’s an interesting sign of the times that weird is the focus group majority. Cool is easy to summon, history has spit-shined it down to that pair of sunglasses. That just don’t work on weird, which is neither a successor to, nor the subsidiary of cool. Weird is an ever-departing departure; spurious attempts to annex this shape-shifter are marked, recognizable by their self-(mis)diagnoses, as lame as giving yourself a nickname.
The iron law of cool is that it operates on disavowal, punctuated most recently by hipster denial. Although weird doesn’t hinge on a negation of the term, it certainly doesn’t use it as a qualifier. If you are sane enough to know you are crazy, you ain’t crazy.
This point seems to be lost right now. Everyone is so seduced by the increasing availability of weird, rejoicing in the good-riddance to cool, that they are blindly embracing anything tagged “freak” that gets tossed their way. Discerning taste is to be expected. Providing accommodations for artless entertainment because it snuck in on the freak train is not.
Examples of this are everywhere, here is an example of the opposite of this. Ryan Trecartin is a favorite video artist of mine. His work incites terror, laughter, inspiration, attentive listening, multiple playbacks and conversation.
Video after the jump.
http://vimeo.com/24968781
