For the Record

Author: Emily Temple

When you really love a band, and I mean really love them, you wind up systematically and emphatically embracing everything about them. You learn their names and their children's names, their favorite colors and their children's favorite colors. You plaster pictures of them all over your walls and wear their logos across your chest. You doodle their song lyrics in your notebooks in class. You listen to their side projects, no matter how obscure or abysmal (or awesome). You maybe, if you're really obsessed, even shell out the money to actually buy their CD.

Your life becomes complete when you finally have the opportunity to see them live. But what happens when you can't embrace everything? What about when you go see a band you love, look around, and can't stand the people around you? Or when you wonder who these people are and how you've possibly managed to become associated with them? Have you changed, or has the band?

This summer, the Hold Steady played a free concert at the epic McCarren Park, an abandoned public pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn known for seasonal concerts as varied as M.I.A., Devo, Regina Spektor and Sonic Youth. Personally, I love the Hold Steady, so obviously I was psyched to go. But let's back up for a second. The first time I saw the Hold Steady was about three years ago in the upstairs part of a dingy restaurant/bar in Montreal, where I was one of about 15 spectators in a standing a respectful distance away from the stage. I might have been the youngest person in the room, although given the numbers, perhaps that doesn't say as much as I think it does.

The McCarren Park show may have been the polar opposite. Once the youngest person at Hold Steady shows, I was now seemingly the oldest and, though I may flatter myself, the least annoying. I had wiggled my way up to the front, and all around me were underage (easily identifiable by their conspicuous lack of green wristbands), proto-pop-punk kids who wanted to mosh. I resolutely did not want to mosh. I made this clear by standing firmly in my spot and, when jostled, by fiercely jabbing my elbows into whatever black and red checked soft places were at hand. Slammed by a particularly enthusiastic fourteen-year-old boy, I reached out to brace myself against the railing. The girl next to me looked over with what looked like pity, and asked me condescendingly if I would rather switch with her - which I didn't do. She talked to me as though she were talking to some little old woman who had wandered onto a rowdy bus and needed a safe seat. The physical discomfort of being near stupid moshing teenagers was not what bothered me. It was the fact that I was in the company of such people, that they also raised their fists and shouted along to the lyrics (albeit only to the most recent two albums, I noticed), that I was in a club they also belonged to. But not only this, because as I looked around, I realized with horror that the Hold Steady does kind of cater to the teenage misfit, the self-aware, self-torturing, but actually fairly normal kid.

Sadly, the disgust I felt at the concert has left me feeling cold about the Hold Steady as a whole, and I haven't really been able to listen to them since. Is it the band that has changed, or have I just grown out of them? Maybe it's a little of both. Maybe I should suck it up and realize that just because lame people like something, doesn't mean I can't like it too. I mean, doesn't everyone you know totally dig Radiohead? And aren't a lot of people you know totally lame? Does that mean Radiohead is bad? Does it mean coffee is bad? Does it mean long walks on the beach are bad? I guess not. But it does mean that they aren't special anymore. And that, at least, will make the pictures come down.