Top 20 #19: AFI

Back at it. I said I was going to post once a week, but... well...

On to #19.

I remember watching a punk documentary (maybe American Hardcore?) where someone was comparing music scenes in the Midwest with music scenes elsewhere. The big quote went something like: "When you're from a place like New York or L.A., you just gotta jump into the pool. In the Midwest, you gotta dig the well yourself."

1999 was an awful year for music. Let me rephrase that: 1999 was an awful year for music if you lived outside of a major city, or pretty much anywhere in the Midwest. I've noticed that there seems to be quite a bit of '90s music nostalgia within the past couple of years, but it's always up until about '95-'96. Nobody talks about what came after that. There's a good reason.

This was before the internet became the Great Musical Archive it is today. Anyone can type the name of a band they like into Google, and within 15 minutes have a list of a dozen other bands that have a similar sound. We didn't have that. We listened to the radio to expose us to new music. Terrestrial radio. This was the period after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which relaxed ownership rules for radio stations. Clear Channel was gobbling up assets left and right, standardizing playlists and quashing any deviation from the norm. (Side note: radio stations are struggling today. Turns out people would rather choose what they listen to than be told what to listen to. Another example of the ubiquitous "We'll tell the customer when they're right" policy going to shit. Looking at you record labels.)

Here's a list of the top 22 modern rock tracks of '99 to help illustrate my point:

There is 1 song on that list I like, 2 I find tolerable, and the rest make me contemplate eating a bullet. This should have been a time when it was easy to swim against the grain, when there were throngs of people crying out for better rock! But, alas! It was not to be. In '99, like in every other year, these songs were hits because they appealed to a large number of people. Now, we can argue about whether people given a wider array of options would have chosen these particular songs, but that's a debate for another time. The important revelation I had in '99 was that my tastes did not align with those of the average music listener. My Xanadu would not be on the airwaves, or in Circuit City (we had those back then.) Instead, I would have to hunt for the music I liked.

Enter AFI.

The first time I encountered AFI was when I saw their Black Sails in the Sunset on display at the CD store in the shopping center near the Olive Garden, which is about the most Midwest sentence that has ever been written. I was really into the Misfits and Samhain at the time, and with the artwork and the song titles, it seemed like this band was more of the same. I hid it from my mom after I bought it, because anything associated with death or negativity brought on a million questions from her that I didn't want to be hassled to answer.

The album was a letdown. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't as good as I was expecting. I gave it a few listens, then set it aside to find other albums that I liked better. It wasn't until '02 when I heard AFI again, and surprisingly, on the radio in L.A. It's funny that I can remember it so vividly: I was sitting in the room I had rented in Granada Hills, with the radio on, noodling with my guitar, when it came on. It was a late afternoon in the middle of the week, and it floored me the instant I heard it. I knew it was Davey Havok singing (he has a very distinct voice, if you've never heard it), which meant it must be AFI. When the song ended, I got in my car, drove to the mall, and bought it -- with some help from the clerk who knew I had heard "Days of the Phoenix" after I described it. 

The Art of Drowning was the album I had wanted Black Sails to be: dark and energetic, with this odd gothic ambience that you couldn't pin down. I bought the rest of their albums and dove headfirst into AFI fanaticism. To this day, I think Black Sails is the weakest album of their early work. Had I bought any other album, I would have been an AFI fanatic in '99 and had a few more glorious years of feeling like they were the best thing to happen to music in a long time. And I was most certainly a fanatic: I bought shirts, posters, joined the street team, learned to play their songs, read interviews with them; I lived and breathed AFI for a short period of time.

Then, Sing the Sorrow came out in early '03. What it pointed to was a new musical direction, and one I couldn't get behind. It was more in line with the times, reminding me very much of Linkin Park, but without the horrible rapping. It wasn't a bad album, just mediocre. The lyrics seemed half-assed, not nearly as vivid  and beautiful as they had been on The Art of Drowning. The songs were boring and predictable. The album was overproduced, and sounded more like it was written with palatability in mind than a desire to make something interesting. It's been quite a while since I've heard AFI, and the last music I heard from them sounded like a U2/New Order/The Cure hybrid, nothing like the band I fell in love with. I've never seen them live. I couldn't get tickets on that Sing the Sorrow tour, and after that there was a very big point made in interviews that they don't play their older stuff at shows, so I had no interest in seeing them.

AFI makes it to #19 on the list because, for a few golden months, it looked like the world was going my way. They were a welcome breath of fresh air on airwaves that were inundated with a million downtuned bands with backwards hats.

I was going to embed a video for the AFI song "Coin Return", but Blogger won't let me do it. I keep getting the "Oops! Can't find video URL" message for every video I try. Either there are some copyright safeguards written into Blogger that block embedding (which, if that's the case, points to another massive problem in the music industry "WHY SHOULD OUR FANS BE ABLE TO SHARE OUR MUSIC WITH OTHER PEOPLE!? PAY FOR IT, YOU LITTLE SHITS!"), or I'm fucking something up.