Song That Caught Me By Surprise on Shuffle Because of How Great It Is, #1: Pinback—“AFK”

(I have a lot of songs I like a lot in a playlist, and I like to play the playlist on shuffle. In this space, I will write about one of those songs, on shuffle, at random.)

They were such pretty, prissy, prancy fancy boys. But this song is so EMO. Not in the way you’d expect from an actual emo band, any more than you would look to side project Goblin Cock (say it out loud, lol) for actual heavy metal. But it’s so much more front loaded with its angsty white dude bitchiness, and, in a rare coup, that’s exactly what makes this song a fucking jam. 

I had this conversation once with this guy who was way too fucking cool for everything. His name was Mike. He made music that was, like, IDM-inflected post-rock covers of the lightest, grooviest soul ballads of the 1980s, which sounds like it could be great, but in practice, at least in this particular case, was garbage.

We, me and Mike, started talking about Pinback, and for a while, a long while, he wouldn’t budge. They were, he said, “just a new variation on the rote two-guitars-a-bass-and-drums formula” that had handcuffed rock and roll, and also (just for the record) explicitly and straightforwardly described the music he himself made. 

After a while, though, he started to buckle under the weight of the world he himself had introduced: “new.”

And the whole cackling hyena’s intransigence of this whole affair is that the following things are true: Pinback is just some guitars, a bass, and some drums (sometimes mechanical), about which there is nothing new; AND, there is something totally new about the way in which Pinback plays some guitars, a bass, and some drums (sometimes mechanical). 

What I mean to say is, at some point in the conversation, Mike swung around to the other pole of his own opinion. Instead of being like "guitars, bass, and drums, but with a unique twist? that's bad!" he was like, "holy fucking shit, how would one ever even hope to come up with even the slightest variation of the guitar, bass, and drums formula, let alone REINVENT IT WITHOUT SO MUCH AS CHANGING THE INGREDIENTS."

And I was like, "Right on, Mike. I'm glad you've chosen to see it from my perspective."

Also, full disclosure: Mike was way, way cooler and a lot more handsome and charming—and probably smart, but I'm not willing to make that concession yet as it's only been 15 years since the last time I talked to him—than I was, and no doubt remains so to this day. Small victories on both sides?

Actually, one of the most bracing things I ever noticed while listening to sad white indie guy music was that a lot of the drum tracks on Pinback’s first album are obnoxiously low-effort drum machine beats. The thing is, that didn’t bother me in the least bit, before I noticed, because I couldn’t haver been less focused on the instruments as acts of individual contribution to the songscape. I just heard the song, and the beat was a part of that. I have been scratching and clawing to get back to that sense of holism, no matter how aloof it might seem, and no matter how impossible it might be, ever since. 

I think it’s maybe clearer to kids who will go on to know a lot about music than it is to adults who have gone on to learn about music: the best songs are the best because they sound like one, undifferentiated thing. A cloak of many colors, to be sure. But the moment when you learned to differentiate MC Hammer from Rick James, or Vanilla Ice from Queen, was in some way the beginning of a precipitous fall from grace. 

A fall from grace, to be sure, that has its own consolations, like reveling in the moment that the guitar splits off from the bass in “Bulls on Parade” to do a bunch of wah-wah gobbledygook before joining back into the rhythm section to form a uniform back-beat to a dope rapper, rapping about imperialist exploitation and dehumanization. 

It’s those moments where music coalesces into something indissociable itself, and then breaks apart into a series of discrete elements, that is the most interesting thing about music to me, now.

And this is where Pinback, to put it gingerly, fucking slays. 

If you need another example, take “Concrete Seconds,” off the Pinback album apparently nobody likes, but holy shit this song is great.

Two guitars are duetting, in a way, to make a broad-strokes harmonic backdrop, but then they’re also letting the bassline play its way in to furnish the harmony. But then, the singer starts singing, and he’s singing a melody that is wrapping itself around the bassline and the guitar harmonies. 

And then the keyboards start doing their own melodic caterwauling, in a way that has been endlessly influential in my own hamfisted attempts to make up pop songs, because, like, they’re there, just doing a whole different pop song, right in the teeth of this other great pop song?

I guess that’s what’s called counterpoint, but I don’t really know, because I never really studied music. I just think it’s neat.

And I didn't even say anything about "Not in a Slint way"!!!! Which, if you don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know—chat me up about it. I have more to say.