So, the top of the post says “week five.” But, to those who have been following the escapade that is The Thirtying, you’ll know this is isn’t true. Life caught up with me and made me into a bad editor. The site’s been silent and I’ve had this column in my inbox for longer than I’d like to admit. Well, this week we find Dan at a Gutter Twins show…

They didn’t play “Dollar Bill”. There was no reason to expect that they would, I guess, but I secretly hoped. This is the danger of going to see rock shows by people with a CV that dates back several bands and side-projects and solo albums. You want them to play something that they’re bored with, maybe have already forgotten about.

Last week I dragged my wife, because I am Old and have a wife, to the second live show in the short career of the Gutter Twins, a 90’s rock supergroup of sorts, featuring Greg Dulli from the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers alongside Mark Lanegan from the Screaming Trees and occasionally Queens of the Stone Age, as well as a handful of solo records. They both sing lead vocals on almost every song, and all of the material in the main set was brand new, save a couple of covers. No material from either’s earlier bands until the encore.

Both Lanegan and Dulli have impressive post-90’s careers, of course, but it was interesting to notice that when people were calling out for songs, they weren’t asking for “Papillion” or “Strange Religion”; they wanted Whigs and Trees stuff.

Well, of course they did- it was a crowd of old people, y’all. I’m twenty-seven and I felt like I was in high school. There were occasionally people our own age where we were- right up at the front, thanks, still rock ‘n roll animals here- and there had to be a couple of people younger than us somewhere, but most of the crowd were in their thirties or older, the same age as the dudes onstage singing.

The band sounded great. The songs are all spooky and haunting, which are elements that have defined both Dulli and Lanegan’s post-90’s work, to varying degrees (Dulli is spookier, Lanegan is haunting-er), and they seamlessly blend both their styles, which is no mean feat given how disparate they are from one another, especially vocally. Lanegan has a dry baritone growl and Dulli sings kinda like an off-key drunk selling his songs through sheer conviction.

I say all this, mind you, under the full disclosure that the Afghan Whigs are pretty much my favorite band ever, and the first time I saw the Twilight Singers remains one of the coolest experiences of my life. So if you’re a fan of Dulli’s and you’re pissed that I’m calling him an off-key drunk, dude- that’s the point.

Anyway.

This column is supposed to have a point, but tonight I just want to think about the show, and rock music.

Oh, and the crowd. Because the crowd was wild. I’ve got my share of intense rock show crowd stories. I saw the Spectacle and Requiem play in a tiny community space in Jackson, Tennessee with a dozen self-professed rednecks who would knock each other’s teeth out for fun during the good bits of each song and then hug each other. I’ve still got a faint scar from that time when the guitar player from the Dillinger Escape Plan jumped off his stack and swung his guitar as he came down in the crowd. He cracked me upside the head and I bled a lot on the person in front of me. Andrew WK was in the crowd; you can’t leave a rock show just because your head hurts when that dude is watching you. I saw Megadeth in Mexico, where they take Megadeth fucking seriously. I don’t shock easily.

But the crowd at the Gutter Twins show- man, that shit was intense. And it was unprecedented, given the type of music they play. I mean, there are some big rock jams, some fast and heavy guitar parts, but they’re also a fairly soulful, contemplative sort of band. And all of the thirty and forty year olds around me didn’t give a fuck. Yeah, it kinda looked like they had something to prove. When the band busted out with “Idle Hands”, there were elbows flying and mosh pitting of the sort I haven’t seen at a show in years. At one point a guy next to me decided he wanted to bodysurf, and if you’re thirty-something years old and determined to bodysurf to a song called “I Was In Love With You”, then, for the love of god, all I want in life is give you a pair of hands to put your foot on as you begin your ascent. Up and- bam. The poor guy landed on his elbow. No one besides me seemed to want to see him succeed, and he limped back out of the crowd, sadly aware that everything was not going to feel good as new tomorrow.

And that’s the weird thing, the thing that you don’t quite get until you’ve seen a bunch of grown-ups all lose their shit at once because a couple of forty year old men onstage started to play a Jose Gonzales song. It’s hard to figure out what to do at a rock show when you’re not there to get fucked up and charge into strangers, secure in the knowledge that you’ll all feel fine in the morning. When the less hip of your contemporaries are at home watching idol and most of the other old folks are in the back looking for their golf buddies…How do you just rock?

No good answer here. I can tell you that watching a bunch of grown-ups go apeshit and start a moshpit is mostly embarrassing and sad. It’s like watching ex-gamers who successfully navigated away from their d20’s after high school all pull out their dungeon master’s guides for one last romp while their girlfriends think they’re at a strip club. There was a guy there with a bald spot and a red goatee and a thick Scottish accent who took great pleasure in being the consumate rock and roll killing machine- howling between songs, elbowing unsuspecting women in the head, just out of passion… for the music, man, punching himself repeatedly in the head to get riled up… and that’s awesome, if he’s at a Pig Destroyer show and is barely out of his teens. Because then it’s convincing- you can look at the guy and believe that maybe this is what he does; maybe he’s just this fucked up rock and roller who goes to shows and gets crazy, and he spends the rest of his time sleeping on his friend’s floor and smoking weed out of a coke can. But if he’s clearly late in his thirties, it’s hard to buy it. Yeah, he’s Mr Rock and Roll tonight, but tomorrow he’s gotta go to the office and take shit from a boss, smile at a receptionist. Tickets for the show were £20, and no one’s buying them for him…

But that isn’t the point, either- because these people aren’t you, and you haven’t got anything to prove, either. You can keep them to one side, take the show on its own merits, and enjoy it however the hell you want to. It’s not about the crowd, either trying to condemn or embrace them. It’s about what you’re there to see, not who’s there to see you. And so what if they didn’t play “Dollar Bill”? The new songs are great, and in a couple of years, I’ll wish they were still playing all of them live, too. You move forward, yeah, but so does everyone else. It’s nothing to worry about. Not at a rock show.

- Dan Solomon

As The Thirtying resumes for another week, I got the email from Dan, lamenting the short length of this week’s column. I scrolled to the bottom of the email, I was faced with something that, yes, was shorter than previous columns, but was still of a formidable length. The wordcounts of his low days are still light years beyond my best days. I bow to his skill. Enjoy…

i really think we should be able to vote in your elections, the young woman with the Irish accent says, it affects us too, how it turns out.

i know what you’re saying, the douchebag American replies as he stares down her shirt. i wish you could, too. All that’s missing is a baby at the end of the sentence.

d’you know if i could, were i living there? i was able to vote in the uk elections when i lived in london.

i don’t think so, he says, you could probably just vote in the uk because- well, ireland’s technically part of the united kingdom…

I cringe, think about this twit who is the reason everyone else in the world thinks we’re arrogant. If she were from the UK, she would know it. She wouldn’t have been waiting around for some asshole American to explain it to her.

But she’s patient, or she pretends to be. no, she laughs, way more gently than I can imagine being, that’s northern ireland. i’m from the republic of ireland.

He stares blankly, like she had just explained that she was from Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn, and not the planet itself. I can’t take it anymore.

who would you vote for, I ask, if you could?

barack obama, she says. And then Johnny America steps toward me and sticks his hand out. He introduces himself as a reporter, a name I don’t remember.

i’m with abc news, he explains. 20/20. Not a regular on-air guy with those jowls, I think, but I shake hands like a big boy and offer my name to the dude who not only didn’t know that Ireland was a separate country from the UK, but thought that he understood it so well that he could explain it to an irishwoman… USA! U-S-A!

After a moment, a couple of older American women overhear us, and soon the five of us are engaged in a discussion of Obama, Clinton, and the decrepit spectre of McCain, in a bookstore in Paris.

It’s easy to find community among people who are all fish out of water- even if you don’t all like each other, you can find high school goths or college freshmen or people who dropped out with a year left in the undergrad to play music, whomever. A bunch of Americans and an Irishwoman in France in an English-language bookstore on the banks of the Seine. Communities are made up of outsiders, the uncomfortable.

Finding a community, building one and being a part of it- one that consists of your peers- is one of the more severe challenges of the thirtying, especially when you’ve landed in a new place, or your old friends are settling into routines that leave little room for much more than an occasional double dinner date.

So how do you do it? How do you avoid settling into the pacifying comforts of getting older without clinging to post-adolescent discomforts, which would be phony?

Where are the people you seek?

You don’t get the ease of a prefab community as you get older. Unless you’re recruited into Scientology or looking for Jesus, no one is kicking down your door and asking you to show up, to express your uniqueness and potential. You can’t fall into a group of zinesters and then pick it up through osmosis like you can when you’re twenty. The dynamic is different.

Communities become self-selecting through the thirtying, because we are old enough now to not be waiting for someone to show us what to do or how to do it. You have to figure it out yourself- you’re a grown-up.

You get what you give, in these cases… you have to contribute before you can have it, and finding yourself is less and less of an excuse. There’s less hunger for you to shine because a lot of your peers, the people you’d have met and been inspired by half a decade ago- most of them have other shit going on now, real jobs and wives and long-term, live-in boyfriends, maybe kids, seasons of six feet under to get through on DVD… You have to be a contributor before there’s a place for you, because the community is self-selecting. No one is convinces your songs will be beautiful before you’ve written them. Not anymore.

All of this is to say- the creative communities you may seek, as you’re thirtying, they still exist. But to find them, you have to accept that you’re too old to fuck around.

And thus concludes this week’s lecture. I am your professor, Jonas X McFucksword, making it all up as I go along. Next week, I will take myself entirely too seriously, but also offer up at least three really good dick jokes. Be brave.

– Dan Solomon

The Thirtying. It happens to every young urban hipster when his hair starts to fall out, or she realizes that most of the people at the Aesop Rock show weren’t in pre-school yet when Tupac died. It happens when you start to feel empty after the one-night-stands not because that’s part of the script, but because you’re really scared that, if you haven’t stopped doing it by now, when will you? It happens when it stops being satisfying to get off on the existential blunt trauma of working a slacker job, or when the mediocre career-path gig you’ve landed starts to look like the thing you may end up doing into your fifties, unless the economy tanks between now and then. It happens when you start giving a damn about the fucking economy.

It’s inevitable, and it must not be battled. There is nothing to gain from fighting the Thirtying. It happens whether or not you fight it, and to fight it is to live in denial. It is not a tragedy; it only feels like one to people whose lives have thus far been defined by youth culture, and who realize that they will be the Old Dude at the Show soon; that the culture they have participated in will pass them by, and there will be documentary films in a decade or two in which the underground icons they’re into right now will talk about the good old days while wearing a suit and working a software job.

This is going to be an ongoing exploration of how to maintain a vital link to the culture that helped define one’s persona and identity, to continue taking from and giving back to that culture, without denying that one’s role within that culture are going to change.

If you’re already in the midst of the Thirtying, you’ve probably already figured most of this out. If you’re years from having to consider it, well- bookmark this shit, because it’ll happen to you, too.

I am twenty-seven years old and the Thirtying started for me sometime last year. Thirty is a tall peak, and you don’t need to be crashing into it to catch a glimpse of its approach.

I started thinking about the Thirtying recently after watching juno. It’s been on my mind a lot anyway, because of about half of those things in that first paragraph, but juno made me think about how ugly it can be.

If you’ve not seen the film, Jason Bateman plays a character in his mid-thirties who hangs out a bit with the title character, a sixteen year old girl to whom he can only relate by talking about music and movies that happened when she was a child or maybe before she was even born. He wears Soundgarden t-shirts and composes ad jingles and hates his life, etc, living in all-out denial of the fact that the Thirtying is happening to him, too, no matter how many Melvins and Sonic Youth records he may have bought when he was younger and hipper.

In the film, the character is portrayed as a bit of a jackass- not a true villain, but certainly a prick who deserves to get syphilis or maybe just herpes. He’s not likable, and in most mixed cinema audiences, you’ll hear the awful gasp of recognition at various things the guy says and does, and there’ll be a slow procession of Thirtying dudes all walking with a little bit less spring in their step because they caught themselves identifying with the character.

Something that caught my eye afterwards, though, was an article by Jim DeRogatis about the picture that ran in the Chicago Sun-Times:

We’re encouraged to see Bateman as hopelessly immature… because he bails on his obviously troubled marriage when he decides he isn’t ready for fatherhood. His stunted growth is illustrated by the fact that he’s nostalgic for that passé and played-out alternative rock, and he regrets quitting his touring underground band to write commercial jingles. Silly old Gen X’er — doesn’t he know Generation Y has rejected the very notion of “selling out” in the mad rush to buy iPhones, Uggs and Wii consoles?

In the end, in a topsy-turvy movie universe where the teen heroine struts like John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever,” clearing a path in her high school hallway with a pregnant belly she treats as the ultimate outsider status symbol, Bateman’s Loring actually can be seen as a more honest and genuinely rebellious character than Juno. At the very least, you know he has a much better record collection.

This concludes an angry screed in which the forty-five year old rock critic for a mainstream daily tabloid newspaper decries the picture as “anti-rock, at least if we still define rock as an honest expression of youthful rebellion.” He then goes on to conclude that such honest expressions of youthful rebellion are best embodied by Patti Smith and Iggy and the Stooges, because they have “anger” and “lust for life”, unlike Kimya Dawson and the Moldy Peaches, whose songs make up the bulk of the soundtrack and are what Juno mostly seems to listen to.

Bateman’s character in the film seems to share DeRogatis’s opinion on what rock is, and the existence of DeRogatis proves that the character isn’t a straw-man.

And this is why denying the Thirtying is dangerous- because to deny that you’re an outsider, removed from the kids who will always be the ones to define youth culture (which is what rock and roll has always been) leads to hopelessly out-of-touch claims like a middle-aged rock critic boasting that only he knows what honest expressions of youthful rebellion sound like, and that it’s music that was made decades ago by sexagenarians.

“The kids” today aren’t foolish for listening to shit that doesn’t move you, and they’re not phony or insincere or co-opted, either- they’re dealing with a different set of circumstances. If everything you hear the current crop of underclassmen listening to today sounds like a bunch of weak, phony nonsense, it’s probably because you aren’t a part of their world.

Part of working through the Thirtying is accepting that this gap is going to widen. There will be trends you don’t get, and some that you do. One must remain vigilant, and continue to seek out the ones that have some relevance to his life, while being careful not to dismiss those that do not. Similarly, it’s vital to keep from embracing shit that doesn’t move you in an attempt to stay relevant. Just pay attention.

The reason DeRogatis comes off like a clueless asshole is that he forgets that the world that teenagers today are rebelling against isn’t the one he rebelled against thirty years ago. In a world that lacks intimacy or sincerity, a Kimya Dawson song about running into Paul Baribeau in Michigan is aggressive and life-affirming. “Angry” and “lustful” music today is how the army tries to get kids interested in joining up.

Avoid these pitfalls as the Thirtying progresses. It will not be your time again, but that is not a tragedy. There are other things in life that can offer the same rewards, and you will have access to them at the same time that you will be able to choose from the best that contemporary youth culture has to offer. Do not get jaded. Remember- every aging punk rocker who claims that the shit the kids listen to today is soulless just shows that they are unable to accept reality with any grace. The current crop of rebellion is at least partially a rejection of your shit, which is old and codified now.

Be aware of the Thirtying, but do not fear it. It is important and will lead you to interesting places. It may start 362 days after your twenty-ninth birthday, or it may start prematurely, the summer you stop having fun going to the same bar with the friends who haven’t yet moved away for real jobs at 24. When it starts depends on a variety of circumstances, but it is coming, if it is not already here.

- Dan Solomon

Next week- thoughts on how to be a vital contributor to youth culture when one is becoming chronologically separated from its prime adherents.

Welcome to a new regular feature here at Taking Tiger Mountain. I’m exceptionally proud to hand over the reigns each Thursday to Dan Solomon, a fantastic writer and thinker. He’s currently spending his time away from the fractured bubble of American culture, tucked away in the heart of London. From there, he’s devoting his idle brain cycles to thoughts about the perverse worlds of sports, politics, music. He’s been kind enough to contribute his words here for everyone. Please enjoy this first installment of The Thirtying, a column whose title I’m not even sure of the exact meaning, but was promised it would be revealed shortly.

Check back each week to watch the ideas evolve.

I’ll miss John Edwards, and fear that his withdrawal from the Presidential primary campaign bodes poorly for Eli Manning’s chances of success in the Super Bowl. I can’t explain how I have become convinced that the Presidential candidacy of a former Senator from North Carolina is intimately intertwined with the on-field fortunes of a quarterback for the New York Giants who hails from Louisiana, but I know that it’s true. It is a feeling in my gut, and I know that such instinctual reactions are to be trusted. Eli’s future was wide open as long as John Edwards had the chance to pick up enough delegates on Super Tuesday to play kingmaker at the convention, but now I fear for the Giants. Eli will likely be crippled by Junior Seau and it’s entirely possible- likely, even- that he’ll never walk again after Sunday night. He’ll eventually appear in commercials in which he’s wheeled around by his brother as they advocate for embryonic stem cell research, and he’ll take on some work as an occasional commentator for mid-market NFL games, a job he’ll be given mostly out of pity.

What the fuck? That was a morbid turn for that train of thought to take. Eli crippled? Jesus, I hope not. He may be on the verge of becoming the only trustworthy quarterback in the NFC, a surprise fuck you to every other team in the conference, especially the Cowboys, and it would be tragic to see that extinguished by Junior Seau in the third quarter of a Super Bowl in which the Giants lead by fourteen points at the half…

And there’s no reason to suspect that it will. Football and politics are both vitally important to understanding the American psyche, but attempts to link the two beyond the superficial tend to result in forced comparisons and analogies. Like Rudy Giuliani- another Loser who, if he’s not officially out of the race as I type this, will likely be done by the time you read it- who insisted that he was the Presidential equivalent of the Giants. Well, they’re both from New York… but other than that, there’s no parallel. The Giants were early front-runners who appeared highly vulnerable and forgotten as the season progressed, only to surprise the nation by knocking off their high-flying opponents in contest after contest, eventually winning the opportunity to face the opposing front-runner in a final match. Well, that sounds more like John McCain, when you get right down to it. Giuliani was always more like the Dallas Cowboys, totally unprepared for an actual contest after coasting for so many weeks on a the notion of inevitability.

But, Jesus, all of this is talk about football and politics, and this is a music blog. Are you still with me? Were you ever?

There are other parallels to draw, that are unrelated to the NFL, but which may be interesting and useful. Is Giuliani the analogue to 50 Cent in his showdown with Kanye? That’s a pretty 2007-centric sentiment, but it’s the New York thing again… In truth, Giuliani is mostly irrelevant, and there are few lessons to draw from his campaign’s implosion, except maybe that there aren’t enough Americans who were fucked by their daddies to make a straight-up Fascist a viable Presidential candidate. Which, at the very least, is reassuring.

Have you ever met someone who had the wrong impression of the sort of person they were? I used to have a roommate who saw himself in one light and had a hard time adjusting when he realized that his role in any group was not the role he wanted or expected. He thought that, in most foursomes, he was the Paul of the group, but four of us lived in that apartment, and the other three of us saw him as the Ringo. It’s a terrifying sight to behold, someone forced to accept that the world does not see them as they see themselves, and that’s the human tragedy in watching a creepy little Fascist like Rudy Giuliani sulk back home to his consulting agency where even a failed Presidential campaign will raise his rates by 20%. Giuliani thought that he was the sort of person people would admire by sheer force or presence, a Jay-Z type, and instead he found out that he was a novelty act, one of the Shop Boyz. After taking a look at him, some were frightened, some were questioning and unconvinced, but most were just not interested- there were grown-ups present.

And so what if those grown-ups are Mitt Romney and John McCain? This is America in 2008, and they are enough to pass as such. In the remaining foursome of Republican candidates as of the Florida Primary, those two were Paul and John, respectively, if only because someone had to be and it wasn’t going to be Rudy or Huckabee. Change the group and they’ll change roles, but that’s as good as it gets if you’re a Republican partisan right now.

Both Romney and McCain have tragicomic videos on YouTube, incidentally, based on their hilarious and unsettling understanding of popular music. Romney’s “Who Let The Dogs Out” moment is a brief flash of stark psychological terror, but it’s McCain’s “Bomb Iran” that reveals just how dangerous old people become when they think that they’re trying to be relevant. By all rights, John McCain should be making well, cut of my legs and call me shorty-style grandpa jokes, but as long as he’s a significant figure in the American political landscape, he’ll continue trying to find ways to try to connect, and that may well lead to disaster.

Except not really, because John McCain has about the same chances of being the President of the United States as the New York Giants have of clearing a thirty point spread against the Patriots on Sunday. Which leads to another fallacy in the football analogies- if McCain is only able to fill the role of the Giants if you give him a thirty-point lead, and Hillary Clinton is clearly the Patriots, with Bill Clinton filling the Bill Belichik role, then what does that make Obama and Romney? Furthermore, who’s actually the Giants? Where do you find a Ringo in this group? You have to suspect that it’d be Romney, but who does that make George Harrison…?

And this is why writing about politics in a music blog is a waste of time; furthermore, it’s why political blogs are probably less relevant to the real world, whatever that really means, than your average music blog. So don’t let yourself feel like you’re an apathetic symbol of your generation if you check your Pitchfork bookmark more often than the Daily Kos – at least talking about music doesn’t reduce anything except popular culture to the role of popular culture, and that is acceptable.

- Dan Solomon