I could be using my little area in the Daily this week to say nice things about the solid Chin Up Chin Up/Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin indie pop double feature that AppleJam put together in Oxfam Caf?© last Tuesday. However, as I hate bunnies, rainbows and God, I thought instead that I'd use my column to report a chilling, tragic bit of live-music news I unearthed while visiting friends in Vermont this weekend: Middlebury is paying Guster tens of thousands of dollars to headline their spring concert.
Why does this happen? Their record sales aren't enormous, they receive little positive attention from the press, their music isn't especially danceable or physically rousing and the band has no public panache. And yet year after year, they headline shows at colleges for sums of money that some critically acclaimed, platinum artists salivate over.
As a snobby critic, this is a phenomenon that I find both horribly frustrating and remarkably engaging. On the less legitimate hand, there is my complaint that a band that sounds the same as it did 12 years ago (generic, uninspired, sappy and toothless) makes more in one show than Chin Up Chin Up makes all year. When I read that Guster, whose asking price for shows in the Northeast is $40,000-$45,000 per show, gets to play another one-off to an audience of white college kids while more adventurous bands spend all year criss-crossing the country crammed in vans to piece together a living, the elitist in me aches to bemoan the cruel and unfair realities of The Man and his big bad music industry.
Ultimately though, this is a stupid complaint. No matter how gratingly vapid I personally find Guster's music (and, in the spirit of this column, their live show as well - seeing them at Spring Fling last year was like watching a gentle wind slowly blow a tumbleweed down a dirt road in a ghost town), the fact is that a lot of people love this band.
Like our Concert Board did last year, Middlebury's Concert Activity Board, through a survey of students and (shudder) informal browsing of Facebook accounts, concluded that Guster was among the student body's most liked bands. Presumably, this is more or less true at each of the other 11 shows the band is scheduled to play at American universities between now and early May, so though the elitist in me likes to complain about how twisted the music establishment is, a far more productive approach to the Guster situation is to investigate how they pull it off.
The band's appeal is truly an anomaly. A few notable exceptions notwithstanding, most successful musicians since the dawn of pop have made harmless, non-polarizing music. Bands that don't push boundaries don't challenge or disturb people, and by not alienating anyone, financially successful bands find broad appeal in the consumptive mainstream.
Guster has arguably the narrowest appeal of any band in its tax bracket. For example, while simultaneously critically accepted and commercially viable artists like Lil' Wayne and Interpol (whose asking prices rival Guster's) attract fans of different ages, races, classes and levels of interest in music, Guster finds the overwhelming bulk of its support (as it's college-heavy tour schedule will attest) from young, well-off, suburban white people.
I have to wonder if this is intentional. On the one hand, subjective value statements aside, I think it is difficult to argue that in their 12-year career, Guster has strayed the slightest bit from the bubble-gummy, inoffensive, adult-contemporary style made popular in the early '90s by college bands like them, O.A.R. and Dave Matthews Band. They sound the same as they did when they were playing in the basement at ATO (not to mention that they sound the same as about 50 other bands), so it's not like they've jeopardized their music for their success.
At the same time though, I can't think of another band with a 12-year career whose music didn't undergo some kind of creative change. The music people make reflects their identity - their ideas, fears, tastes and aspirations - and it is unrealistic to think that, in 12 years, the psychological landscape of an entire band would remain as constant as Guster's stagnant music would suggest. More believable to me is that a band whose music struck a chord with people who can afford records and concert tickets deliberately avoided any artistic development when they say how profitable their music was.
Again, the snobby aesthete in me cites this as irrefutable evidence of Guster's status as complete tools, but at the end of the day, they get to swim in a pool of gold doubloons while I gripe about artistic purity. Johnny Rotten used to ironically claim that his post-punk group Public Image Ltd. wasn't a band but a corporation. Maybe that is the best way to view Guster. Countless products and ideas, from cigarettes to magazines to political causes, are marketed specifically to college kids, why not a band? When I view them as a band, I hate the music Guster makes and I seriously question their integrity. But when I view them as a corporation, I can't help but tip my hat to a commercial entity as successful as they are.
Mikey Goralink is a sophomore majoring in American studies. He can be reached at Michael.Goralnik@tufts.edu.
