Rainer Maria is getting back together, but that's not what this blog is about.

The sole bright spots of the last couple of weeks for me have been musical in nature. The almost transcendently loud Pujol/Screaming Females concert on Saturday was one of them. Live music is, generally, a fantastic way to put your troubles out of your mind, and this year has been a fantastic one for it. Robyn/Royksopp, New Order, Xenia Rubinos, Minipop, Lake Street Dive (twice), Mø, Black Prairie, motherfucking Prince oh my god best concert ever, Charli XCX/Elliphant (I somehow spent $40 on a shirt that announces me as a member of the Baltic Semen Armada), with London Grammar and Tycho yet to come. A fine calendar year of music.

All of this excitement is somewhat odd on its face, as I am not the most musically-inclined of people. Alex used to amaze me by writing his Top 50 Albums of the Year back in the Screened days; I’m usually lucky if I hear five albums that I really enjoy in any given year. Music, like poetry, usually requires of me a lot of concentration and quiet time to appreciate, and both of those resources are in short supply these days. That said, when I latch onto a band or album, I latch the hell onto it, and usually replay it to the point of disgust.

As with any medium that requires some level of mature critical skills to appreciate (which is basically all of them aside from iPhone games), I don’t think musical tastes really being to develop in earnest until the late teens. I’d even go so far as to say that most people over 30 probably share some kind of shallow embarrassment about the first few musicians that they really loved; I mean, To The Extreme was revelatory to my 12-year-old self, but can anyone look back at that album and sincerely call it good? I’m not going to apologize for my 10,000 Maniacs phase or that summer I spent watching the sun come up listening to Throwing Copper (even if Live somehow managed to become almost transcendentally shitty during their V and Birds Of Pray era), but I’m still going to admit that a lot of the music I listened to at the time was pretty goddamn bad. If you're too young to truly understand love and passion and sex, you're probably going to gravitate towards artists that express their opinions about those subjects in a juvenile way.

Music’s a little different than film or games, though, mostly due to the accessibility of the tools used to create it. Making a film or game of any note or quality requires tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Although this is changing; Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture was shot on DSLR cameras for under a hundred grand, and obviously indie games are regularly being made on the cheap by one or two-person teams.) Making a demo cassette with your friends requires just the sunk cost of instruments you likely already own and a studio rental for a weekend. Or, hell, just make it in your apartment; plenty of fine albums have been recorded in relatively spartan conditions, e.g. Kathleen Hanna’s Julie Ruin, Julianna Barwick’s The Magic Place, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, Jolie Holland’s Catalpa, etc., etc. (When was the last time you heard someone cough on an album track?) These records will not sound professional, but what they lack in slickness they usually make up for in sincerity.

More to the point: late adolescence is a time of incredible confusion and romance and angst and struggling with the dichotomy of adult responsibilities and youthful passion, all of which are uniquely suited to being expressed in song, preferably of the loud and intense variety. The accessibility of the tools to create it allow for very young bands to group together and make sometimes astonishingly raw and piercing music. By the time you head off to college, you’re probably only slightly younger people playing the Tuesday punk night at the local bar or scribbling away at lyrics while they strum away at their acoustic guitar in their dorm room.

That’s not to say that music is the only art form available to the young: plenty of 20-year-olds write novels or screenplays or poetry, and while 99.99% of the resulting work is no doubt truly insipid, the occasional Rimbaud pops up to make it clear that youth is not an absolute barrier to genius. But I’ll admit that I haven’t found many novels or films made by people under 30 that I’ve truly enjoyed or considered to be memorable works of art; some media require the weight of experience and Gladwell’s probably-mythical 10,000 hours of practice before true talent is honed out of the rawness of youth.

Music is different, perhaps in an ineffable way, or perhaps in a way that I’m simply biased toward without realizing it. Music can be raw and scratchy and weird and unprofessional in ways that I’m willing to accept and even appreciate if I get the sense that the artist behind it is trying to express something true and personal, but I’ve written enough words in my life to find the flaws or excesses in the prose of an adolescent or twentysomething writer to be more off-putting than endearing. Prose (and poetry) requires control and self-restraint to maximize the impact of the words (neither of which come easily to non-prodigies), whereas music is often at its best when you reach some combination of artistic ability and the grandiose and passionate loss of self-awareness and self-filtering.

Novelists generally get better with age, as their skill and experience trumps the dimming of their youthful inner fire; most of my favorite musicians have followed the reverse course, as technical skill and slicker productions make it more difficult to connect with the meaning behind their lyrics. In general, of course it’s true that music should be pleasant to listen to, or at least reward a determined interpreter if not, but sometimes the sheer artifice of production erects a wall between whatever sincere meaning a song has and the listener.

That’s not true in all cases, but it’s unfortunately so in the case of Rainer Maria, perhaps my favorite band from my college years. They were a seminal part of my college years, and, given the rambling paragraphs above, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that they were formed just two years before I graduated high school. Despite their missteps late in their career, their recent announcement of a reunion show on New Year’s Eve (their first in eight years) gives me some secret, selfish hope that they’ll come back to tour one more (last?) time, or record a new album.

It’s an odd thing, realizing for the first time that people your age are actually making music, expressing the thoughts and desires and anxieties that you yourself are experiencing. It’s clear upon re-listening to most of Rainer Maria’s albums over the past week or two that I probably wouldn’t find them so dear if I hadn’t been in the frame of mind (a cliched late-teens mishmash of despondence and loneliness and sexual frustration) I inhabited when I first stumbled across them, but that’s largely irrelevant: they were the band. They were my special thing, something obscure that I could love and not share with anyone. (Before the internet’s explosion, it was a relatively simple thing to convince yourself that you were the only person who listened to any given indie band; it’s not like they had Facebook pages or Twitter accounts with thousands of followers.)

I don’t know why that would be important, but maybe it’s part of growing up: you share so many things with your parents and siblings and classmates as a child that you can’t help but desire things that are uniquely yours as you reach the teen years. Secrets are, perhaps, the things that define the experience of adolescence; secrets you keep, and secrets you share. Who you’re sure that you love, who you wrote that note to, who you are sure that you would murder if you could get away with it, the book or album that means so much to you that you don’t want to tell anyone about it.

I was originally trying to find a way to link this conversation from Almost Famous here, but I couldn’t find a way to make it feel natural, so fuck it: here’s one of my favorite scenes from any movie ever.

Maybe Snapchat and Twitter and technology will erode this sense of self-censorious secrecy that existed before the internet; I’m not sure I look forward to that. I wrote a secret admirer letter to a girl once and it took real fucking guts to put the stamp on it and walk up to a mailbox and drop it in; I’m not sure if the experience of tapping “send” quite compares. We live in an era where communication is easier than ever before, and by and large that’s an amazing thing with serious repercussions for all kind of repressive societies, but at the same time, sometimes it’s best to keep things inside and try to understand them before sending your thoughts out into the ether. I love passion and self-expression, but I also love discipline and how it can refine a thought into something that's not just immediately intriguing but something that's timeless and universal.

Anyway, that was a long blog entry mostly about nothing at all. I already wrote a bunch of words about Rainer Maria’s first few albums; I’ll try to clean that up and post it sometime this week, followed by some thoughts on their last two albums! Spoiler: they're really good.