The sun always shines on TV
TV on the Radio and the secret world of personal music
By David Cotner 04/16/2009
If you saw Brooklyn quintet TV on the Radio on, well, TV recently, you might be forgiven for being mystified at who these five shaggy mystics were and why they were, at various points, bullshitting with Jay Leno about music and cars, or tearing up a fire escape outside the Ed Sullivan Theater for a performance on Late Show with David Letterman.
It’s been a long almost-decade since singer Tunde Adebimpe and guitarist Dave Sitek — both adept on tape and other sorts of loops, incidentally — dropped off copies of their first musical offering, OK Calculator, in cafés and other places of interest throughout New York City, messages in bottles made just as much of zeroes-and-ones as they were of raw happenstance.
With Kyp Malone joining on guitars and more loops for the 2004 Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes LP, the buzz around the band became like unto a drone, as tastemakers far and wide heralded its dense, dark and at times violently joyous music as something to watch, if not to listen to, seemingly for the duration. With the universally acclaimed Return to Cookie Mountain two years later — and its propulsive, anthemic single “Wolf Like Me,” its place in the pantheon of latter-day indie saints grew ever more secure.
“Wolf Like Me” remains its most emblematic song — at least, until the spare and reedy vistas of 2008’s Dear Science LP — for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the realization of what the Internet is used for on a daily basis: looking up song lyrics. An exemplary pop single carries with it certain distinct signifiers: the tune, a certain relevance and an indecipherability that, when delivered on effectively and successfully, is a gift unto itself.
What you think the singer says is surpassed only by the beautiful totality of the love vibrating through the lyrics of “Wolf Like Me” as surely as any guitar chord strummed with a nigh-unto-cosmological potential. It is the sum totality of supernal blues married with sex-urge rock power — or as Lester Bangs once wrote, “Some good re-workings of past idioms.”
So when Dear Science emerged late in 2008, those expecting more of the same kind of pop hard-chocolate shell were somewhat surprised to hear songs with a texture more like chewy tinfoil than the warm fleece of the previous effort. The acclaim, despite the shudders that always come with the artist spreading out his sonic palette, was near universal and not necessary to reproduce here.
Six months later, its spring tour takes TV on the Radio from the Ventura Theater to Coachella, Bonnaroo and beyond. And yet the most mystifying thing in among all this is that unified acclaim for songs that are uniquely personal, songs that contain sounds and shifts in sound that mean everything to the band but that most listeners wouldn’t necessarily choose, schooled in the ways of decades of pop in which hearts beat at 4/4, and every two lines rhyme.
This is not to say that the acclaim itself is without merit — it is to say, however, that not everyone hears the same things in music, and for such disparate sounds and rhythms to bring people together across class, race and economic lines is an enormous feat, even in these days of new world orders, information superhighways and free trade agreements. It’s a bit like a global secret, as near as such a thing can substantively exist in this omniscient planet today — the workings of Dear
Science upon the collective consciousness at large; that so much passion for the music from the listening public could pool as a great deluge from those halcyon days of one CD here, another CD there, not knowing if anyone would pick it up and get it or pick it up and get it. It’s mass-produced person-to-person communication at its finest, most challenging and most achingly sublime, and as Malone put it not too terribly long ago, “I grew up listening to Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Cure, the Smiths and Swans. It didn’t add to my ‘angst’ as a teenager. I simply identified with something in the music. It made me feel less alone, you know? If I could be that for someone else, that would make me happy. It’d be a real form of success for me.”
TV on the Radio will perform at the Ventura Theater on April 16. 639-3965, www.venturatheater.net or www.myspace.com/tvotr.
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