THE DISTRICTS

When The Districts played the Red Marquee Friday early afternoon, the LED screen at the back of the stage displayed a sort of band logo, or maybe an album cover design. At the top it said “The Districts” and below that was an illustration of what looked like five red dots and a pineapple, or maybe it was a hand with five fingers made by collaging together cut-up magazine photos. The background to the design was mauve, which was an odd tone, neither bright nor dark, just neutral. This was how they turned the Red Stage into the Mauve Stage.

The music was, what shall I say about it? Mauve as fuck? The Districts are an indie band from Philadelphia that play moody, heavily distorted rock. They are a dude band, whose music plays mostly on college radio, in America. I can imagine driving through Chapel Hill, North Carolina or Athens, Georgia or Princeton, New Jersey and hearing the songs on an FM station in the 88 or 89 KHz range and kind of liking them. Their front dude, who plays guitar and sings, Rob Grote, reminds you of Jack Black but mostly without the irony. At the end of the set he was flailing around in his super sweaty, checkered shirt, sweat dripping from his unkempt hair, and he was even sort of rolling around on his back on the stage playing some distortion heavy indie rock riffs.

Watching the other dudes in this band, I can imagine the cool, lower income Philadelphia neighborhoods they live in, the wooden porches with peeling paint, the used cars they drive with cassette tapes on the floor of the passenger side. They dream of a world where no one works in Starbucks because everyone makes enough money touring with their band or producing indie documentaries or glazing highly technical pottery, but of course that world doesn’t exist.

I identify with this kind of music and kind of like it, and recognize the coolness of The Districts being signed to Fat Possum, though it was no longer the Fat Possum of RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. But this music, which struck me as sort of emblematic of indie rock these days, is not music that blows me away and I can’t really go nuts for it anymore, not since the Pixies or Pavement really. In the 90s “indie” appeared as a self-determined label that replaced “alternative,” and it wanted to destroy the monumentality of pop, and 70s stadium rock, and heavy metal cock rock, and all these other heroic genres, but they still wanted to stay firmly within the genre of rock, with all its mythology and history, having their cake and eating it too. But now that’s it’s clear that Generation X and Generation Y are earning less than their parents, and cannot expect modestly big houses and a new car every five to seven years, the middle-class affectation to identify with the lower income levels has become a reality, there is something kind of sorry about this downward mobility, and the way that it hasn’t really bottomed out yet and regained the hunger of music from the streets, the hood, the ghetto.

So what the fuck am I railing about? The show was OK. According to friends, “the first song I walked in on totally rocked, then the next song had all this ambient distortion and I was like, ‘Meh.” A photographer friend simply said, “Visually, they were not interesting.” But it was just Friday afternoon, and the festival was just getting started. Some of the songs were enjoyable, and maybe I’d even listen to them again. Maybe it was a good time to be mauve as fuck.