The Fiery Furnaces
EP
(hear it)

The Fiery Furnaces are like Phish.

Having heard only this EP by the Fiery Furnaces, I should be more hesitant, but I will make the claim anyway.

People generally discover culture through friends, and discover friends through culture. Friends are culture. As a result, often when we listen to music we are actually paying attention to a social network. Because people tend to prefer to congregate by category, various social networks become like little cultural ecosystems - bands and other meme-generators generally can cross cultural divides no more easily than gene-generators can escape geography.

The old world and the new world each has a tree which grows fruit at the top, and by hell someone is going to figure out how to get at it. Here, perhaps it's a monkey, and there a bird, but each evolves a way to reach the prize, stretching the jaw, flattening the rear, until at first glance the similarities surpass the differences between a monkey and a bird although half the world separates them.

In music, too, across cultures, different strains evolve to fill different niches - and the human tendency to produce culture is as constant in its action as the Earth's tendency to produce vegetation. Bands of a certain type will each independently succeed in multiple social groups just as a certain type of creature succeeds in different locations. Now, a given band usually signifies its home culture too strongly to succeed in other defined cultures. Usually, a band or style of music will sooner become mainstream, breaking free of its native ground. This is exactly like an invasive species.

Phish and The Fiery Furnaces are basically the most fun bands around. They offer people a good time, with only ironic or silly references to anything that might bring us down. Contrast them with the Grateful Dead and Sleater-Kinney, for a minute. These have more to say, more to think about. Can you really say that Phish and the Fiery Furnaces are less like each other than either is like these pillars of their respective categories? You can see the same sort of band popping up across every genre: compare George Clinton to James Brown, Mozart to Beethoven, Terry Riley to Pauline Oliveros.

Unless a social group is all rocks and cactuses, you'll find someone picking the apples at the top of the tree.

bb, 7 jan 08