Carrie Brownstein - Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

THE SOUND OF WHERE YOU ARE

Ive always felt unclaimed. This is a story of the ways I created a territory, something more than just an archipelago of identities, something that could steady me, somewhere that I belonged.

My story starts with me as a fan. And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved. All the affection I poured into bands, into films, into actors and musicians, was about me and about my friends. Once, in high school, I went to see the B-52s. I pressed myself against the barrier until bruises darkened my ribs, thrilled to watch Kate Pierson drink from a water bottle, only to have my best friend tell me that to her the concert wasnt about the bandit was about us, it was about the fact that we were there together, that the music itself was secondary to our world, merely something that colored it, spoke to it. Thats why all those records from high school sound so good. Its not that the songs were betterits that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like weve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through somethingsurvived it, experienced itis often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask intemporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesnt require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does.

Now I cant listen to some of these records alone, in my house that I have cleaned and organized, books arranged just so, sheets washed. The sounds dont hold up. In these cases, fandom is contextual and experiential: its not that it happened, its that you were there. Its site-specific, age-specific. Being a fan has to do with the surroundings, and to divorce the sounds from that context often feels distancing, disorienting, but mostly disappointing. I think of all the times Ive had a friend over and pulled out records from high school or college, ready for the album to change someones life the way it changed mine. I watch my friends face, waiting eagerly for the aha! moment to arrive, only to realize that my affection for this intentionally off-key singing, saggy bass sound, and lyrics about bunnies isnt quite the revelation it was fifteen years ago. You had to be there is not always a gloat or admonishmentoften its an explanation for why something sounds utterly terrible.

Yet there is much music that survives de- and recontextualization and that needs no experiential reference point. In this case, the role of the fan is still to be a participant, and to participate is to grant yourself permission to immerse, to willingly, gladly, efface and subsume yourself for the sake of the larger meaning but also to provide meaning. Its symbiotic. My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.