A Teenage Muse
An English band, my discovery, my banishment, and its return.
For the last few months I have had an additional compass in my music listening and music researching brain, a specific north pointing towards my life with and memory of my brother, my twin brother, who is getting married this July. As I go about my daily life, and find reasons to remember a song, or search for a lyric – like when the sports team I coach needs to remind people that we have a deadline looming to sign-up for our tryouts this month – I find myself entering rabbit holes that bring me back to him, and to us, and to the life we used to share so closely, side-by-side. Today, when looking for that temporal reminder of a song, I turned to a band that I used to play in my room while grinding Halo 2 matches on Xbox Live, a band that I’ll always remember for having a song about time running out: Muse.
Okay, immediate tangent: I have never seen a photo of the members of this band before. I’ve never seen them perform live, or seen a video of them performing live. This specific photo, which I found by googling “Muse 2002”, was the first result that included all three members in a non-playing scenario. I think it specifically captures something I’m about to talk about. Ok, let’s talk about it.
Just kidding, we’re immediately onto tangent number two: directly after writing that last paragraph, I saw another headline that led me to search “Muse tour 2019” on YouTube. I’m watching it as I type, and my word, there is so much more context being added to my brain, and I’m going to choose to not talk about it here, in this post. But please, if you want to see what a Daft Punk concert could be like if they filled arenas and played worse music in a different genre, give it a YouTube search.
Ok, let’s talk about it, for real.
Ok, hold on, one more tangent: this video is bizarre, and I would say not very good. It’s very clearly post-David Fincher, post-Jonathan Glazer, and definitely post-my-watching-music-videos-regularly, which I stopped doing when my older sister stopped watching TRL, which as far as I can remember, was when Korn’s Freak on a Leash was denied the number one spot for the seventy-first week in a row. That’s also when I learned there is no justice in the world.
Anyways, Muse. They formed, loosely, in 1994, only getting their final name and their first record out in 1999: Showbiz. I don’t believe that I was in on them at this inception point, but the first song here is definitely a declaration of their sound, fully formed:
A tempo and drum pattern that give a lot of energy from drummer Dominic Howard; a simple piano pattern that has the tempo ramped up, creating something very simple and knowable that feels advanced and exciting; the vocals are yearning, sometimes reserved, frequently leaping into a smooth falsetto, that maintain a sweetness even when the volume leaps towards yelling; and there’s a cinematic feeling to the piano and the arrangements, something that will really build and feel more prominent in their future work.
I likely came into the game when 2003’s Absolution was released, the band’s third album, which had a couple of singles that I think were the first big breaks here in America, but I am a bit shocked to discover that Muse has never had a Billboard charting single in the U.S. Regardless, their music found its way to one of my available airwaves, and for a young teen boy in middle America, Muse’s music hit like a 12-pack of Mountain Dew: sizzling, sugary, bright, and completely invigorating.
I was infatuated. I played 2001’s Origin of Symmetry front-to-back all the time on my (insert dated .mp3 technology here). They were rock and roll, they were new, and maybe most importantly, they weren’t a copy of, or a riff on, any other band. Not for me, at least, since I had yet to discover Radiohead, The Strokes, Blur, or any other influences that are being played with and against in Muse’s discography. Additionally, this was some of the first music that I found that matched my own angelic falsetto, after previously discovering I am a direct match for Coldplay’s Chris Martin – I am a menace on the mic for anything off Parachutes. Hell, they even dropped a track into one of the Guitar Hero installments, which was basically the Hall of Fame of rock music for millennials. I also was several years into my education as a percussionist, and my appreciation for instrumentation and production was really flowering in high-school, even after I dropped band after freshman year. Muse’s many layers of sound, many layers of effects, and an ecclectic collection of percussion instruments and sounds was really captivating, especially when I could sing along with it, allowing me closer in to the ecstacy that is creating and playing music.
This was also the peak time for my brother and I to be not only listening to the same music, but to be discovering new music for ourselves, and to still listen to mostly the same things together. We both enjoyed the medium, and both enjoyed guitar-based stuff, rock adjacent stuff, and we were musically linked most strongly right around this time, I think. Very shortly later, as we aged and met new people and started carving individual paths for ourselves, we parted ways on the paths of musical taste, inch by inch. His Queens of the Stone Age was my Incubus. He found Joe Satriani, I found Nas.
(I’m mostly making these up, and I can’t wait to see what he thinks of those examples)
Shortly into my infatuation something started to happen in my circle, sometime around 2005 or 2006. I’m 15 or 16, I’m a sophomore or junior in high school, and I find out that people have turned on Muse. It’s over. They aren’t cool. In fact, they’re deeply uncool. The culture had Dave Matthews Band-ed them (ascribed their fandom to a narrow sect of males that shared several specific undesirable qualities). I don’t know how or why it happened, but I know that I was not confident enough to go against any wave of social norms that seemed to flow my way. I simply turned around, and let the wave wash me away from the things that I was enjoying. It was over.
This wasn’t a shock to me, necessarily, and certainly not the first time it had happened (see, again: Dave Matthews Band). I got on with my life, and listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers while playing Halo instead. I was ok.
But I’m not okay now, I’ve decided. My circle was wrong, I’ve decided. This early Muse music fucking rocks. It rolls. I can definitely identify a silliness, an over-trying, and maybe an unseriousness to their sound, and I absolutely do not care. I, too, am silly, over-trying, and maybe unserious. At least I was when I was listening to Muse, drinking nuclear waste soda and eroding my brain in front of a tv screen. And I’m those things still, today, because I am who I am, and I mostly am who I was.
And while we’re here, if you aren’t aware, the Dave Matthews jokes are dead now. It’s played out. Those guys can fucking jam. Carter Beauford is a genius. Boyd Tinsley fucking slays. Get over yourselves. Live at Piedmont Park is one of the best concert LP’s of our generation.
God, I love rebelling against people who had bad takes in high school, which was nearly twenty years ago.
Listen, I don’t really know what I’m doing here, other than letting this wave of Muse reincarnation – which started only six hours ago – push me back into rebelling against something, against “deciding” a band or a genre is bad. Let people like things! All music sucked from 2000 - 2012, it’s common knowledge! We have to decide to like some of it! What were we gonna do? We were growing up in a country and economy that was barely holding together. The least we could do was to rock out to some English boyos who wished someone would love them, and wished others would leave them alone.
That’s it for this trance-like-state I just emerged from. Where am I? Did I say anything to offend? I’m sure it’s fine. It feels good to reclaim something you once loved, and that someone else decided you should move on from. I hope you dig into your crates to find some gems that have gathered dust, waiting to be freed from neglect. It’s ok if it sucks.
TTFN,
Bobby