By Kavit Sumud | January 17th, 2013
While other generations, “raged” against the machine when confronted with the shifting realities of their bedeviled youth, we’re what Beach Fossils would call, “generation synthetic, most apathetic.” Lead singer Dustin Payseur feels like he’s swimming in a sea of desperate musician-hopefuls whose nonchalance to life is belied by a hunger to bask at the feet of some music PR rep.
If it was just another track about the corrupting corporate influence on indie artists, sure, the song would be forgotten and wiped clean from our memories in no time. Every generation has semi-privileged artists that like to reject the man in search of purity. But songs about generational strife in poor economic times — or as in this one, the complete lack of strife — find their messages amplified and able to take on wholly different messaging than their original intention.
This has been a generation which has been spinning in its wheels in a rut through their entire early to late 20s. We’ve lost the sense of time. When opportunities are limited and you’re likely going to be worse off than your parents were, time no longer moves forward… it stands still.
For that kind of a generation, “all [their] words are so magnetic,” because the minutiae of a person becomes amplified when the puzzle pieces of the larger picture have been smashed to bits. Payseur sings about the distance of his friends between each other (figuratively and not) as they keep striving in all different directions in hope for an incline of even a few degrees out of their ruts.
So what can a generation do where the system has failed it? Payseur says that he’ll step outside it — and this is where his metaphor serves as a double entendre. He wants to do “it on his own again,” saying what he feels, he’s rejecting the system, rejecting the ties that keep one in perpetual horizontal motion by keeping one afraid to risk the chance that your bit of kibble might rise in front of you when you aren’t looking, and the corporate masters will take you on a ride into their big house. It’s a political act in song for a generation that feels perfectly content in never really voicing their frustration, masking it in “synthetica.”
It’s a simple song of quiet, dispassionate anger, but that’s right in line with this generations voice and another great example of recession rock. Check out Beach Fossils new album, Clash the Truth, out next month.