O melhor do ano

1. The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls In America

Depois que eu li esse texto, eu não consegui escrever nada que não me fizesse querer amputar as minhas mãos. Então vou colocar ele aqui. Foi um cara de um fórum gringo que escreveu.

One of the great ironies of American life is that the allegedly endless air of possibility often suffocates the young. Boys and girls grow up being told they can be anybody, but most of them become their parents, compartmentalized in sleepy suburban pockets with sons and daughters and debts and, if they're lucky, a few airbrushed memories of what it felt like to have the world at their feet. The artists among them often follow their muse but fall victim to their demons, like Kerouac, who crisscrossed the country but ended up living with his mother and drinking himself to death, or John Berryman, who threw himself from a bridge and literally suffocated on the banks of the Mississippi.

Freedom can paralyze, and this paradox lies at the heart of all quintessentially American songwriting. Nick Hornby articulated the conflict as it appears in Springsteen anthems: "stay and rot, or escape and burn." Bruce's heroes usually make valiant stabs at getting the hell out, and it's for this reason that the Hold Steady and Springsteen - or more specifically, Boys & Girls in America and Born to Run - appear ideologically opposed at first glance. Craig Finn's anti-heroes stay and "walk around and drink some more," or follow directions to a party on the other side of town, or at most cross state lines to see a concert; they punish themselves with drugs and end up trapped by chemical dependency; they search for salvation in empty bottles and beauty in lonely girls, but ultimately they don't travel far. Despite their low aspirations, they have the same desperate faith as Springsteen's road warriors - the same sense that they have something to live for, even if it's a mere few seconds of satisfaction.

Boys & Girls in America is first and foremost about pleasure-seeking, but Finn approaches the topic with first-hand knowledge of both its terrible cost and its sacred purpose. "Stuck Between Stations'" message of mortality lingers like last call over the succeeding booze-soaked vignettes, which follow Finn's subjects to bars, malls, race tracks and places in between, ultimately finding virtue in the fact that a few local girls aren't going anywhere. The rest of that cribbed Kerouac quote begs for "real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious"; this is a lot to ask for from teenagers and twentysomethings basically looking to get drunk and fuck each other, but Finn won't settle for less. His narrator is by turns an over-the-hill dreamer, a bent-out-of-shape cynic, a believer in young people even as he exposes their weaknesses. He's also a somewhat tuneless lead vocalist, and some critics have argued the album's pop sensibility is wasted on a frontman that often seems frustratingly indifferent to his musical surroundings. "Indie" rock has always placed a premium on vocal eccentricity or even inability, but it's worth asking whether Boys & Girls might have been a better album in the hands of a bona fide singer.

The other predominant criticism of Boys & Girls is that it's a "big, dumb rock record" hampered by literary pretension, its fist-pumping bravado blended awkwardly with Finn's steel-barbed, scenery-chewing rants in a way that dilutes both melody and narrative. Many of the choruses are big, some of the lyrics are indisputably dumb, and the song cycle is stuffed with rock clichés â“ kissing, drinking, drugging, dancing, to name a few. But through the album's theme of living fast while staying put, it makes the one statement pop music ever truly has: life is to be enjoyed, come hell or high water or the indignities of age. There's a resigned sadness in Finn's stories, but everything behind them - massive hooks, majestic keys, backbeats designed to shake barstools and car windows - provides a deliriously happy counterpoint, an insistence that there are always good times ahead. And for all Finn's sermonizing, one "big, dumb" message resounds above the rest: being young and getting drunk is fucking awesome, a corollary to Kerouac's reminder that "nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old." Sal Paradise was right, but there's still plenty of time for both the hedonism and soul-searching Kerouac and Finn bear witness to.

Ultimately, then, perhaps that American paradox is not as heartbreaking as it first appears. Circling around your hometown, chasing after the wrong girls and getting obliterated with your friends will get you nowhere - but that may not be such a bad thing.

No próximo post vou colocar uma coletânea que montei, com uma faixa de cada CD do meu top 10.