a grammar

DIY = "personal responsibility!"

Nathan Williams of Wavves The strange thing about Chris Richards’s Washington Post story, the one about Wavves’ instant internet blowup and tour meltdowns and general buffeting on the waves of online enthusiasm and snark and backlash, is that it presents Nathan Williams as basically pitiful and entirely, completely lacking in any sort of agency whatsoever, nothing even resembling agency, nowhere even close: he sits and stares off into space and eats “soggy pita chips” and says perfectly true stuff like “I’m just some kid” and “I never thought about any of this” and “There was no time for me to suck in basements.” Apart from saying that his main joy is making music—coming up with ideas and getting them on tape—there’s not a single quote from Williams where he’s an active subject, where he says my plan was this or I wanted that or my goal was the other.

And I sympathize with the guy a little—he’s young and he got thrown into high-pressure, ego-bruising public environments where a lot of people would make mistakes. But the moral of Richards’s story might actually have to do with agency, with “personal responsibility,” with control. Wavves is a DIY act in its sound and its ethos. Its rapid rise to attention was build on relatively “DIY” channels. What Richards describes is the kind of DIY dream plenty of circa-77 punks would have approved of: the ability to go from making music in your bedroom to getting that music heard and talked about and passed around, all with minimal mediation by giant corporate concerns or super-entrenched nation media or any of that stuff. The Clash offered everyone a tagline and a rallying cry for that sort of thing: “We want COMPLETE CONTROL!” And Williams got complete control. Or he could have had it, if he’d wanted it. The agency was his to seize, mostly, wasn’t it?

I hate to sound like anyone’s dad quite yet, but this is the thing about DIY freedom; the freedom comes with responsibility. If you want to be disintermediated—if you want to skirt or simplify the system of major-label gatekeepers and A&R concerns and marketing departments that might otherwise script your career—then you have to script your career. If you need time to suck in basements, you have to make it. (Rehearse longer. Go play under a different name.) If you don’t think you’re ready for a tour, you have to turn it down. (This will be hard, so hard, when the iron is hot and people are asking you to strike it; you might even lose your window of opportunity; welcome to the stuff those evil big labels used to worry about.) If you just want to make music for a while, then stay home and make music. (Figure out what you’re aiming for, don’t show your face, let the tunes do the work. Be mysterious, if you want.) Pick a path. You can beg a corporate giant to pick it for you, or you can pick it yourself, or you can find savvy people you trust to advise you—but somewhere along the line a path will need to be picked, or else you will wind up buffeted by those waves and staring off into space, eating whatever kind of pita chips get thrown in front of you, talking passively about what happened to you, as if you had nothing to do with any of it.

I don’t know if Williams is as passive as the article makes him sound; obviously it’s a piece with an angle. Williams’s rocky path may even work out for him, in the end—it’s certainly getting his name out there, anyway. Part of me really likes seeing it, because so much of the indie world these days is so damned savvy: acts know how to present themselves, how to work the system, how to present their angles and hooks to best effect. (Williams stands out precisely because he’s one of very few people who don’t know how—or won’t try—to be canny and professional and play their cards right.) The public as a whole, these days, is cannier about these things, right down to middle-school kids on social networks. (The internet teaches a whole lot about it; you can learn it just from embarrassing yourself on a message board somewhere.) There are good things about seeing someone who seems immune to all the savvy and knowingness we all tend to be really, really beholden to.

I get the feeling the bulk of indie acts have been thinking since they were roughly 14 about what they would do with Complete Control. But Williams might be a good lesson to those who find themselves in that odd blow-up position: better that you plan what you’re doing than following some trail of carrots off into embarrassment.