Book: Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock
by Jesse Jarnow
Reviewed by: Steven
Like everyone else, I have a couple Yo La Tengo albums lying around that I’ll throw on from time to time when I’m craving an extended fuzz rock guitar freakout. I’m not obsessed with them, and they’re not something that I regularly seek out, but, when their music is on, I’m genuinely excited and happy to hear it. Incidentally, if you don’t think you own a Yo La Tengo album, you’re wrong. You definitely do. Everybody has at least one. I’ll wait while you go and check.
I was right, wasn’t I? I knew it.
I don’t so much love their songs as I love the band as a concept and a group of people. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley have been making exactly the kind of music that they want to make and making it at their own pace for the last thirty years, and there is something desperately beautiful in the entanglement of their romance and artistic collaboration. James McNew has allowed his relentless love of music to shape his creative vision, and, like so many musicians have over the years, he simply found himself in Yo La Tengo by happenstance, the only difference being that he stuck. Together, the trio has carved out a niche in modern music that has come to embody and define indie rock. Their unique ties to freeform radio and the alternative comedy world have inspired a whirlwind of seemingly disparate art that has become one of most interesting cultural phenomena of our generation.
In Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, Jesse Jarnow chronicles the ascent of the New Jersey post-punk scene by exploring the personalities involved: the artists, venues, record labels, and fanzines that have made rock and roll what it is today. The enumeration of the factors at play in the Hoboken arts community reveal the network of influences that shaped Yo La Tengo and the significance of Yo La Tengo to modern music. Interwoven with rich personal histories, Big Day Coming documents the spiderweb of creativity that has convolved to make Yo La Tengo so powerful, important, and, in a way, inevitable.
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