In this once again Golden Age of the Reunion, everyone from the jaded old punk who saw At the Drive-In at some shitty college venue with 20 other kids to the 16-year-old Alternative Press subscriber who just read about Refused for the first time in an issue with Breathe Carolina or My Chemical Romance on the cover - they all have something to say about these bands who've either come back from the dead to (a) collect a paycheck from all the suckers buying tickets to see them or to (b) remind us how this whole band thing is really supposed to be done. The important detail that seems to be overlooked from all this commentary on the Reunion is any acknowledgement of what all this business says about the currently active B-team of bands trying to make waves in the treacherous waters of a music scene. But when the biggest waves in said waters are being made by bands who'd been long ago left in their own wakes, there comes a time to analyze the state of things.
'Suckers' like myself will tell you, seeing Sunny Day Real Estate on their 2009 reunion tour was far more stimulating and memorable than whatever bands of the moment I saw for months after that. When The Dismemberment Plan did a full US tour selling out bigger venues than they would have played in their active years (and made an appearance on Fallon), we danced harder and sang louder than we had in years, and none of your favorite buzz bands could have evoked a reaction even in the same ballpark. Everyone who's watched recent videos or had the pleasure of seeing At the Drive-In on their current tour probably doesn't even remember that The Mars Volta just put out another record.
Some might credit nostalgia for the aforementioned phenomena, but I tend to think there's more than just nostalgic value that keeps us so fixed on our favorite bands of yesteryear coming back for us. Critics of the Reunion will tell you that this is all a scam. That all these bands are just in it for the money. That they saw This Band or That Band in a basement in 1993 and seeing them now would just be a waste of time and/or money. This leads me to assume that there must be something of equal or greater urgency happening in the current musical landscape that somehow the rest of us just haven't caught wind of yet. However, as far as I've seen, the arms-crossed-feet-cemented-to-the-floor dance remains the most popular step for the kids patronizing this wave of bands.
So why is everyone so quick to accuse these bands of being simply 'in it for the money'? And even if they are, why should we care? Have they not paid their dues? Have they not earned whatever status we've given them? If we didn't value the product they were giving us, wouldn't we stop giving them our money? Or do we (consciously or subconsciously) place such high value on the Reunion because we know damn well that there's comparatively much less value in most everything else that the current musical landscape is churning out?
I, for one, am of the opinion that the Union is in desperate need of its own movement. Punk is not dead. Rock n' roll is not dead. Hip hop is not dead. But the more we butcher these tired scenes, the closer we bring them to the musical mausoleum that many short-sighted individuals claim to have witnessed them in. So maybe this is a perfectly ripe time for us to stand back and watch the seasoned veterans who pioneered something of their own and learn from them (rather than plagiarize them). Learn that we as a generation of independent musicians need to etch out our own path - not one of revival, but one of conception. After all, how can we revive something that's not yet dead?
