Chicago’s Drag City Records is featured in this Spotlight: installment.
Drag City, one of Chicago’s best record labels, began in 1989 by releasing material by Pavement and Royal Trux. Now Drag City has a number of subsidiary labels (e.g. Moikai and Palace Records). In their dozen years of operation, their roster has grown to include Edith Frost, Gastr del Sol (et al.), Red Krayola (et al.), Aerial M, US Maple, and Palace Music, among others. Drag City is one of the best operations around. They have not pigeonholed themselves with a number of tightly related bands and one sound; they have not restricted themselves geographically to such an extent as to be a regional record label; and their choices have been exemplary.
Drag City is signing the bands that are making some of the best records, and they are signing the bands that are making difficult, esoteric, beautiful, arresting, and intelligent music. Their bands have contributed to the development of music. These are bands that are doing their own thing, on their own terms. The press and popular fancy has a complex relationship with Drag City. Pavement and Stereolab sell records and critics like them well enough, liked them well enough, whatever. Shellac and US Maple are annual college radio favorites. Hipsters liked Will Oldham and Palace; and Royal Trux, Red Krayola, and the Gastr del Sol lineage have all attracted an ardent, fiercely loyal following.
Drag City takes chances. But they do not take frivolous chances. They take chances on bands that may not have clear commercial promise, but they have clear talent, intelligence, and dedication to their craft. The Drag City catalog documents artists doing their thing; perhaps consequently, Drag City embraces a seemingly disparate range of genres. The bands are not defined in relation to what they are against or what they are reacting to or what they have divorced themselves from. The artists experiment and when they find conventions in their way no longer relevant, they let them go, sometimes forcibly and sometimes gently.
People listen to music for different reasons. I don’t buy records so that I feel better because somebody felt like me once. I’m not buying records so that I can play them and feel happy that I have the latest bullshit bandied as the next thing . I’m buying records to hear artists’ in the privacy of a studio hammering out a sound and putting together a record of music. I pay money to acquire craft, the musician’s craft, and Drag City is a label dedicated to craft however it may be clad. The releases Drag City has given us over a dozen years have made us rethink what music ought to strive for. It’s made us rethink what it means to say something is a song. It’s made us wonder about the artists’ intentions in releasing an album of old school rock ‘n roll after an unlistenable experiment in noise, and it’s made us wonder if the artist was intending for us to wonder about his or her intentions.
This is a thought-provoking record label. There aren’t many thought-provoking record labels. There aren’t many people that want their thoughts provoked, least of all by a record label. But if you are one of them, you should carefully visit Drag City. It is like being in a small rundown book cellar that has dirty paperback copies of Don Delillo’s Libra, a copy of Under the Volcano missing the cover, scattered stuff from Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, even a book or two by Nabokov, Paul Bowles, and buried upstairs expensive copies of Borges manuscripts. If you were in this bookcellar, you would look at the books and think, I read that book fifteen years ago, I have to read it again. Looking at other books, you would think ‘I should have read that many years ago but I never have, I’ll read it soon’. You might scold yourself and sigh, staring at the unassuming books.
Tags: best, intelligent music, record labels
