Maybe we’re getting old, but anybody else remember when Trey from Phish started telling Guitar Player about how he was obsessed with “Wowee Zowee” and couldn’t stop listening to Pavement? It looks like that little aside is finally coming to fruition.

Now while Joel and I each might have separate youthful indiscretions of the jam variety, and out of collegiate shame, we may even have later lashed out at pseudo-jazz noodling in print (j-ho is still decried in DMB chat rooms, me in phish ones), that’s not what this about.

The New York Times reports that jazzheads are coming for our indie rock. And we wanna know what’s to be done about it.

Now when the Grey Lady declares a new trend, everybody knows it’s either already over or never remotely true. A “Gold Sounds,” a jazz album of Pavement covers is in fact coming out and it’s seems there’s little we can do about it, other than enjoy it’s weirdness. It seems like we should save our heroes, but we were spacing out during solos for years so maybe they brought it on themselves. And really there’s nothing wrong with jamming after all, it gets wanky pretty quick, but we don’t have to completely fear it.

But it got me thinking. New jazz stopped mattering shortly before I was born, so I go back and forth whether I should care about it all, (which I should, but come on, it’s jazz), though here’s the thing: Jazz mattered roughly for 70 years by my watch. After World War One to 1980. Rock and roll just turned 50, so if we’re lucky, rock has maybe 15 years left, tops. Nobody wants to hear it and hopefully I’m wrong, but I doubt there will be any important rock ’n’ roll much after 2020.

Like jazz in the ‘70s, rock has mostly fallen off the popular radar. It’s become the plaything of passionate nerdy white people, who for better and worse, keep the flame alive and out of the masses’ reach. Again no judgment, that’s just where we’re at. Like most old people, Jazz is all too happy to tell you how great it use to be, Rock is in its “Bitches Brew” flux and Hip-hop is waiting for it’s Beatles.

The NYT article skirts around the non-sonic similarities between jazz nerds and indie nerds (we are nerd aren’t we? who cares). Obsessive, bizarrely territorial fetishers of the past glory who mix-up listening intensely with listening passively all the time and over think stuff. I’m sure there’s great jazz musicians out there now, who’ll never get through to anybody. The fog has settled too thick, the fans pretending they like it.

15 years, I’m not kidding, we’re practically there. Maybe we’re gonna hit a jazzy spell in rock. Fine, but let’s not make to big a deal of it cause then hardcore will crop back up to respond and we don’t need to waste the precious little time we got left on long settled debates. Let’s stop wasting time being territorial and caring what kind of label put records and who is on what commercial. Let’s just fucking enjoy ourselves, stop being glum and pick out a nice coffin. The pseudo-underground is death or life or death…Doesn’t matter.

Fuck it. Uncross your arms and smile.

Let’s make rock DEpendant again.

Perfect sounds for now, brothers and sisters.