And so now we can all see that people were still using cocaine in the 90s; I wouldn't be surprised if the DVD commentary for Herbie Fully Loaded brought us all up to speed in acknowledging that people are using cocaine even in the 00s. Soon everything will be blogged and documented well into the future, so we can all check who's using cocaine in the 3050s. Why all the talk about cocaine? Well, mostly, I just like to talk about cocaine. But I also had some kind of point to make about Dig!, though it may have been lost in my subsequent three rails and 20 mental tangents. Ah yes, it was that Dig! pulls back the curtain on the 90s indie rock phenomenon, as expereinced by two not-very-good and not-very-famous bands, The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Both bands rose from obscurity seemingly through pure deluded self-belief rather than anything like real artistry, and their paths were parallel if entirely opposite. BJM, led by self-proclaimed genius and candidate-for-anger-management-training Anton Newcombe, were an ongoing trainwreck known for amazing productivity (if shoddy quality) and shows more akin to street brawls than rock concerts. The Dandies, conversely, were more willing to play the game, and tasted real success, if not the level of Guns N'Roses-like stardom they probably imagined they were having. Interestingly, despite the fact that both groups are essentially cult bands, they lived like full-on rock stars. It's in the depiction of music-industry indulgence that Dig! is most compelling, showing that even bands on the lower echelons of a given label's roster are about as inclined to pursue the suddenly plentiful drugs and drink as to try to write some really good songs or make a truly meaningful record. And so, for someone like myself who aimed for similar success when my generation swept into the spotlight—only to achieve pretty much the same end as if I hadn't tried at all—it's both bittersweet and strangely gratifying to see that the Gen X adherence to "integrity" really benefited no one. The members of each band, for the most part, end up working at places like Amoeba Records, or some hipster bar, still holding on to the idea that they did something, they meant something, and they're still going to do something again. It's a sad little trap. Dig! is an intoxicating document of a moment in time when bands just like mine somehow made it, while others almost did … and in the end, everyone got spit out of the machine. The lingering question, for me, is whether it would have been better in the end to at least have been in the machine, even with all its pitiful pitfalls and harsh comedown, than to simply have been standing outside it, as most of us did, listening through the walls and imagining what must have been going on inside.
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