Loyal readers will no doubt recall the homage to Big Star that I posted a while back. Tweeps know by now that Alex Chilton died yesterday as the result of a heart attack he suffered while mowing his lawn. Aside from definitely being off of yard work for a while, I’m pretty bummed. If you don’t know Big Star, you do know REM, or Talking Heads, or Green Day, or Barton Carroll, or Vampire Weekend, or any of a whole host of artists that play “power pop.” Like it’s cousin punk, power pop was a rejection of overproduced rock and roll. Unlike punk, power pop did not simply say “fuck all,” but strove to assert some value in comparison to what seemed like shallow commercially successful music.
Not that power pop is dead, by any means. But Alex Chilton and his band mate Chris Bell are dead. Their producer, Jim Dickenson, died within the last year as well. What strikes me is that, as a person who has just recently really started listening to their music, Big Star sounds as fresh today as the Beatles do. That is to say, very fresh, which is hard to pull off given that they recorded in the early to mid-Seventies. Their lyrics and delivery are extraordinarily heartfelt, or heartbroken, and always sadly sweet. Or sweetly sad, I’m not sure which. Feeling a bit that way at the moment for reasons totally unconnected to Chilton’s sudden passing, I’m all the more sad to see him go right at a moment when I want him around. But that is too often the way it goes.