4th of July.

5 March 2002—In 1979, my family and I took a road trip up to the Bay Area to visit my sister Janet, who lived in Point Reyes. The best part of the trip for me was that Janet had a big, wild back yard (at least it was big to my nine-year-old eyes), and there was a stream running through it. Everyone else slept in the house, while I pitched my tent near the stream.

The worst part of the trip was that my parents kept saying the word cool. To me, “cool” was a word Fonzie said on “Happy Days,” and it was about the least cool word my parents could say. Simply uttering the word cool placed them instantly in that realm where parents everywhere simply render uncool the vernacular of their children. Syntax wasn’t the problem; my parents are excellent writers. It must have been the inflection. You can always tell when parents slangmangle: it sounds about as natural as a non-French-speaker talking about trompe l’oeil.

I made a vow then, a vow to which I occasionally recommit myself, that when I become a parent, I will use my children’s idioms only sparingly and with just the right inflection. Furthermore, I will attempt to be in the know about what music they like. Further still, I will attempt to see something in their music that I can relate to, so that I am not hopelessly out of touch.

I have already failed.

Last week the Grammies were awarded. Never mind that I didn’t even realize the show was coming up until the day after it had been on television. I looked at the list of winners and had a sobering realization: out of 101 categories, I had only heard 10 of the winners, and there were a couple of those that were duplicates. Sure, I recognized almost all of the names of the artists who won, but if you asked me all the songs U2 won for, let alone Nelly Furtado, I’d give you a blank look. As friendly a blank look as I could muster, but blank nonetheless. Dude – I used to know all of U2’s songs.

I realize, of course, that if I had teenaged children, they probably wouldn’t know the names of the U2 songs, either. These days, they’re listening to Outkast, Alicia Keys, Staind, Usher, Korn, and a bunch of bands I haven’t even heard of yet. A few years ago, I used to log on to launch.com every Wednesday afternoon for an hourlong trivia contest in which the host asked musical questions and the first correct answer won its participant the cd of his or her choice. It was usually me and a bunch of teenagers duking it out. Most of the questions might as well have been the million-dollar question on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” for me, anyway. But then the host would pull out some not-too-obscure bebop question, such as “Which jazz musician went by the nickname Bird?” and the room would go silent. I would then get to saunter right in and win my cd for the week.

Between the questions, the kids would just be chatting with each other about what they were listening to. Those days, they were really excited about a band called Coal Chamber, a band I hadn’t heard of before that and haven’t heard about since then. Still, I was amazed that I hadn’t heard of the band, and I still couldn’t tell you what any of their songs are/were. See? I don’t even know whether they’re still together. (OK, I just looked them up on Google, and there were something like 46,000 Web pages that mention them, and it seems they’re coming out with a new album next month. Congratulations, Coal Chamber! I kiss you!)

Let’s get back to U2 for a moment. They used to be one of my favorite bands: great hooks, great teeth. A little preachy and overwrought sometimes, but the earnestness made up for it. Then, almost the minute after Rattle and Hum came out, the band went postmodern on me. I’m all for a band’s evolution; it has to grow and change, and if it does so in ways that don’t appeal to me, that’s fine. We had a nice time together, U2 and I.

I was at least still aware of their songs that got released as singles. But something began to happen: I started listening less and less to commercial radio. At my old job, I had the radio firmly set on our local hugely popular classic-rock station, KFOG. It was too much trouble to change the station, to tell you the truth, and though I like the programs on KQED, one of our local public radio stations that plays things like “All Things Considered,” “Fresh Air,” and other such NPR favorites, I can’t listen to people talking and focus on my work at the same time.

So the dial was stuck on KFOG. I have to say, as commercial stations go, KFOG is pretty cool. It’s not owned by some big conglomerate, it treats its listeners well, and it puts on a hell of a fireworks show every year. They have a policy of not repeating any songs between 9 and 5, but the fact that they have to make a special effort to not repeat a song in the span of eight hours kind of sums up the problem of commercial radio: there isn’t enough room in the playlist to get a wide variety of music in there.

KFOG used to play an album side twice a day, which was great because you got to hear tracks that normally wouldn’t make it onto the radio. It also allowed them to present songs in the context of their albums, which can reveal a greater depth than by isolating the song as a single. The “Three O’Clock Album Side” program is long gone, but there’s still one program every day that breaks completely from the KFOG mold: “10 at 10,” which plays ten songs plus relevant cultural/news sound bites from a particular year, and sometimes linked by special themes instead of years. “10 at 10,” created and still hosted by the best DJ in commercial radio, Dave Morey, is a welcome break from a mostly bland palette of classic rock, “alternative” rock, and pseudo-blues. The neat thing about “10 at 10” is that listeners vote for best of set and are involved in the planning of special-theme shows. There even came to be a Yahoo! Club devoted to the show, which gave listeners a chance to meet each other, at least virtually. (Eventually many of the online folks met in person and have kept in touch outside the “10 at 10” realm; we even once had dinner with Dave Morey himself. Yes, you may touch us.)

At my new job, however, I finally had a more up-to-date computer that allowed me to listen to stations online, and suddenly I could listen to KCRW, a fantastic public radio station in southern California. KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” is a perfect show, music I wouldn’t know about if someone wonderfully more knowledgeable than I didn’t introduce me to it. Gradually I was listening less and less to KFOG and even to “10 at 10.”

Internet radio, however, has its technical limitations. Real Audio was crashing quite a bit, or it would occasionally lose its buffer, making annoying breaks in continuity, so I eventually stopped listening to KCRW in the mornings. But instead of going back to KFOG, I turned to an even more independent voice.

KALX is UC Berkeley’s student-run radio station, and it’s surprisingly good. I never listened to it when I was a student; every time I turned it on, it seemed like the DJ’s self-assigned mission was to find the most cacophonous sounds and unleash them in a barrage of unlistenabullshit. It was only because my housemate liked it so much that I started giving it a shot, some eight years after I had graduated.

Maybe the DJs have changed; maybe I’ve changed; maybe music has changed. As third-wave feminism has made it possible for women to be empowered without sacrificing their sexuality, independent artists have apparently found that they can kiss the establishment goodbye and still have catchy melodies.

I don’t know what took me so long to get that myself. My favorite musician, Lloyd Cole, has been operating outside the mainstream spotlight since almost the beginning. In a reverse from the usual “overnight” discovery of a band that’s been around for years, Lloyd was swept up early in his career, had one major hit, “Perfect Skin,” and then disappeared from radio.

But after his first album in 1985, I knew I was a lifelong fan. His band, the Commotions, lasted through two more albums. Lloyd then went off to start a solo career. He’s been dumped by a few labels over the years, but he’s put out a bunch of solo albums, music and lyrics dripping with his caustic intelligence and a poetry rivaling that of his hero, Leonard Cohen. (I may try changing my initials to LC and see if that doesn’t help my own writing, actually.)

He’s now more or less completely independent, managing his own career, his own site, his own albums. Fuck the record companies; they never treated him right anyway. He tours big clubs like Slim’s, and he sells them out every time, whether it’s just him and a guitar or with his new band, the Negatives.

Then, of course, there’s Ani, who’s famous for having always rejected offers to record for music companies. And she’s done just fine on her own, thank you very little, selling out big venues wherever she goes, whenever she feels like touring. Here’s how broad her appeal is: I was introduced to her music back in 1993 by an acquaintance of mine who was politically pretty conservative; he really just loved her guitar style. Because music labels cajole radio conglomerates into playing the music they own (payola’s not dead, in case you were wondering), musicians without a label calling the shots for them simply don’t get played on commercial radio. Case in point: a singer named Alana Davis popped up out of nowhere with a horrible cover of Ani’s “32 Flavors” and got tremendous airplay on one of our local stations. To this day I have never heard the original on that station.

Now, thanks to KALX, I’ve been treated to a ton of stuff that would never find its way onto the bigger stations in our area. I’ll be forever indebted to KALX for turning me onto Jason Falkner, whose only rival for utter musical talent in the power-pop world is Ben Folds. JF is an amazing musician, the kind of artist you just sit there listening to with your mouth agape, wondering how one person can be so damned talented. Once a minor member of Jellyfish, a two-hit-wonder band I still love though they’ve been broken up for nearly ten years, and later a less minor member of the one-album band The Grays, JF went on to a solo career, turning out two fantastic cds before Elektra (which JF calls Neglektra – another sharp wit, this one) dumped him. I didn’t get to him until he partnered up with a little label and released a cd of early demos for songs that later got polished and released on his previous two albums. I actually listened to the demos before hearing the “final” versions that had already been released, and it’s interesting to see the development. It also makes me appreciate all the care he puts into his songwriting. There’s so much in there it demands repeated listening. If you have any affinity for bands like Ben Folds Five, Jellyfish, or Fastball, you absolutely have to hear Jason Falkner.

Station break: I must take a moment to tell you that despite the utter brilliance of Jason Falkner, I love Sarah most of all. Now back to our regularly scheduled essay.

One of the things that’s made it easier for independent musicians to get their work in front of people is that the means of production has become reachable for most people. It still takes some money to do a decent recording, but anyone with a basic four-track recorder and a cd burner can self-publish. Then they can pile their equipment in a van, take it around the country, and play little clubs, sell their cds, and eke out some kind of living, doing exactly what they want to do without corporate restraints.

This is something that’s still somewhat out of reach for artists in other media, such as writers. It’s possible to self-publish a book, but the cost of production is still quite high for a book of the same physical quality as what you find in bookstores (preferably independent stores, of course). And writers can’t exactly tour like bands do; it’s a bit more difficult to do readings of short stories or novel excerpts at house parties and tiny clubs. (In the case of slam poetry, however, out-of-town writers do have sort of a collection of built-in venues, especially here in northern California.)

Electronic books, though, are making their way slowly into the collective consciousness. There are still some significant reservations among the purists, one of which is the understandable lament of the loss of a multisensory experience of reading, wherein the feel and smell of high-grade paper and cloth makes you want to envelop yourself with a favorite blanket, settle in, and read for hours.

The less-understandable reservation – for me, anyway – comes from those who worry that the newfound ease of self-publishing will open the floodgates to a tidal wave of literary sludge that otherwise would have met its proper fate at the bottom of an editor’s slush pile. How ever will we know what to read if the publishing houses don’t decide for us? Oh, don’t worry, the arbiters of literary taste, through the major book reviews, will still help us determine our reading lists. But it does open an opportunity for a diligent, dedicated independent writer to get her work in front of a lot more people.

There’s another place for independent writers to get their work seen, and you’re looking at it right now. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of online journals, most of them dailyish diaries of people’s lives called weblogs, or blogs for short. No one can tell these writers what to write (though one person just got fired from her job for what she wrote on her journal), and though I have a couple of misgivings about the self-referential and insular nature of the medium, including my own journal, I like it when people express themselves well, and the medium allows a lot of people to deal with their demons and increase their self-confidence by helping them discover their voice. For aspiring writers, especially, I think these journals can be a wonderful place for us to practice our craft, building readerships like bands build their audiences.

The Web has a lot of potential for independent content. With music, of course, mp3s have become the scourge of the recording industry for their potential to increase theft of copyrighted material. On the other hand, mp3s can be the lifeblood of musicians trying to get the word out about themselves. One of my “10 at 10” friends, Amelia Ray, has released two albums on mp3.com. Without this technology, you might not have gotten to hear her fabulous music. Now you have no excuse not to.

Finally, beyond the simple translation of one medium to another, which is essentially what journals and mp3s are, there are the sites that use the medium to its fullest extent, going beyond words, beyond sound, beyond film or animation, to a perspective-widening break into interactivity. It’s here that truly independent creative geniuses like Ze Frank can show us what’s possible.

The SXSW Interactive Festival, coming up this weekend in Austin, has an entire track focusing on independent content on the Web. The forums will be filled with people who are passionate about the subject, such as Jeffrey Zeldman, and it’s under the banner of a loose collective of creatives called Independents Day, which kind of functions as inspiration for those of us who want to see what the Web is capable of. I’m really looking forward to what comes out of these discussions.

Because I think a Web dominated by creative, independent artists, writers, musicians and other visionaries would be really cool. Even my future children might think so, too.

By the way, Mastication Is Normal is a finalist in the online journal category of the SXSW Web Awards, which will be announced Sunday night. Wish me luck!