The Golden Age: Animal Collective and Avatar
*MP3: Animal Collective - “My Girls”
The art forms of each age are informed by the cultures which they inhabit. Artists may think and work independently, but their work will likely follow contemporary streams of public consciousness. If we live as a collective, we think and move as a collective, for our collective advancement and preservation. The movement may be unspoken, and it may be be pushed and pulled in many directions, but it is there, and everyone, sooner or later, shifts with it. It’s interesting, then, to observe cases of artistic parallelism, when like-minded artists unveil like-minded works at the same time, revealing a bit of the invisible conversation of collective idealism while helping to shape and change the public consciousness.
Consider 2009. It fascinates me that Animal Collective’s album Merriweather Post Pavilion and James Cameron’s film Avatar would appear in the same year. If there was any age that could defeat the idea of parallelism in art and culture, it would be our information age, with its insistence on expanding and diversifying the terrain of ideas. Yet here they are: a revolutionary film that celebrates the lushness and expansiveness of life, and a forward-thinking album that could easily soundtrack the film. Both were likely intense labors for their creators, requiring years of experience in separate modes of thought and design. And yet they appear at the same moment in history, precisely when it matters most that they exist, and they come to this point without prior knowledge of each other and only the intuitive sense that it was time for such creations to be brought upon the world.
[Click here to watch a clip of Avatar]
When you examine the two side by side, the relationship is starkly apparent—Merriweather expresses aurally what Avatar demonstrates visually. If you have seen the film, go back and listen to “In the Flowers” or “My Girls” and try not to conjure imagery from the film. The strange electronically manipulated jungle sounds that seep from the crevices of the album seem as if they must be taken directly from the film. More than anything, though, it’s the feeling of these two things that seem more analogous and advanced than anything around them. They seem culled from the same future pressure point, simultaneously dire and hopeful in its prediction of what could await us and the choices we can make for getting there.
There is also a willful naivete that exists under the technical mastery of each work. “There isn’t much that I feel I need,” sings Panda Bear on “My Girls”, “a solid soul, and the blood I bleed.” The lyrics are primal. He only wants a proper dwelling place for his family. “Summertime Clothes” and “Brothersport” dance and play wide-eyed around the innocent worlds they encapsulate. In Avatar, the Na’vi swear fealty to the world around them and live by its movements. They only want what is apportioned to them, not what is theirs to take. Their symbiosis with nature is as ancient and primal as music’s ability to describe such things, which means it goes back at least to when human beings first learned to open up their throats and sing.
Such statements have, of course, been made before. Avatar isn’t really that original of a film underneath the visuals, and plenty of other musicians are doing interesting and forward-thinking things that Animal Collective is not. We have learned by now that full-on hippie-dippiness probably won’t bear out anything, that human relations are a more complex animal. The interest of these works, then, remains more aesthetic than existential. But their appearance and relative success at the same time (Avatar has had much more exposure than Merriweather) suggests that what may have once been fringe ideas have gained intelligence and maturity enough to take hold of the public discourse. And that is the beginning of change.
- The Golden Age is a weekly column written by Erik Martz.
