I’ve been working my way through Bob Dylan’s Chronicles over the past few days and have been thoroughly enjoying it. It amazes me how meaningfully Dylan was able to respond to all the differing situations he found himself in. Whether it was in the Midwest, New York City, Woodstock, or in New Orleans, his surroundings were at all times informing the shape and content of his music.

All of this caused me to wonder whether or not this sense of belonging in music, especially popular music, is becoming a thing of the past. As much as I like the catchy hooks of “Since U Been Gone,” I have no idea where Kelly Clarkson is from, and nor do I think that really matters. Pop music is a world currency: it is just as listenable in Ljubljana, Slovenia as it is in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It seems to me that pop music is having less and less to say about who we are as a people in a particular place, and more about what we like to consume as entertainment.

This is where the significance of groups like the Animal Collective lies. The group only have emerged out of the current North American way of life. Take “We Tigers” from their 2004 album Sung Tongs for example. In the midst of a society longing for more security, Avey Tare and Panda Bear opt rather to start a drum circle chanting ‘everybody’s welcome, everybody’s welcome, tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger.’ This isn’t some humanistic approach to reality in which we gather together, ignore all our differences, sing kumbaya, and then claim to be living in unity with each other. Instead, they invite us to participate in their alternate way of life in which we all gather together and start dancing around on all fours, short-circuiting us from the rest of society.

On the more recent Feels, the focus is more on destruction: the album consists of one incomplete song followed by another, as they throw away more ideas in one album than most artists can come up with in their career. “The Purple Bottle” is a wonderful example of their schizophrenic songwriting. It goes from a nice melodic pop song (ala “I Just Called to Say I Love You”), to a disturbed Beach Boys choral piece, to a possessed screaming opus, all in under eight minutes. Here again you hear the group yet again immersing themselves in their surroundings, only to explode them from within. Proving that, as Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “somewhere is better than nowhere.”

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