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First, I know next to nothing about Deerhoof. I've heard they are a great band and I know they are slanted more toward the avant-garde side of things, but I have never listened to any of their music. I was reading an article about them in Skyscraper and this bit struck me as wonderful. It's what their drummer Greg Saunier had to say about the reaction to their music and the uses of music.
"A college student once told me that they listened to Reveille every morning when they woke up. That was their alarm clock, basically. They had it set to whenever they'd wake up, and it would play the disc, which totally blew my mind. I couldn't beleive it. That made me really happy, the fact that someone had found a specific use for it. But that use wasn't mandated by us. That doesn't mean that it can't be mandated by them. It's their right to use it in whatever way they wish. For us, it's just a disc with 1's and 0's on it, and we're just offering it and hoping that people can find some uses for it, and we don't know what those uses might be, and so far those uses have far surpassed anything we could dream of. Something like that is so incredible to me, that it's more than just, 'This disc got a good review in blah blah blah.' No, someone is using a Deerhoof record in a way that isn't just about music. It's one little piece of their actual day or their real life. It's not separated off. And it just reminds me of how music has so often felt to me. You think of when you're a kid and you're listening to the radio, and it's not like you're an eight-year-old record collector and you're thinking, 'Okay, now I'm going to listen to music.' It's so much a part of your actual life, and ths song makes you feel sad, and this song reminds you of your girlfriend, and this song helps you exercise - all these things that are related to real life activities that are intertwined and music doesn't feel like this thing in a museum. When I started to realize that our music was starting to play that role in real people's lives - other human beings that we'd never met before - that was really amazing. It made me think about our music in different ways. It just upped the ante. It made me feel accountable. You're really putting something out there, and it may turn out to matter."
"A college student once told me that they listened to Reveille every morning when they woke up. That was their alarm clock, basically. They had it set to whenever they'd wake up, and it would play the disc, which totally blew my mind. I couldn't beleive it. That made me really happy, the fact that someone had found a specific use for it. But that use wasn't mandated by us. That doesn't mean that it can't be mandated by them. It's their right to use it in whatever way they wish. For us, it's just a disc with 1's and 0's on it, and we're just offering it and hoping that people can find some uses for it, and we don't know what those uses might be, and so far those uses have far surpassed anything we could dream of. Something like that is so incredible to me, that it's more than just, 'This disc got a good review in blah blah blah.' No, someone is using a Deerhoof record in a way that isn't just about music. It's one little piece of their actual day or their real life. It's not separated off. And it just reminds me of how music has so often felt to me. You think of when you're a kid and you're listening to the radio, and it's not like you're an eight-year-old record collector and you're thinking, 'Okay, now I'm going to listen to music.' It's so much a part of your actual life, and ths song makes you feel sad, and this song reminds you of your girlfriend, and this song helps you exercise - all these things that are related to real life activities that are intertwined and music doesn't feel like this thing in a museum. When I started to realize that our music was starting to play that role in real people's lives - other human beings that we'd never met before - that was really amazing. It made me think about our music in different ways. It just upped the ante. It made me feel accountable. You're really putting something out there, and it may turn out to matter."
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