Virtually everyone in the music industry (including musicians themselves) agrees that there's a certain stigma attached to making guitar-dominated rock ‘n’ roll: it's painfully simple to do; it's kiddie play. While doing interviews in support of Nevermind, Dave Grohl even went so far as to say that Nirvana went out of their way to ensure that the songs on the record were very simply constructed and stark, "like the songs you used to sing when you were a kid," according to the drummer. With so many musicians making music that they claim to be juvenile it would only make sense that more kids would be trying to make it but, historically, unless your last name is Jackson, Hanson or Cyrus (okay, so she swapped it for Montana, but it's common knowledge that Hannah is Billy Ray's daughter), there hasn't been much to appear. The Mini-Pops were kids, but they were simply blanching the music of established adult acts in a bid to make it palatable to a youth audience—not putting out anything with an authoritative presence or anything actually created by them, it was simply a product.
So if rock ‘n' roll is "kiddie play," it stands to reason that the individuals potentially most adept at making it would be children—so why aren't there more kids rocking out?
That's exactly what has been happening in recent years. In large city centers around the United States including New York, Detroit, Seattle, Los Angeles and Austin, bands whose members are all too young to vote have been surfacing and playing remarkably solid rock that doesn't rely upon the age of the band members as a gimmick. Both the New York Times and Vagrant Records owner Rich Egan have referred to these burgeoning scenes as “kid-core” and some of the bands have begun to attract the attention of the music industry at large as they begin playing shows on their own as well as releasing records. "We started playing together in a band called Cloud Festival which was just all of us jamming, messing around and playing cover songs and stuff," explains Please Quiet Ourselves multi-instrumentalist Adam Becker, "then we got the idea that maybe we should start making our own songs."
Often drawing comparisons to Broken Social Scene, Sonic Youth and even being called the "Baby Modest Mouse," Please Quiet Ourselves recently released their self-titled debut album to overwhelmingly positive response. Betraying no sense of their age, Please Quiet Ourselves feels like listening to the culmination of efforts by musicians that have been listening to that music very literally all their lives and, at an average of 16 years old, the band members could very reasonably have been raised with this music playing in the background—not just come of age with it. Remarkably accomplished songs including "Antibodies" and "Winter Breaking" don't sound like what you'd expect a bunch of high school students to sound like in their meticulous craft, but the band has been steadily building a fan base both on the strength of their live shows as well as PQO's presence online. While it's not easy getting the word out with scholastic obligations looming, the band does everything they can to regularly get in front of as many people as possible. "Touring's a bit of a stretch right now," says PQO singer/guitarist Jojo Brandel realistically. "There's been talk of going down to play South By Southwest but we're not sure if that's going to happen right now. We're trying to convince our parents, but it'd be a week of missed school. We'd love to do it, but we don't know if it's feasible."
"It's definitely harder to get the word out when your life isn't centered in making music and you have to be in the school setting as well, but I think it's been alright," continues Becker. "We've gotten some great press, and a lot of local stuff too and we haven't had to do much reaching out. They've come to us in a lot of cases.
"I think the people that have heard the record really like it and then they find out how old we are and they find new appreciation for it, but it's nice that they don't immediately gravitate toward that."
While the ages of Please Quiet Ourselves' members may not be apparent in their music, in the case of Brooklyn's Tiny Masters of Today, it's fairly difficult to miss—but not because their music is immature, only that when singer Ada steps up to the mike, the tenor of her voice betrays her eleven years rather than her lyrical content. Along with her brother Ivan (who's thirteen years old, their family name has been withheld upon their request), the duo began making demos about a year ago and when their parents brought home a new Mac computer outfitted with the Garage Band home recording software, the songs and structures of them really began to tighten up. When they had a couple of songs finished to their satisfaction, they set up a MySpace page and before long began getting a tremendous amount of attention in the unlikeliest of places. David Bowie has called their song "Stickin' It to the Man" "A two-minute, forty-three-second slice of detached cool" and a work of "genius." When Blues Explosion drummer Russell Simins found the Tiny Masters' MySpace page, he was so captivated that he contacted the band with an offer to produce a full-length record for them, and now when they perform live he fills the drum seat as well. When the band set their sights on recording their debut, they discovered exactly how much of an impact they'd already made as well when established acts from all over the alternative music landscape including Kimya Dawson, Karen O and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes and B-52s singer Fred Schneider all offered to appear on the songs. "We started recording the album about six months ago," explains Ivan of the process that ultimately yielded Bang Bang Boom Cake. "We recorded the first two singles at our house and then the album was done in the studio. Karen is friends with Russell so he hooked us up with her. He actually hooked us up with a lot of the guests that are on the record, but Kimya Dawson came along on her own and messaged us on MySpace and she did two songs with us over email. So far, the record has been received really good; we did a two-week tour of England last summer and we're still doing about one show a month.
"We're taking a break right now because we've been doing a lot of them recently," continues the guitarist. "We just started writing new songs—how it works usually is that my sister writes the lyrics and I write most of the music. We're just in the really early stages right now so it's tough to tell what shape they'll take because the songs we've got don't have lyrics yet but they're sounding pretty good overall so far—Ada will probably have that done soon though."
Invariably at this point, anyone would be asking where the parents fit into this equation. The Spears family has set a precedent in pop culture at this point that the entertainment industry can be a potentially hazardous and difficult place to raise children as the clan can now boast not one, but two train wrecks in Britney and Jamie Lynn as well as one demented conductor and would-be author (mother Lynne Spears), but Tiny Masters' father/manager David says that it’s simply a matter of not losing one's head or getting sucked into the vortex. "With the kids, we use the analogy that we're on a bus and you can get off the bus at any time, you just might have to ring the bell first," explains David. "Now that there are other people like labels and publicists involved and other people's money involved, we do have obligations that we might not necessarily be able to cancel after we've agreed to them but it's like when a kid gets on a soccer team; if they decide they don't want to play soccer anymore, they don't have to, but they have to finish out the season. In the same way, we find ourselves seriously evaluating the whole thing every six months or so and asking, 'Is everybody still having fun?' 'Are everyone's grades still in check?' and that's reasonable enough.
"The other thing is that, as parents, we're not particularly interested in being famous which, from what I've been able to discern, is also fairly uncommon," says TMOT's father, chuckling. "A lot of the time in this new celebrity culture the parents seem as desperate for the spotlight as those that are being fawned over. We won't be interviewed on camera and all that; it isn't about us and we deflect it away from ourselves as much as possible. When we saw that Britney Spears' mother was actually working on a parenting book, we thought it was absolutely hilarious. I think that one of the things that functions as a built-in check for these kids is the fact that what they're doing is pretty avant garde. It's not really part of that big pop-culture scene and in some ways—I won't say they're oblivious to it—but they're a bit immune to that. The moments that are a little more difficult are when they're placed in these adult environments and we don't always know; the first time we toured England was very difficult because everybody smoked in bars," continues David. "We haven't done that here in years so the venue they played was completely sold out, and people were just crammed in there and it was full of smoke. The kids were just gasping; they'd never experienced that. Now the whole EU has gone non-smoking so that's easier, but every now and again something creeps up and it becomes apparent that they're in an adult world and dealing with things they're not used to."
More on Please Quiet Ourselves here: www.myspace.com/quietourselves
More on Tiny Masters of Today here: www.myspace.com/tinymasters
