When I first saw STS9, I was 16 and they were a thought-provoking, ludicrously skilled, highly energetic band with a small but committed following of warm, interesting people. Their music dipped and swelled, generating tension and then releasing it in a haze of live drum and bass, organic electronica, and rhythmically enveloping music that I don’t think anyone else has or can really match. Its pointless to try to describe what my first several shows meant to me, and I’ll probably never have the vocabulary or syntax to convey the ipmact that that music and community had and has had on my development. Just know that they were important.
Thankfully, I’ve changed a lot since I was 16. I’m not saying I wasn’t the man in 10th grade—I totally was, I’ve just gotten a lot of cool clothes since then that I can’t imagine living without now. Predictably, my life is a lot different now than it was then, and I’m confident that I am a deeper, generally better person than I was at my first STS9 show.
I can’t say that about the band. Since I first saw them almost five and a half years ago, the quintet and their music have “evolved” from probingly intense organic electronica to a kind of futuristic, prog-arena electro-hip-hop with the emotional and spiritual depth of an Oprah rerun. For the last nine months, I’ve been falling in and out of favor with this new incantation of STS9, and the last of three shows in Oregon this weekend may have been the nail in my personal fandom coffin.
While Thursday’s show in Eugene and Friday’s show in Portland generously blended together old, current, and brand-new sounds showcasing much of the band’s 10+-year career, Saturday’s Portland show was all about showing off the grandiose electronica sound STS9 began crafting with 2005’s ArtiFact and culminating in last summer’s Peaceblaster and this fall’s mini-tour of scaled down PA performances.
In 2003, STS9 were playing songs inspired by Mayan mythology on stages decorated with crystals, channeling the collective effervescence of a passionate fanbase that followed them around the country. On Saturday, as has been the overwhelming rule for the last 18 months, they churned out bombastic electro banger after banger, doing everything possible to make Portland dance, emotions and spiritually be damned.
And the mission was more than accomplished. Epic, melodically towering songs like “Be Nice” and uptempo, low-end-driven prog-techno songs like “Shock Doctrine” and “Lo Swaga” made people’s bodies do uproarious things all night long. It looked like my first show, where everyone in the audience seemed to subconsciously synchronize his/her body to the rhythms coming from the stage, anticipating peerless drummer Zach Velmer’s rhythmic shifts and downbeats and pulsing to bassist David Murphy’s warm tone. That kind of communion—between audience members, between the crowd and the band, and between the bandmates themselves—was what made seeing STS9 such an exuberant experience for me.
That doesn’t really happen any more, for two reasons. The first, and I say this knowing how condescending this is going to sound, is the audience itself. I realize that STS9 crowds didn’t use to be cultural melting pots, but I haven’t been anywhere that has matched the positivity and unity of crowds at places like Mississippi Nights in 2004 or even the Higher Ground in 2006. And yes, there were a lot of white people with dreadlocks who really missed Phish, but there were also a lot of relatively clean cut hip-hop heads, bluegrass fans, and ravers who sought the energy that STS9 cultivated and shared.
In Portland, and elsewhere for at least the last 18 months, the STS9 demographic has changed to replace a lot of the seekers—dreaded or not—with a bizarre breed of thugged-out quasi-hippie scenesters that put as much time into their wardrobe as they do to listening to STS9. A kid, wearing stunna shades, a Billionaire Boys Club trackjacket, and (get this) a Bob Marley flag as a kind of kafia, stumbled over to me with his identical friend and asked, “Yo homie, Are you thizzzzin’ tonight?” While I appreciated the Mac Dre reference, I did not appreciate the shallow, party-first attitude that this poser and people like him brought to the STS9 community. It was clear that I would not be talking to this boy about Mayan mythology.
But the bigger problem, I think, isn’t the crowd but the music. As the band’s tastes and music have shifted from atmospheric drum and bass and downtempo IDM to epic club bangers, their fanbase has largely shifted from those seeking to be illuminated and touched to those looking to rage really hard. There’s nothing wrong with this—I like to rage really hard, and with songs like “Heavy” and “The Unquestionable Supremacy of Nature,” STS9 proved that they can provide the musical accompaniment to that ambitious goal.
But I can rage anywhere. What saddens me about Saturday’s show and what will keep me away from STS9 for a while is that they no longer seem interested in pursuing the emotional and spiritual dynamism that I and so many others found in their performance. As they indicated during the weekend, it is still possible to get lost in the bright ebullience of “Circus” or to touch the ineffable in “Jebez,” but those achievements are rare. I used to think the only part of being 16 that I missed was the carefree humid summers of a kid with a car and no obligations. Saturday in Portland added “STS9 as I know it” to the short list.
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