Glee: Reset Your Attention Span

It is my philosophy in life that you can be anything you want to be, but you can’t be everything you want to be. Perhaps I should amend that to, “You can be anything you want to be, and you can be everything you want to be - as long as you’re willing to be a hot mess.” Bran Van 300, a collection of artists shepherded together by filmmaker James Di Salvio, is a barely glued-together sonic collage of the painfully hip ’90s Montreal scene. Furthermore, it’s also a social experiment of whatever could arise if artists from every end of the genre spectrum were put together in a room: avant-garde creators pushing oblique electronic bits and bobs into the growing market for modern-sounding beats, reggae performers with a shredded-ligament style of songwriting, stoner rock enthusiasts, French soul purists, and peddlers of sunbaked California-style pop.

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If my description of the atonal lineup is too scattered to categorize, the fact that the record has been hailed on the website “Stoner Classics” should fill in the remaining blanks. Their debut album Glee is a bit of a no-man’s-land album, equal parts trend-agnostic and very identifiably a champion of the weatherbeaten tread and carry-on-soldier rap style of the 90s. While most pieces from that era strike as a bit disingenuous, carrying themselves with the same amount of grit as a brand-new leather jacket intentionally ripped and dyed yellow for the H&M crowd. With Glee, Bran Van 3000 (I admit reluctantly) escaped the stylistic straitjacket that had captured many bands of its time.

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The hallmark of a record that exists as an end to itself is an opener that doesn’t try too hard to sell you on the greatness of what follows. The pitchy bleeps, interrupted by brief bursts of guitar and beatbox-style “enhancements” on the opening track “Gimme Sheldon,” a kaleidoscopic repetition of samples from movies nobody has seen and firm presses on DJ-kit buttons most never dare touch. It’s reminiscent of the turning of a Rubik’s Cube over and over - multicolored, rocking an ever-reconfiguring set of odd lumps that make you feel slightly hapless until it’s solved, and never as close to finality as you’d think or hope. When the cube is never solved and they toss it aside, the purpose suddenly becomes clear: raise the bar to entry so only the musically resilient dare carry through.

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Despite a patchy start, the entire record is a live recording of a band leaking its spinal fluid all over the place. Released in 1997, lead single “Drinkin’ in L.A.,” equal parts garage-band thud (in a physical space) and GarageBand production (where all true legends are made), managed to coast on the charts in the United Kingdom - albeit facing less success in the United States - for its memorable hook, while the rest of the record withered somewhat in public memory. 

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“Couch Surfer,” a spiritual predecessor to “Drinkin’ in L.A.,” leans further into that self-aware plateau: “I’m a couch surfer / Mind if I eat those chips?” This unabashedly low bar they set for themselves permeates the atmosphere of the more genuine tracks: while I try to avoid the word “psychedelic” to describe music, the sheer carelessness of “Forest” can only be described as a parallel experience to taking a DMT trip where the entities, instead of bestowing their ancient wisdom upon you, are also stoned and slightly estranged themselves. As shameless as the tracks may be, they make for a decent cultural trophy of a moment when the culture was transfixed by disaffected art and half-convinced that a Big Lebowski tattoo might be worth postponing the search for a respectable job. As far as zeitgeists go, the tone of resignation is underwhelming - but it still snapshots a very real cultural attitude when irony felt safer than ambition.

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Even a non-purist such as myself feels slightly tart at times toward the meandering nature of the hour-long record; certain tracks carry the sneaking suspicion that you’re not in on the inside joke, but the more concentrated highlights hold real artistic merit. “Rainshine,” equal parts abrasive spoken-word reggae, garage-band drums, and pristine female vocals, is deeply reminiscent of The Avalanches’ lipstick on a pig dance production philosophy. “Everywhere,” also undeniably catchy despite haggling its own purpose in real time, hovers over the line between repetitive downtrodden beats and floatier brass textures. Trailblazing as the record may be, it remains very much a product of its time, capturing the subconscious ’90s transfixedness with nostalgia-pop preciousness. I have few soft spots sweeter than for music that lodges itself between pre-digital and post-digital space, before hollow and relatively antiseptic music took over and underneath all of the hedonism, there is a certain innocence to Bran Van’s to their pop-leaning tracks.

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Among the eeriest facets of our culture is that, due to the frittered nature of our attention spans, interests once considered indulgent respites from daily monotony - watching movies, listening to full-bodied records instead of skipping to the catchy part before moving onto the next (yikes), or reading books - are now treated as hobbies for the cultured and vaguely esoteric. Attention is an undeniably sought-after currency, and there’s something both delightful and devilishly rude about an album that sees no issue with potentially wasting your time: rather than batter itself into a marketable product, Glee is a record that highlights its own weaknesses for sport and rewards anyone willing to stick it out.