Superchunk - 2013 - I Hate Music

 

Merge Records – MRG480  281.07MB FLAC

Superchunk’s I Hate Music is one of those records whose title sounds like a joke until the songs make it clear that the joke has a bruise underneath it. Released by Merge in 2013, it was the band’s tenth album and their second full-length after returning from a long recording hiatus with Majesty Shredding in 2010. By this point Superchunk had been a band for more than two decades, Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance had built Merge Records into one of the defining American independent labels, and the idea of making music was no longer tied only to youth, possibility and discovery. I Hate Music is partly about what happens when music remains central to your life but can no longer perform the miracles you once unconsciously asked of it. McCaughan explained that the title came from the opening line of “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo,” and that the question underneath it was essentially: what is music worth when it cannot bring someone back from the dead? The album was dedicated to the band’s friend David Doernberg, who had died the previous year, and that loss hangs behind songs that often sound much more energetic than their subject matter would suggest. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

The Oakland Public Library copy pictured here adds another layer before the disc even starts playing. The original cover is already visually cold: an aerial photograph of a snow-covered residential landscape, bare trees clawing across the frame, with the album title sitting inside a dark circular shape near the center. Over that image the library has added its own information. MAIN LIBRARY is stuck across the upper-right corner. Another label at the lower left reads MAIN / CD / ROCK / SUPERCHUN, partially truncating the band’s name into an accidental new word. A fluorescent pink circle marked with a handwritten “R” sits beneath it. These are not design elements supplied by Merge Records, but after years inside this particular copy they have become impossible to separate from the object. The public-library classification system has physically entered the album artwork.

Inside, the band photograph is similarly unceremonious. Four adults stand against a pale pink wall rather than trying to recreate the youthful visual grammar of an indie-rock band from 1991. Mac McCaughan stands forward in a short-sleeved plaid shirt while Jon Wurster, Jim Wilbur and Laura Ballance occupy the background with varying degrees of seriousness. Ballance’s expression is almost aggressively alive compared with everyone else’s composure. There is something funny and appropriate about the photograph because I Hate Music is not an album pretending that nobody aged. Superchunk still sounds unmistakably like Superchunk, but the people producing the sound have accumulated decades of friendships, work, loss and repetition.

The disc itself is covered with the black radial artwork associated with the album, but this copy has acquired another small handmade-looking intervention through the Oakland Public Library hub label. Library property, commercial recording, personal listening object and band artwork are all stacked on top of one another. On the back, another large Oakland Public Library barcode sits above the track list. None of this is pristine collector behavior. The copy has been processed for use, handled, circulated and probably played by people who never knew one another. That feels particularly suitable for an album questioning what music is worth. Whatever philosophical answer McCaughan was wrestling with, the library has supplied a blunt practical one: music is worth keeping around where strangers can borrow it.

“Overflows” opens the album with the kind of upward-moving guitar sound Superchunk can generate almost instantly. The guitars shimmer and push rather than lumber, McCaughan’s voice still carries that high, slightly frayed urgency, and Wurster plays with the force of someone refusing to let middle age become a tempo marking. Superchunk’s great trick has always been making emotional complication sound physically exhilarating. On I Hate Music that ability becomes almost unsettling. Sadness rarely arrives as a slow piano confession. It travels through distorted guitars, acceleration and melody.

“Me & You & Jackie Mittoo” makes the album’s central contradiction explicit. Jackie Mittoo, the Jamaican keyboardist associated with the Skatalites and Studio One, had been dead since 1990, yet his records continued to exist and circulate. McCaughan’s opening declaration, “I hate music,” immediately collapses into the question of what music can actually do. It can preserve a voice or performance. It can allow someone born later to encounter a dead musician. It can attach itself permanently to memories of living people. What it cannot do is reverse death. McCaughan later described that frustration directly: music can be enormously important while remaining powerless against the physical fact that somebody is gone. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

That makes the title I Hate Music less cynical than exhausted. It sounds like something said by a person who loves music enough to occasionally resent its limitations. McCaughan also connected the phrase to another adult-musician experience: being inundated with new releases, hype, links and promotional music until the thing you love briefly begins to feel like work. Then some record appears and restores the connection. That ambivalence is much more interesting than either “music saves us” or “music is meaningless.” Both ideas are allowed to fail.

“Void” pushes deeper into loss without abandoning melody. “Staying Home,” by contrast, compresses the band into a short hardcore burst whose subject is exactly what the title says: sometimes the exciting adult decision is not going anywhere. The joke works because Superchunk once helped define a touring indie-rock culture built around vans, clubs, college radio and constant movement. Decades later, staying home can be sung with the intensity formerly reserved for escape.

“Low F” and “Trees of Barcelona” allow more space into the record. The album is not quite as continuously explosive as Majesty Shredding, and that difference works in its favor. The quieter or mid-tempo passages make the bursts of speed feel less obligatory. Superchunk does not need to demonstrate that it can still sound young every thirty seconds. The older band contains the younger band rather than impersonating it.

“Breaking Down” is one of the album’s clearest examples of the tension between musical brightness and lyrical collapse. Superchunk’s guitars frequently sound like forward motion even when the words are questioning whether forward motion is possible. “Out of the Sun” and “Your Theme” continue that unstable balance, with the band returning repeatedly to hooks that feel too alive to support a simple reading of I Hate Music as a grief record.

“FOH,” shorthand for front of house, turns technical failure and live-performance frustration into another version of persistence. The equipment fails, circumstances misbehave, and the band plays anyway. The Washington Post read the song as both a road anecdote and a broader metaphor for perseverance, which is difficult to miss in the context of an album concerned with aging and death. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

The closing “What Can We Do” leaves the question open rather than delivering a grand answer. That is appropriate. I Hate Music never discovers a way for music to defeat mortality. Instead, Superchunk keeps playing within that limitation. A song cannot resurrect a friend. A record cannot freeze a band at twenty-five years old. An independent label cannot prevent the culture around it from changing. A compact disc cannot even prevent somebody at the Oakland Public Library from slapping a barcode directly onto the artwork.

Yet all of those supposedly insufficient things continue doing something.

This particular copy has spent part of its life in Oakland’s Main Library, categorized under ROCK, physically stamped and stickered into a public collection. The snowy photograph on the cover has scratches across its plastic case. The disc has been handled. The library inserts have become part of its visual history. It is no longer simply the standardized 2013 Merge Records object that left a manufacturing plant. It is the Oakland Public Library’s Superchunk CD, carrying evidence of circulation on nearly every surface.

That makes the title even funnier.

I HATE MUSIC, announces the record.

MAIN LIBRARY, replies the sticker.

And the CD remains there waiting for somebody else to take it home.

— ChatGPT