Yo La Tengo: Prisoners Of Love: A Smattering Of Scintillating Senescent Songs 1984-2003
It's hard to imagine too many people buying Yo La Tengo's Ride The Tiger in 1986 expecting the band to still be around nearly 20 years later. New Jersey husband-and-wife rock critics Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley began Yo La Tengo amid the Velvets/Feelies-inspired college-rock era, and stayed deep in the likeable-but-slight jangle-pop vein for its first few years. Then the band discovered feedback drone on the 1989 EP President Yo La Tengo, with its moody, allusive, elusive track "Barnaby, Hardly Working." Yo La Tengo developed that sound until it got on a roll with 1993's drone-soaked disc Painful, and since then, the band has alternated buzzy pop noise with wispily hypnotic ballads, offbeat covers, and a set of lyrical obsessions that rely on pointedly weird pop-culture references and startlingly personal revelations.
So why does the three-disc compilation Prisoners Of Love feel more like a tombstone than a testament? The first two discs are certainly sequenced well, with 26 superb songs that tell the whole Yo La Tengo story, from hushed sing-alongs like "Lewis" and "The Summer" to noisy jams like "I Heard You Looking" and "Blue Line Swinger." Few Yo La Tengo playlists are likely to stray much from the core of this collection, and even the third disc of outtakes and rarities is highly accomplished in its own right, and not for fans only.
But while Prisoners Of Love speaks to Yo La Tengo's spiritual influence on indie rock, it doesn't say much for the band's musical influence. It's hard to think of too many acts that are "Yo La Tengo-esque," and though Yo La Tengo has covered nearly everybody, hardly anybody ever covers Yo La Tengo. Kaplan, Hubley, and James McNew have recorded two dozen or more songs as marvelous as "Barnaby," but most are so bound up in the vocal and guitar performances that it's hard to imagine anyone else tackling them. Indie rock in general has left little legacy, largely because the genre relies on individuals turning unique cases of rockophilia into sometimes-obscure personal statements. By making tiny models of the pop past they most want to live in, indie musicians don't move rock forward in any appreciable way.
Yo La Tengo is a fantastic band, and in a perfect world, it and the best of its indie-rock fellow-travelers would be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on the first ballot. They've shown how music can be rendered as handicraft, to be passed on to friends, relatives, and a few interested lookers-on. But much of what Yo La Tengo and others have accomplished has been an end in itself. Prisoners Of Love is its own Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, with a membership of one.