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Camera Obscura Are Only the Latest Indie- Poppers to Sing the Praises of the Public Library

by Michaelangelo Matos

Donald Milne

CAMERA OBSCURA Lit lovers.

It began innocently enough, as it tends to in indie-pop. I'd been playing the excellent new Camera Obscura album, My Maudlin Career (4AD)—or really more to the point, I'd been obsessively replaying its leadoff single, "French Navy." Everything about the track sparkles: sharp opening one-two floor tom, brisk Motown beat, obsessive orchestration, vocal melody to die for, the whole thing as twee as a basket of kittens but with enough real-world resonance to apply to adult life. (Or so I tell myself: I've read too many complaints about one of the song's lines, "You make me go ooh-ooh-ooh," not to note them here—but when you're talking about a romance as gooey as this tune is, you're going to have to face some ooh-ooh-oohs sooner or later.)

Still, what got me thinking was the song's first line: "Spent a week in a dusty library/Waiting for some words to jump at me." "French Navy" isn't about a library—it's about singer Tracyanne Campbell's pining for her enlisted beau—but opening its story among the stacks is part of a long, proud indie-pop tradition. After all, few things besides indie-pop are as bookish, non-macho, detail-oriented, earnest, and geeky as the public library. Not even Rem Koolhaas can make the library altogether cool—not that anyone who loves libraries altogether cares. And few musical styles invite the kind of obsessive filing and categorizing that indie-pop does, with its emphasis on 7-inch singles and collectible label catalogues. (Naturally, there was even a late-'90s/early-'00s indie-pop label called Library Records, with artists operating under such cutesy names as Sleepy Township, Pencil Tin, Tugboat, and Bowlarama.)

Libraries and librarians have been part of the indie-pop mythos since the form began in 1978, when Brisbane, Australia's Go-Betweens released their first single, "Lee Remick." The 7-inch's B-side, "Karen," Robert Forster's ode to a comely help-desk assistant, marks the birth of the indie-pop librarian—and in some ways the birth of a coy, socially regressive indie-pop ethos generally. "I don't want no hoochie-coochie mama," Forster sang, before shining the spotlight on his nerdy object of affection, who's "willing to help with all the problems that I encounter": "Helps me find Hemingway/Helps me find Genet/Helps me find Brecht/Helps me find Chandler/Helps me find James Joyce/She always makes the right choice."

It's not surprising that the genre is sometimes referred to as "librarian pop." A number of musicians in the field, as well as some notable fans, are or have been librarians. Scottish indie-pop icon Stephen Pastel, of the Pastels, has a library-science degree; the Folk Implosion's John Davis has worked in libraries. An early-'90s issue of the zine Incite! devoted itself entirely to indie-pop librarians, including an interview with Davis.

J. Edward Keyes, an indie-pop fan and an editor at eMusic.com, spent many years as a librarian. Of his first job, at age 16, he says, "The first thing my coworker said to me after giving me the basic training was, 'Hey, so, do you like XTC?' Every library I've ever worked at, the record buyer was a sheepish 30-year-old in glasses. In the late '80s and early '90s, when I was working in libraries, most alt-rock was very 'smart,' bookish, etc., so socially aware records like R.E.M.'s Green or XTC's Nonsuch made for a natural co-axis to what the kids I worked with were reading, like Vonnegut or even Marx. It cemented the feelings of social alienation they had from their peers."

Sometimes, though, that alienation can be used to randier ends. Not just as in Camera Obscura beginning their tale of breathless devotion surrounded by numerically coded volumes, either. The other great indie-pop single of 2009 so far comes from New Yorkers the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Their "Young Adult Friction" (Slumberland) takes place in a library—one the singer is having anonymous sex in. It begins, "Between the stacks in the library/Not like anyone stopped to see/We came they went, our bodies spent/Among the dust and the microfiche." Dirty, yes, but not unprecedented: What do you think Robert Forster was after "Karen" for those 31 years ago? Besides, of course, a good book to read and some quiet time to read it.

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