In Which We Give Thanks for Long-Forgotten YouTube Footage

From the second the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve until the last time I checked my phone, 2017 has been a nonstop onslaught of political conflagration, personal upheaval and general bullshit. Our institutions are crumbling, mass shootings are de rigueur, and we’re plugged into a social media machine that feeds on neuroses and fear while crapping out sponsored posts for late capitalism’s most destructive tendencies. On the other hand, it’s Thanksgiving, and it’s time to take stock of the good things. It’s time to give thanks for the folks who saved my year from total desolation, the folks who gave this shitshow of a year a silver lining: the YouTubers of the late Aughts.

Generally speaking, I don’t do nostalgia. I have always been content with where I am, happy with when I am, suspicious of people who look back and say, “Those times were better.” Culture is a living, breathing thing, and fascination with “the good old days” chokes off its air supply. And don’t even get me started on the fallibility of human memory and our brains’ tendency to make things seem cooler than they really were. Then I found myself half-drunk and alone in the dark, falling down a rabbit hole of shaky house party videos with blown-out sound, and it hit me: Nashville really was a weird and magical place during the last days of the un-networked era.

It started, as so many strange journeys do, at beloved local dive Springwater. Filmmaker Michael Carter, whose YouTube handle is mc5tn, posted “Lone Official Live 2003” on July 7, 2007, almost 10 years to the day before I found it. It captures a typical night at the bar at the dawn of the Iraq War: dark, smoky, sparsely attended. You can almost feel the sticky sweetness of stale tobacco and cheap beer clinging to your skin. The social interactions are awkwardly youthful. And the band is incredible, maybe the best of their time and place.

Sami El Amri makes his way off the slab of the stage, cigarette clenched between his teeth, letting his maraca guide him out to the patio, where he encounters confused bystanders. The small crowd in the back room gives him a hero’s welcome when he returns. “Lone Official Live 2003” is a charming, humble encapsulation of a time when this town wasn’t crawling with corporate talent buyers and rock performers weren’t chum for the sharks. I have found a nostalgia that suits me.

From there, the trail spirals outward. Hurling keywords into the void — bands like “Altered Statesman,” “Features” and “Meemaw,” venues like “Springwater” and “Red Rose” — brings back brilliant, hard proof that the talent, energy and excitement that was bubbling under the surface, unseen by the world at large, really was as amazing as I remember it. There are nights I remember and nights I don’t, and plenty of audio evidence that I was the woo-iest woo-dude on earth during my late 20s. The videos are posted by mysterious entities with handles like “ministerofdarkness” and “thrashrox,” as well as old friends like Davis Cox (aka “Davis Cox”) and lovelikeadrug (aka Jess, whom I knew from the used books and music shop McKay’s).

There’s a charm in the way standard-definition camcorder footage transfers to low-res streaming video, a degradation that captures the low-budget spirit of the times. The handheld, single-shot “Lambchop — Live at William Tyler’s last house show / party” by simonlynn (aka Simon Lynn, drummer for The Whole Fantastic World and Anchor Thieves) is shaky, pixelated and perfect, a majestic, lo-fi coda to the end of a musical era. (“Ah the night that Pujol and me jump-started the cop’s car who came to bust the party,” said Tyler when I posted the clip to Facebook.)

The weird glow of Christmas lights on old tile in “Turtleneck and the Sweats — Sports,” a clip of a Dave Cloud-fronted outfit filmed in 2003 and posted by ministerofdarkness in 2008, conveys the manic, hyper-caffeinated energy that made Murfreesboro’s Red Rose Cafe a magnet for magnificent weirdos. Thanks to the postings of opticaudio, I can see full shows from The Protomen and The Bang Up at fellow ’Boro staple The Boro Bar and Grill, as well as the first show I ever saw a block away at notorious dive Gentleman Jim’s.

All of these videos feel like they were scrawled on the cave wall, primitive renderings marking the end of an epoch, imbued with righteousness of consumer-grade vérité. It City status was a few years off, and cinema techniques like rack focus were still unaffordable for an upstart arts fan or Nashville concert videographers. Flip phones, y’all. Some of these were filmed on flip phones.

There’s a lot missing. Luckily, the most embarrassing moments (late-night hijinks with my terrible punk band, for instance) are absent. For that, I’m thankful too. But mostly, I’m thankful for the folks who shot these videos and uploaded the footage into the cellar of the internet, as a reminder of the good things about laboring in relative obscurity. This isn’t to say that moments of equal magic and wonder aren’t being captured right now by some squirt with Snapchat, but it reinforces the idea that budgets and attention from around the world aren’t what make good music special — it’s the ingenuity and determination of the people making the music. Thanks, YouTubers of the late Aughts, for helping save a shitty year.

Email music@nashvillescene.com