Blueblood,
Price $5
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Summertime,” the second track on the band’s first proper full-length, Raw Yang, is three minutes of 60s jangle with a flow that stalls and stutters, playing off the intentional awkwardness of early punks like the Modern Lovers the same way Elvis Costello did on his first couple records. The album came out in July on the local label Fresh Produce, and the first time I heard “Summertime” its melody was what caught my attention. But listening to it over and over, I realized that what’s really compelling about it is that awkwardness. It sounds unpolished and crude, but in a good way, like something you’d hear from people making up their own form of pop as they go along–which in a way the Fake Fictions are.
Ammerman and Johnson began their relationships to popular culture largely as outsiders. By the time they met in 1998, they were both working at the radio station of the College of William and Mary in Virginia and just as obsessive about music as you’d expect, but growing up they’d had such limited exposure to mainstream media that even now there are strange gaps in their knowledge. Ammerman was born in Florida, but because his dad worked for the State Department he spent most of his childhood on a world tour that touched down in India, France, and Yugoslavia. Attending international schools in the years before global media networks matured, he made do with whatever bootlegged rock albums he could find–and he’s still playing catch-up, as evidenced by his recent discovery of Steely Dan. This outsider status works to his advantage: to many musicians, the rules that dictate how pop songs work are as invisible as water is to fish, but to Ammerman they’re a clear template just begging to be messed with.
“Part of it’s technical prowess,” he says. “Ben just started playing drums when we started the band. And I’ve been playing guitar since 12 or 13 or 14, but I’m not the guy who sits at home and does scales all day. I can’t really play leads that well in the traditional sense.”
