The new music obsessive

I’m typing this just a few hours after getting off a plane back to Indianapolis from New York, where I recently watched Toronto hardcore punk sextet Fucked Up plow through “David Comes to Life,” the band’s monolithic rock opera and arguably the best record of 2011.

As a hopeless music obsessive since before my thirteenth birthday, I’m no stranger to traveling long distances and making questionable life choices in the pursuit of bearing witness to triumphant displays of rock ’n’ roll. I feigned interest in attending the University of Toronto so I could see Iron Maiden on the first leg of the Somewhere Back in Time World Tour in 2008 and still have my absence excused as a college visit.

I’ve had more mornings than I can count where I’ve rolled back into Bloomington at 7:30 a.m. after seeing some show in Chicago or Cleveland or Columbus, Ohio. I’ve had stretches of four days in a row with an ear-shattering concert each night.

Even considering all that, flying to New York to see Fucked Up is still the craziest thing I’ve ever done for a show, and it was totally worth it.

In fact, it was probably the best show I’ve ever seen. Fucked Up blasted through the entirety of “David Comes to Life,” plus a three-song encore of older material, and the Jersey dudes in opening act Titus Andronicus held their own with a high-energy set drawing mostly from 2010’s masterful “The Monitor.”

But this isn’t really a column about that show, as easy as that column would be to write. It’s a column about obsession.

Both Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus are relatively well known — Pitchfork Best New Music recipients who have dented the Billboard charts —  but compared against the well-documented Beatles, Zeppelin and Grateful Dead obsessions of older generations, the dedication to these acts reflected in the crowd at their show represents a glimmer of hope for underground music.

The majority of the sold-out crowd at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan shouted every word of the two bands’ sets.

Everyone from crusty old-school punks to nowadays Brooklyn hipsters felt blessed to be in the presence of these two great acts, and they paid their adoration in throat-ripping screams.

It’s unfairly reductive to say this is a cult phenomenon. There’s been cult music as long as there’s been pop music. Cult bands, for all their other idiosyncrasies, universally appeal to small, specific audiences. That wasn’t happening at Le Poisson Rouge.

We now live in a world where obsession doesn’t mean collecting concert bootlegs and reading unauthorized biographies but simply going to shows, engaging with the material and having as good a time with the music as the band.

By that definition, just about everyone watching Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus was obsessed, and we loved every minute of it.