Ive been listening a lot to Foxygen’s We Are the 12st Century Ambassadors of Peace of Magic recently. A lot of the joy that I get from the record is in identifying the musical references/influences that are littered throughout the album. These are inevitably the subject of every review you could read about the record, so I won’t mention any particulars here, though it is telling which writers pick up on what. It’s been getting a lot of attention for its influences-on-the-sleeve approach, as its just the sort if thing that’s alluring to any music fan, but even if it does cop a lot of different sounds, the album feels like something wholly itself, which I think is why it’s really getting accolades.

The most immediate connection I made with the album was with last year’s Queen of the Wave by Pepe Deluxe, which was a fascinating but unfocused release. On that album Pepe Deluxe seemed to take on the mantra that more was more and the result was a record that was compelling in its sheer wealth of sounds but one which ultimately felt convoluted because those sounds didn’t lend well into each other. A cool listen once, but ultimately just a novelty. This is where Foxygen’s album really, truly succeeds. Even if “San Francisco” sounds like it could be a B-side to a late 60′s Kinks album, it’s got enough panache to be its own self. And in the context of the album as a whole, no song really sounds imitative, even if every song has elements seemingly stolen from some classic act. That continuity is important, since it realizes the variety of influences at play here and they way that they play into each other over the long haul. “Shuggie” may remind you of “Some Velvet Morning,” and its precursor “Bowling Trophies” might reek of an early Floyd track, but the whole compendium together feels like something different. Altogether, it reads more like a love letter than any outright theft.

A lot of mythologizing has gone about with the Baby Boomer generation but even as they age into retirement, the benefit of recording means their music exists today as young as it did when it was made. That sentiment is what Foxygen seems to be so expertly grabbing at–somehow an imagined past that is exclusively the domain of the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Stones, is fermented and more acutely realized through a compendium of that era’s songs and sounds. The resultant image remains modern even as it might sound aged, as if time is not truly the determinant factor, but rather individual sentiment. “Oh No” closes the album in a way that John Lennon would probably enjoy, but it has underneath the manic middle section a bit of Kanye West, “Flashing Lights,” strings–a reflexive reference, with beautifully circular musical logic: youth can be old, too, but it’s never really outdated.

That’s what Foxygen seems to be trying to get anyway, but it’s hard not to admit that that is in some ways problematic. Flavorwire reacted harshly to the album, and even if that article might be a bit overzealous, it does itch at a certain sentiment that’s hard to grapple with. Part of the allure of Foxygen’s album is its spot-the-band structure. Songs weave through a variety of musical allusions abruptly and even if it is surprisingly cohesive, it leaves me wondering if the enjoyment of those allusions somehow supersedes my enjoyment of the actual band and the thing that they created. After all, you might like a Family Guy joke but that doesn’t mean you like Family Guy.

If we’re honest, this is only really a problem for people who analyze themselves too much. And even if I did waste a bit of rum thinking about it, I did ultimately come up to a tenuous conclusion.

I think part of the reason that Flavorwire article comes across so bitterly is that it mistakes a small garage band’s affinity for the music of the 1960s with our cultural nostalgia for the 1960s. While it’s true that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, the two shouldn’t be lumped together in a whole, either. The simple fact of it is that when the Beatles broke they replaced canonized pop standards with a canonized pop sound. Nobody rips on Michael Bublé for singing the same songs as Sinatra because the music he make exists explicitly in that jazz singer tradition. Just the same, Foxygen exist within a guitar pop lineage that all those ’60′s act canonized. And instead of running away from it like so many other bands did in the decades after the ’60′s, they’ve embraced it.

You may or may not embrace the mythology of the ’60s (as you may have guessed, we regard it with the same suspicion we generally reserve for spiders, lizards, and menacing heavyset men on the subway), but at least the Rolling Stones really did do a metric fuckton of drugs in a French mansion while making their record, instead of just trying to sound like they did.

Tom Hawking, who posted that Flavorwire article, takes issue with the fact that Foxygen didn’t post themselves up into a French Mansion, veins full of drugs, in order to create a track (“Waitin’ 4 U”) that sounds a lot like it came from Exile on Main Street but it’s a nonsense ‘authenticity’ argument, a clinging to context ahead of substance. If the Stones came out tomorrow and admitted that Exile was a concentrated effort made in a sterile studio, would it really change how good the album is? If you answer yes, then you’re admitting that the narrative of an album takes precedence over the album itself and so Exile isn’t a great album, it’s just a paragraph in a great story. Essentially, Hawking does what he so strongly protests against: he buys into a mythology instead of just the graspable truth. If you view the legacy of ’60′s with “suspicion,” then why not levy the same suspicion at Exile, an album made a band that clings to their own mythology just to keep standing?

Because a recording made in a moment has no bearing on its own future. Because Exile will always be Exile and no one can question its existence. Because when it comes to the actual, palpable sound of “Rocks Off,” the Rolling Stones don’t matter. Only the vibrations matter.

Hawking makes a nonsensical argument for feeling as if he can posterize that just because Foxygen weren’t blitzed the whole time they made their album it somehow lacks an essential quality to authenticity. It’s bullshit. Is it the music that matters or the drugs? If the latter, then it comes down to Hawking once again putting myth before truth. I fail to see how Exile has more feeling than Foxygen’s output in any real sense. They just didn’t bother to make a story that was better than the Stones’.

Context is often important when attempting to understand any music, but it’s important to remember that all context is equally suspect, especially in regards to narratives. Once you put context before the product, the product too becomes suspect. Just like the story of the 1960′s doesn’t quite line up with the whole truth of things.

After all, the first time I heard Exile I didn’t really like it very much. But I also didn’t know the story behind it. I still don’t really like Exile. But I also didn’t know anything about the Beatles the first time I heard “Yellow Submarine” and I fell in love with that song. The stories behind songs are fun, but stories aren’t songs. And though connected, one shouldn’t be mistaken for the other, just as a manipulation of the past’s sounds doesn’t necessarily speak to a desire to recreate it, which is what (stupidly) Hawking really takes issue with.

I can’t say whether I’d like Foxygen’s album without knowing all the references embedded in it. I’ll never really have a pure listening experience in that sense. And even if a very deep part of me thinks that I would, it’s irrelevant. Foxygen may have a stupid band name and the title of their album may make me write 1,500 words while only typing it once, but I’m still listening to the music and enjoying it. After all, you can love a song for reminding you of CCR while also loving it for its originality. After all, CCR could never have said, “You don’t need to be an asshole, you’re not in Brooklyn anymore.”