Jets and Kettles Form a Chord with Screeching Gulls

I'm too old to pretend I don't like pop songs. Sure, there was a time in my surly youth when I would have howled and gnashed teeth--not necessarily only my own, that's how edgy I was, man--and cursed your questionable heritage had you suggested that anything I chose to listen to was "pretty" or "fun" or "liked by more than seven other people." The fact that what I liked was music for a subculture of weirdos through most of the 1980s and into the 1990s was a bulwark against the idea that the music itself (the Smiths, They Might Be Giants, Elvis Costello, REM, XTC, etc.) was arch, wordy singalong anthemics dripping with melodrama and pretension, served in a hyperglycemic sauce of four-chord post-Beatles liquid candyfloss. Sure it was built on massive hooks and earworm refrains, but that wasn't the point, man. The point was it wasn't fucking Motley Crue.*

The fact that other people thought you were a dork for listening to "alternative" music was the whole entire point, in the way that music can be, to teenagers uniquely, a mission statement for life as an enterprise. Yes, in retrospect, maybe it was just what New Wave people listened to when the rest of the music-listening world had moved on, but the relative rarity of it meant it did what it was supposed to do. It gave me my Otherness badge that separated me from the normals as we mutually ignored each other through the hellpit of late 20th century American high school.** How could I care what those people thought? They didn't even know who Camper Van Beethoven was. How many of their favorite bands even had a violin player?

Of course Nirvana happened right as I was graduating high school and, though I enjoyed the gleeful bloodletting as all music labels dropped all hair-metal bands, remanding the entire loathsome pose of an aesthetic to the punchline it always should've been, now they were on to us. It turns out that knocking down the wall between alternative and mainstream was the same as making a new door, letting all those fuckers right into the introvert sanctum of nerdspace. And now, just 25-ish years later, fucking everyone knows who Loki is. Not just Thor, oh no. They know a thing that would have gotten me punched in the face for mentioning in public while The Cosby Show was still on the air.

And my music, ugh. I still loved it, but so did everyone else. It's so much less satisfying to know that it was just... really good. The secret code of it, the shibboleth function, torn to pieces by the mob, exposing it all as just excellent pop music. Sometimes there's nothing so tragic as to have one's tastes validated by the general public.

Verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus. Sometimes a cheeky (but tasteful!) solo in there, just to keep up the musician's bona fides. But there's no dance break, there's no jam-band noodling bullshit, there's no guitar shredding you'd need nine fingers on one hand to play and is long enough to get the guy with the flamethrower out on stage during the show. It's organized, it's cohesive, it's tight. Just the right kind of a genre for the quiet ones trying to will the loud, scattered world into making sense.

Age rubs the edges of preciousness until they're shiny, but dulled, rounded. People can like what they like I guess and I'm content to let them get on with it for the most part.*** Unless it's Motley Crue. Or Donald Trump, obviously.

Hey, did you hear the president had a really, really bad week this week? I'm sure it's way worse than the last one or the last one or the last one or the last one.

Verse-chorus-verse-chorus... Except in this one, the shitty, preening, self-appointed lead singer keeps be-boppin' and scattin' all over the lovely, delicate arrangements.

Wow, that was a hard turn there at the end. Sometimes I panic if I edge too close to nostalgia. There's no dose of cold water like a wet-towel snap of inescapable current reality.

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*NO I AM NOT DOING THE STUPID FUCKING UMLAUTS THAT DON'T BELONG. There is an incredibly thin line between "metal" and "fucking stupid." A line so thin, it might even be imaginary.

**Oh, you liked high school did you? I'm sooooo happy for you.

***Could you crawl through the archive here and find me very recently shitting on something you happen to like? It's not impossible. But this isn't a deposition, people. It's rhetoric. It's supposed to be bullshit.