I’ve been doing some work lately that’s forced me to become at least casually reacquainted with pop music, a reunion that distresses me as if I were being dosed with booze after a happy stretch of sobriety. For the past three or four years, I have sheltered myself from developments in music, and have enjoyed the isolation. Before, I was a self-confessed record geek, the kind of emotionally arrested, obsessive collector lampooned in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. In my early 20s, I allocated 90 percent of my post-rent budget to record-store binges, leaving just enough ready cash for one Totino’s Party Pizza and a Diet Shasta per day.
But as I approached 30, and my wife and I started talking kids, I became concerned for my future. I had a nightmarish vision of a father-son chat from my vinyl-hoarding tomorrow: “Son, I need you to be a man about this and sleep on the couch so I can move the jazz section to your room.” But before I could enroll in a twelve-step program, the addiction loosened its grip without coaxing. To my occasional sorrow, my diehard rock-and-roll ideals began to quietly erode. I was slightly disturbed to discover that my non-conformist instincts, my passion for records, fanzines, and nightclubs ebbed in my late 20s, at about the same age most regular folks, by which I guess I mean the non-non-conformists, lose touch with youth culture. My response to this loss of faith was to become a pop ostrich, avoiding exposure to new music as much as possible. Music couldn’t suck, I reasoned, if I sealed myself in a vacuum.
Just a few years ago, dissecting the music scene and tirelessly surfeiting my lust for records was so self-defining that I couldn’t imagine my interest fading. But along the way, band profiles and record reviews began to interest me about as much as the copy on a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Soon I started to bog down in the middle of 100-word concert previews (“Oh God, when will this end, and what are they talking about?”). I reduced my record-store visits from three or four times a week to once or twice a season. Hearing a good song on the radio became an unexpected day-brightener, rather than a call to action; for the first time, I felt approval of a record didn’t morally obligate me to own it. I started leaving the (eternal, infernal) gaps in my collection unfilled, tuned in NPR, and dropped out.
For most people, the golden age of music conveniently climaxed when they were about 18. Having danced and moped and cruised and groped to (depending on their generation) Benny Goodman, the Beatles, Boston, or Public Enemy, they find it especially difficult to tolerate what they regard as the vastly inferior effluvium being spoon-fed to kids today. I’d like to think my neglect of new music is not driven by this kind of cranky nostalgia. I’d like to think my tastes weren’t so rigidly formed in my youth that I couldn’t see the merit in the cream of today’s crop. If I immersed myself in it, I could judge the newfangled on its own terms. I figure the aesthetic quality of pop music is fairly constant, that there is always at least a small percentage of great stuff being made. Sure, particular genres and even particular musical values wax and wane. But for the kids—the abstract, mythical kids—I suspect the music has the same transcendent, liberating, intoxicating wallop it has always had. Ever the populist optimist, I cling to the idea that if the “kids” think it’s great, then it possibly is great.
At least that seems like a reasonable theory, but one I haven’t tested too rigorously as of late. And that’s why, when I learn, for example, that Nelly and Nelly Furtado are two different people, or that the Hives are helping resuscitate garage rock, my curiosity is tempered with fear. It makes me want to hear their music, and I don’t want to hear their music. If curiosity gets the best of me, and I blow my next paycheck at the record store, I might find the music uninspiring, perplexing, boring, trite, rehashed, juvenile. It’s too risky. The chasm between youth culture and my own increasingly bourgeois world-view could suddenly yawn in front of me. I could start to feel old, cranky, and sentimental, like a white-flannel-trouser-wearing beachcomber, when all I want is to be the eternal pop fan on an indefinite leave of absence.
And so the irony (you’ve undoubtedly heard how much my generation loves irony) is that in the midst of trying to dodge a buzz-band-induced buzzkill, the opportunity has arisen to earn a little cash by writing about pop music. And I guess there’s some rule about “journalistic integrity” that requires the critic to actually listen to the music before evaluating it. So I’m hearing new music again, and it doesn’t seem worse than when I left it a few years ago, but my relationship with it, once so intimate, now feels long-distance.
A few weeks ago, I heard the new Missy Elliot single, “Work It,” as I pulled into my garage, and I waited in the car until it finished. I love it, but I feel I’m enjoying it out of context. I want to hear it in a club, or at a party, or with a carload full of stoned friends. But I can’t stand clubs anymore, and parties start too late, and it’s dangerous to drive stoned. Still, I bought the twelve-inch. On some level, I’m back.
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