A Musical Interlude

Last night (as I write this, but not as you read it – the twisty deceptions of prose!) I went to a screening of Urgh! A Music War, a concert film snapshot of punk/post-punk/new wave at the dawn of the 80s. Urgh! relentlessly throws performances at you, with no context, and no band gets to play more than one number (with one exception – The Police get three, almost certainly because drummer Stuart Copeland’s brothers ran management and booking for the film). This decision means you get to see a tremendous array of numbers, from acts both popular and/or influential (The Go-Gos, The Cramps, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Oingo Boingo, Gary Neuman, The Dead Kennedys, Devo, Pere Ubu, Echo and the Bunnymen, and the license plate gumbo of OMD, X, XTC, and UB40) to more obscure stuff… at least for an American like me. (i.e. Skafish, Athletico Spizz 80, and Splodgenessabounds – names that sound like groups your college roommate would really enthusiastically push a road trip to see, and you’d be like “ooh, I’d love to, but y’know… midterms are only several months away!”)

The performances range from pretty good to fucking electrifying, so if this is sort of music is your thing, I’d very much recommend it, although you can probably fast forward when UB40 takes the stage for its mostly-white reggae stylings (I be forty? Fuck you! YOU be forty). It’s not streaming on any major site, but there is a Warners Archive DVD, and you can string together all of the individual performances on YouTube (check out The Cramps’ lascivious performance of “Like a Bad Girl Should,” if nothing else). 

Maybe the film’s inaccessibility accounts for why I’d never heard of Urgh! until it showed up at a repertory screening; but it was still surprising, because – much like Austin Powers’ penis pump – this sort of thing is my bag, baby. Early 80’s post-punk/new wave is my usual answer to "what's your favorite musical genre?" Talking Heads top my personal heap (they were asked to be in Urgh! but opted to do a little film called Stop Making Sense instead), but give me any pop music with spiky guitars or shimmering synths and I’ll be happy.

Not-so-coincidentally, this stuff is the preferred hipster rock of one generation prior to mine, which is often true of sentimental faves – you adopt what older folks are listening to before you start finding music on your own – but I don’t think that’s the only reason it appeals to me, specifically. Watching the performers on screen, I wondered to myself, “Is this the most neurodivergent genre?”

A bold, possibly nonsensical statement, but hear me out. There are exceptions, but… as thrilling/rocking/sexy as the performers were, what I mostly saw up on screen were a bunch of real nerd-ass nerds. Post punk/new wave is filled with a cavalcade of glorious geeks, distracting you from their essential poindexterness via edgy intensity, theater-kid-turned-cokehead stagecraft, or both. (Or, in the case of Devo, not even distracting you, but succeeding by being the most nerd – nerding so hard they shoot the moon. The Urgh! performance of “Uncontrollable Urge” rocks harder than anything you’d think could come from a group of men who look like human graphing calculators.)

Many bands don’t seem to even give a shit if they’re off-putting, like Gang of Four, who spend their Urgh! time strutting across the stage, strumming their guitars in a deliberately sloppy fashion, such that they often fail to even make contact with the strings, and leaving gaps that are as much an intentional, integral part of the music as the occasionally bum note they also embrace. Then they flash the audience an “I’m a bad widdle boy” grin, because Gang of Four has their own way of doing things, damn it, and just because it's different doesn’t mean it’s not awesome.

If nothing else in my "most neurodivergent" thesis rings true, there’s at least this – these bands are great for a guy like me – someone who loves to dance, but whose dancing is best described as “angular,” and relies mostly on feckless enthusiasm, thrown elbows, and lateral knee movements. 

My point (and I’ve taken my sweet time getting there) is that “the most neurodivergent pop genre” is not just an unprovable matter of opinion, and also a total chicken-and-egg situation. (Do I enjoy this music because I’m like this and the music is too? Or have I decided that the music has to be like me, because I happen to like it?) The point is that IT DOESN’T MATTER. I heard songs I connected to, and because I felt connected, they felt like part of my identity. 

Understanding, even constructing, your identity via pop culture is an act that exists, like everything, on a spectrum. On the most extreme end, it can get pretty poisonous. Let’s briefly bring the discussion back to movies (the pop culture world I wallow in, and thus am, unfortunately, most familiar with “the discourse”). In film, this kind of cultural hyper-identification can breed stuff like assholes harassing Kelly Marie Tran, daughter of Vietnamese refugees, for having the audacity to be a non-white woman in a Star Wars film, or the teeming incel masses proclaiming Marvel too “woke” for occasionally letting someone other than a white dude fight their giant glowy sky portals.

These folks are mad for some of the same reasons they’re angry at non-white, non-male, non-cis or non-straight people in their workplaces. To borrow a phrase from a song from a movie about women (briefly) replacing male baseball players – this used to be their playground. They’ve constructed part of their identity out of being sci-fi nerds or comics fans, identities that were (not exclusively by any means, but stereotypically) heterogeneous white male spaces, and thus any encroachment is viewed not as an expansion of that space, but theft. “Sharing” is not a thing, because sharing means frightening change, not only of their fandom but of the identity they’ve built around it. 

"If I am not this, then what am I?" 

And that doesn’t even touch the additional fear that perhaps some of these newcomers will be better than them, and that their competence will shatter the existing fandom's flimsy sense of self-worth. If Ms. Marvel is the most powerful person in the Marvel universe – a GIRL – perhaps it reminds them too much of times they dimly suspected they might not be the best person in the world, simply by virtue of being a dude with opinions. 

In this way, overdeveloped identification with pop culture can kill empathy. The same fans who lack boundaries between themselves and “their” art are unwilling to think, “Hey, I like having these heroes to look up to. Maybe others might enjoy heroes that look and feel like them.” Instead the response is usually, “Why do things have to change? It doesn’t matter that he’s a white guy; Captain America’s already a hero for EVERYONE!”… not realizing that it’s just because “white man is hero” has been the default for so long that they’ve confused the norm for what’s “normal,” and any deviation from normal is abnormal, which leads to WOKE CHAOS.

Of course, over-identification with pop culture doesn’t need to get that poisonous to be queasy. High Fidelity was ahead of its time in pinpointing a less virulent strain of the same disease. At one point, Rob, the protagonist, opines that, “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” and while his elevation of taste over character is not as immediately hateful on its face, it’s still immature nonsense. By the end his (incremental) growth is smartly indicated by him finally being able to make his girlfriend a mix tape of stuff she would like, not just the kinds of things he thinks she should like. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

I know I’m getting into well-swum waters here, and I’m doing y’all the double-diservice of not-saying-new-stuff in a not-particularly-amusing way, so I apologize for this mini-essay within the essay. I promise I’ll return to music in a moment – but not before mentioning that it's not all dire. Anything beautiful can get twisted and perverted with the wrong attitude. Pop culture passion might be the disease, but it’s also the cure. Fandom has long been a way for people to connect, and those people are often folks who may feel marginalized or socially awkward under other circumstances. I’ve seen firsthand how communities that spring up around media can be welcoming, supportive spaces. My own podcast, The Flop House, has been blessed with a listenership that’s mostly filled with only the sweetest, good-hearted weirdos, and I’ve watched people grow friendships, get married, even adopt children thanks to connections we (very tangentially) helped facilitate.

Meanwhile, I hopefully dream that as various fandoms reconfigure themselves to include all sorts of people, some of these growing pains will subside, and what's left will be a broader variety of folks, learning to co-exist. Wide ranging tastes and an open mind help, too. If you start consuming art that’s not just niche-specifically made for YOU, it can be like a backdoor into someone else’s experience, which fosters the empathy other approaches can kill.

Thus, as with most stuff in life, the answer is the most un-fun-sounding, dull, aphoristic solution – the middle path. Love what you love with your whole heart, but don’t confuse that love with who you are as a person. Conversely, if someone else hates your favorite thing, they aren’t actually cramming their hand deep into your chest to rip your heart out, Mola Ram-style. They’re merely a different individual, with different experiences and needs. 

Contrariwise, if you dislike something, consider that it may not be “bad,” per se, but merely aimed at a different audience. My wife and I will often marvel at frustrating comments we see online – one poster will be like “Anyone know a good dry cleaner?” and another will respond with “I never buy clothes that need to be dry cleaned. Too much trouble!” To which we think, “Uh, great. Is that helpful? Was it important to respond? Do you believe everyone on the internet is literally talking to you, specifically, and it would be rude to ignore them?” Once you get over your main character syndrome, you can make positive adjustments, like thinking, “Well, I’m an 82 year old man. Perhaps I don’t need to complain that this Snorks reboot sucks. I can just acknowledge it’s not for me.”

Let’s get back to music, perhaps the most intensely personal artform. In music fandom, linking your tastes to your sense of self is a practice as common as, say, an underemployed writer launching a newsletter. But it’s a tricky business, because the self changes over time. When I was younger, I liked spiky, aggressive music, with hipster cred, because I was a turbulent, sarcastic young man who felt unappreciated in his small, Midwestern hometown. I was desperate to prove I was smarter and more interesting than the people around me, and I valued “not being boring” above nearly all else. These days? I’ve come to learn that there are other values that might be slightly more important like “kindness” and “patience” and “listening to others.”

Now my nerves are jangled enough without adding musical jangle to the mix. As a kid, I would scoff at the lame soft rock my Dad would play on the car. Now I understand there are values beyond lame and cool, like “will this bring my heart rate down?” As a kid I would wonder, “When you get old, do your ears just break, and you can’t handle cool music anymore? Is life a drift towards sonic wallpaper?” Now I realize that it’s more like an expansion. I still like that angular guitar rock, it’s just that I’m no longer embarrassed to chill out a little, too. As a kid, I might reach for – say – one of Roxy Music’s art-rock albums like For Your Pleasure or Country Life. Now I’m just as apt to put on Roxy Music’s Avalon, a record I recently described on my podcast as “The adultest of adult contemporary.”

If you define yourself through music, shifts like these can feel alarming. Around your mid 30s or 40s you might start getting baffled to learn that song you heard at the supermarket for the first time yesterday is literally the biggest hit in a decade, while simultaneously gathering with other middle-aged men who once fancied themselves cool, to have hushed, guilty conversations about a heretofore unimaginable sneaking fondness for Steely Dan. 

If you find yourself in this boat, and it worries you, may I suggest some advice cribbed from a book I haven't read, but has a very grabby title, and embracing “The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck.” Who gives a shit if kid you would think current you is lame? Kid you was an idiot. 

So much of our taste is reactionary and tribal, and so much of it is based on context. For instance, when I was younger I shunned Pink Floyd, because I associated it with (1) weirdo stoner burnouts, and (2) tail-end Boomer nostalgia from the weirdo stoner burnouts of yesteryear. Flash-forward to a newer version of Dan who’s (1) survived a global pandemic (2) witnessed the growth of American fascism, and (3) lives somewhere where weed is newly legal. Now imagine the heavy use of (3) to combat stress from (1) and (2), and you know what? Floyd sounds pretty goddamn good. 

I’ve since hit pause on marijuana over health concerns, but whatever that sweet devil weed unlocked in me remains unlocked. I still enjoy Pink Floyd. I’ve even (God help me) extended my prog rock explorations into even proggier directions, like Rush. When I was a snotty teen, the baroqueness of prog's grandiose explorations seemed like a silly betrayal of the simple spirit of rock and or roll. Now I still think it's silly, but the silliness is part of the fun, and I realize that elevating simplicity over all else is just received critical nonsense. I love Ursula K. LeGuin's spicy words on a similar topic. In her A+ book on writing, Steering the Craft, she performs a merciless drive-by on a whole slew of post-Hemingway authors, stating, “‘Rules’ about keeping paragraphs and sentences short often come from the kind of writer who boasts, ‘If I write a sentence that sounds literary, I throw it out,’ but who writes his mysteries or thrillers in the stripped-down, tight-lipped, macho style – a self-consciously literary mannerism if there ever was one.” Fuckin’ A, Ursula.

One value of getting older is that it can strip away a lot of the generational or cultural contexts that previously kept you from exploring whatever culture strikes your fancy (although the barriers may, sadly, still take a while to overcome – you might notice a general whiteness in my musical touchstones, an unfortunate side-effect of my ultra-homogenous cornpone upbringing. I’m working on it). The less you give a shit about the signifiers surrounding a genre, the more you can just dig the music.

Sure, sometimes people need training wheels along the way. For instance, the general reclamation of yacht rock feels like it’s come with a heaping helping of irony – people will sing along, enthusiastically, but with a whiff of “Isn’t it an absolute HOOT that I enjoy this cheese?! Don’t you find my embrace of this shit HILARIOUS?” Not really. These songs were hits for a reason. To parrot an oft-invoked Duke Ellington quote, “If it sounds good, it is good.” Why keep the song at a distance? Don’t fight it. Just enjoy the way that saaaaailing takes you away to where you’ve always heard it could be.

I’m no longer young, as this essay has made painfully clear, so I could be talking out of my ass in this next bit – maybe these divisions are generational, and the "rules" don’t mean as much to young music fans of today. For an example, take the cult popularity of the Japanese genre “City Pop,” little-known in the U.S. until fairly recently. City Pop was an 80’s style that combined some of the aspirational, laid back vibes of yacht rock or 70’s AOR sounds with stuff like soft funk or jazz fusion – all genres that kids of my general age and attitude were bred to reject as uncool, but now my fortysomething hipster friends (and I’m not immune) embrace it. And there’s a part of me that wonders, uncomfortably, if it isn’t easier for folks my age to embrace it because it’s foreign – the smooth sounds come with some kind of ironic distance, because they've been laundered through a vague exoticism, similar to the way music nerds of the 90s loved Shonen Knife, partly because of the “funny” broken english of their simple lyrics. 

Maybe that’s all in my head, and I’m seeing soft racism where it doesn’t exist, but I do feel like younger people’s enjoyment of City Pop might be free of this weight, because it comes with a kind of radically modern decontextualization. Younger people lack the same associations for the 70s and 80s sounds the genre draws on, or the cultural dissonance that comes with hearing those sounds reflected back to the U.S. from a distant country. They just heard it on TikTok and know it’s a bop. Plus they’ve grown up in a far more globalized world, where Japanese culture is a daily part of their lives, so they can just enjoy it on its own terms.

Like I said, maybe this is nonsense projection, but if true? God bless ‘em for having to deal with less bullshit.

One final note, before wrapping this, my most rambling installment yet (next time: shorter and funnier!). As a guy (me) who's fallen ass-backward into a career that’s at least partly "criticism," I’m not saying that “expert” opinions are worthless. They're still valuable. The democratization of opinion has been wonderful in many ways, particularly in increasing the diversity of what gets discussed, but professional criticism is still vital. If you love something, an informed critique can provide a lot of fascinating context about why that art exists in the form it does, or why it “works.” If you hate something, a smart counter-opinion can open you to new ideas and perspectives. But, like the number on a Pop-Tarts box, reviews are just serving suggestions. Use critiques as a whetstone to sharpen your own opinions. 

In the meantime, though – like what you like, and stop being so angry and uptight if other folks like stuff that sucks. Chill out a bit. I can recommend a few albums that might help.

For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer, currently unstaffed. If you’re looking to hire, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!