How I wish that I had something intelligent to say about Beyonce! For that matter, Dear Reader, how I wish I were pop-culture savvy, as pop-culture savvy as you probably are! How I wish I could compose a pop-culture-savvy response to Nasia’s excellent post! (Nasia and I, in [more]
How I wish that I had something intelligent to say about Beyonce!
For that matter, Dear Reader, how I wish I were pop-culture savvy, as pop-culture savvy as you probably are!
How I wish I could compose a pop-culture-savvy response to Nasia’s excellent post! (Nasia and I, in this go-round of 60 Pages, will be responding to one another’s posts.) How I wish I could write 800 words studded with references and links and inside jokes from mid-nineties MTV!
But, as usual, I got nothing.
Flash back to me in fourth grade in Atlanta, over at my best friend’s house; I’ll call her Janet. Janet and I are hanging out in her room, listening to the radio. She has a strict rule: two songs from the pop station, Star 94, which she loves; one song from Kicks 101.5, my favorite country station. I don’t even argue with this rule; I’m just glad I get one song, since it’s common nine-year-old knowledge that country music is lame and pop music is cool.
Fast-forward two years to Shanghai, China, where I still somehow have a subscription to Country Music Magazine, which gets delivered each month to our apartment on Nanjing Road, and features interviews with the likes of big-haired stars like Reba McEntire and Trisha Yearwood in between Gibson guitar ads. At school dances at Shanghai American School, the music of choice is Dr. Dre, which I loathe because it makes me feel sad to hear it: I find its dark themes discomfiting, and I can’t access the transgressive delight it seems to unleash in my peers.
Fast-forward two years to Singapore. I’m 16 and crazy about the Indigo Girls. My two close friends, I’ll call them Janet and Janet, cannot get behind this. They feel what the Germans call Fremdscham (vicarious cringing) for my musical tastes. Janet and Janet are singing along to R. Kelly and the Spice Girls while I’m singing along with Amy and Emily, who are harmonizing on such intensely earnest lyrics as: “Now I know a refuge never grows/ From a chin in the hands in a thoughtful pose / Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.”
Fast-forward four years to college, where my new boyfriend, I’ll call him Janet, deeply admires country music and deeply deplores my mid-nineties heroes, who he sees as commercial Nashville posers. He adores Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams and Bonnie Prince Billy. Love is funny: my friends’ teasing in middle school and high school never did a thing to bring me over to their musical tastes, but now that I am swoonily infatuated, I put aside my favorite music and start listening to my boyfriend’s music, nearly exclusively. When we break up, I find I am sick to death of Johnny Cash, but still listen to Lucinda Williams now and then.
Fast-forward to now, about ten years later: by and large, pop music still mostly leaves me sad or irritated, and I find it hard to listen all the way through Beyonce’s album, even though I loved Nasia’s piece on it, and I enjoy reading music critics like Jody Rosen (an alleged poptimist) opine on stars like Miley Cyrus. But it never really makes me like the music all that much more, or pay attention to what’s happening in that scene. I fall in love with the occasional pop hit—the Daft Punk song from last summer, or that awesome duet “Used to Know,” with Gotye and Kimbra a couple years back. And, I have to say, I love my friend Florian’s (aka Neonresolutions) mixes, which manage to splice pop and hip hop and indie in just the right ways.
But 90% of the time, my embarrassing cluelessness/apathy can best be summed up by an occurrence this weekend in Rome, while I was in the car with my father. A song came on the radio, and he turned it up. “Isn’t that Katy Perry?” he asked. I had zero idea.
This feels to me on some level like failure. Why can I not be broad-minded enough to delve into pop, or curious enough to analyze what it has to say about contemporary culture? Why am I sometimes forced to leave coffee shops because they are blasting a horrible pop song and I hear every word and am overcome by a sense of devastation that most people only get watching Old Yeller all the way through?
I know that not all pop is created equal. I get what Nasia and others are pointing out about Beyonce’s albums growingly compellingly more complex, and I am not calling all pop insipid or undeserving of deep attention. It’s not pop, it’s me. Plus, the fact that I love Haim, which is basically the poppiest of the poppiest, means that my anti-most-pop aesthetic lacks consistency and integrity. Oh well.
In all of my nearly 33 years, there has only been one day, April 18, 1992, in which my musical tastes felt mainstream and universally accepted. That was because, in a dictatorial move, I forced all of my friends to go watch Dolly Parton’s movie Straight Talk with me for my birthday party. I think it was probably the best birthday party I ever had. If it had happened two years later, in 7th grade, the other girls would have done something mean, like leave halfway through, but since it was fifth grade they just sat there and ate their Sour Patch kids, while I beamed, watching Dolly Parton sing (well) and act (badly), and it was too dark in the movie theater to see if my friends were rolling their eyes.