too old for pop
I have a paper due in seven hours. Like, a really important one. So I thought I’d post here about music. Not the music of 18th-century midwives, but music from the bygone 1990s.
So, the TV seasons are ending. I’ve become very reliant on television at the end of a day: it’s become part of my ablutions routine, along with the toner, the moisturiser, and the pot of tea. House, Law & Order, Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant. These are the things I watch on my own. With Mike, 30 Rock and The Office. But the seasons are ending, and I have to get creative. So I’ve decided to start watching movies.
Not a movie a night, mind. I have some other things to do in this cloistered world of mine. Portions of movies.
Last night I watched a whole one: Zack & Miri Make A Porno. I’d had this in my queue for quite some time, and had avoided it if there was anything else to watch. Mike saw Pineapple Express and didn’t like it, and there was general disapproval of Seth Rogen at Casa Chalk. Besides which, I find Kevin Smith a bit hard to take sometimes, not for the Controversial Reasons, but because his male main characters always end up being Saccharine Good Guy Who Loves Women. You always know how these movies are going to end.
Zack & Miri didn’t disappoint, in that regard. Seth Rogen is actually a real sweetie, did you know? The movie was more or less as advertised, complete with Traci Lords twat-bubble-blowing. The thing that stuck with me about it, though, was that it began with a high school reunion. There was a high school reunion on 30 Rock recently, for the 38-year-old Liz Lemon, very a la Grosse Pointe Blank, replete with Simple Minds and Wham!. Zack & Miri made me realise that I thought all high school reunions played 80s music: boy, was I wrong.
The eponymous main characters graduated high school in 1998, so what I heard was a lot of Live, Pixies, and Marcy Playground. For the first time I felt like I was at my own high school reunion (although mine would probably feature drunk renditions of numbers from the Threepenny Opera; my high school was very ‘two years jazz, three years tap’). I went through high school in time for Radiohead, Beck, and The Prodigy. Escaped just before the advent of Britney Spears. Got a lot of Dave Matthews in there. I didn’t think it mattered so much.
Watching this movie and listening to this music, though, I understood that I am now officially part of an era - the mid- to late-90s - and that the market no longer caters to me. I became lazy about discovering new music a long time ago, and I’ve always been something of a late bloomer: in high school, was I listening to Dave Matthews? Nope. I was listening to Elvis Costello and XTC. And Primus. Writing fraught poetry, I was. Learning to smoke. In a high school full of sequined hats and Daring to be Different, I wore the same pinstriped blazer every day and spent almost no time with people my own age.
I think that’s part of the problem. My boyfriend in high school - and the friends I thereby appropriated - were all three, four, and five years older than me. When I got to university, the first boyfriend I had - and the friends I thereby appropriated - were seven and eight years older than me. Luckily, this was when 80s music was experiencing its first retro revival, so we were speaking the same language, the language of Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Big Country and Wall of Voodoo.
The thing these two boyfriends - and their posses - had in common was a not-at-all-veiled contempt for Canadian music. I remember sitting in uni boyfriend’s living room one night at about three in the morning - sometime in 1997 - trying to sober up to go home, and watching a Prodigy video that I didn’t even like. Boyfriend says: ‘Why can’t Canada do something like this?’
I had no answers. I was drunk.
Because I was busy listening to Andy Partridge and Elvis Costello and They Might Be Giants and the Sugarcubes and goddamned Pizzicato Five, I more or less figured that the music targeted at me from my late teens to my mid-twenties had passed me by. I remember owning Odelay by Beck - it got me through a very long, very cold Greyhound trip over Christmas 1996. But other than that, I didn’t spend hours in HMV scouring the shelves for the Hits. Somehow, though, the Hits stuck in my head.
Like: ‘Steal My Sunshine’ by Len. Second year uni? First. What a silly song. I don’t remember especially liking it, but there it was on Zack & Miri, and I was rushed back to driving in my 1985 Honda Accord, Sophie, to campus from my parents’ house in the west-end ‘burbs, circa 97-98. Radio was what I had in that car. Power fucking 92.
The thing is, I knew what it was OK to like back then, and what must be scoffed at, and what could be enjoyed on an Ironic Level. (I LOVED ‘I Want You’ by Savage Garden, listened to it loudly and with impugnity, but knew it was an Ironic Level song, right up until the moment that I was irretrievably done with it. Earlier tonight, on a nostalgia kick, I found it on YouTube, and found myself just as sick of it as I became that day in 1997.) I was With It, even if I really didn’t think I was. Now I’m not sure. I shake like an old biddy when people ask what recent music I like - I like the Killers? Hot Chip? Sufjan Stevens sort of? Is that OK? Are Soul Coughing still a thing? Are the Tremeloes still Number One, as Roddy Doyle would say?
See, you don’t realise this shit until you navigate out of your own age group. With my friends in Edmonton, my friends in London, we could warble to Blue Rodeo and measure how cool we were by what our parents raised us on. I didn’t realise I wasn’t keeping up until last night, when I heard the music of My Generation and realised that it was released more than ten fucking years ago. 80s music I’m less self-conscious about - that wasn’t my music. I just borrowed it. But Dave Matthews is mine; Radiohead is mine. Beck is fucking mine. And so, unfortunately, is Marcy Playground (yeah, I got that one CD too, back when people did such things).
Does this mean I’m too old? Done for? I don’t think so. I think these things are cyclical. My mom went mad for Michael Jackson in her mid-thirties. She liked Tori Amos when Tori Amos was underground. She still finds cool things to listen to. But I’ll have to ask her, one of these days, if she ever went through a vacuum period when she just stopped seeking music out, and how long it lasted. I don’t mind the break from fashion - I like the music I like, even if I can’t talk about it confidently in public. But I refuse to become one of these bints who says that a given decade didn’t produce anything worthwhile. I know there’s value in the music out there now - a lot of it - and I’m just not noticing it enough.
And now that I’ve used up all the m-dashes in my repertory for the evening, I figure it’s safe to go back to the life-defining meisterwerk.
Till next time, &c.
Related posts:
