Maybe All I Need is a Shot in the Arm
I haven’t blogged very much about music, except to tell y’all what I’m listening to and what festivals I’m attending. I don’t have much confidence in my ability to talk about music–I know just enough about it to be dangerous, just enough to pretend to know what I’m talking about. Despite that, I’ll confess to musical snobbery: I turn up my nose and cover my ears at anything Top 40. And don’t even talk to me about Dave Matthews Band.
Recently, I’ve had a couple really interesting conversations about music with a new coworker (we’ll call him John C.). He’s brought up some challenging musical questions and he inspired me to download Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” And that, at the very least, deserves some explanation.
I haven’t always been a music snob. In fact, I grew up listening to what my dad did: 80s country (think: Kathy Mattea’s “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” and Patty Loveless’ “Timber (I’m Fallin ‘ In Love)”), the Kingston Trio, the oldies station. My dad used to quiz me while we’d listen to radio, prompting me to name the singer or group and the year each song had been released. I got pretty good at it, too, but as a result, the popular music of the 80s rocked and synthesized on without me (with a few notable exceptions, namely The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian”).
The Year I Became A Music Snob was the year I lived in Oxford, the year that changed my life in a hundred other little ways. By some cosmic grace or chance, I had a lucky stroke of foresight–remarkable, even–for a barely-20-year-old. I knew I had the luxury of a single year to live 4000 miles away from everything familiar and comfortable. It was all mine. If ever a circumstance demanded open-mindedness, this was it, the time to pry open my white-knuckled fists and fall into whatever experiences awaited me. My preconceptions muddying this sliver of foresight were simple, and laughably narrow; I thought cultural and intellectual knowledge would be my pots of gold. My little stroke of foresight suggested only the broadest categories and failed to forecast the minutiae. Like music.
But God is in the details, and the minutiae is as important as the last drop of melting ice cream. You just can’t let it slip away.
One of my Oxford housemates, Tim, played blues guitar with twice the conviction of any school assignment he did, strumming and wailing and bobbing his head until four in the morning. Another housemate, Brendan, bought a stereo immediately upon arriving in England and spent more money at The Polar Bear (the used CD store on Cowley Road) than he did on groceries.
I let go. I listened. I think it was the keyboards in Wilco’s “A Shot in the Arm” (off Summerteeth) that really did it. As soon as Brendan hit “play,” the bouncing chords got under my skin and my fingers itched for a piano. “You finally slept / while the sun caught fire / You’ve changed.” Something in my veins, yes, yes, and bloodier than blood, catchier, more interesting, more provocative, than the two hundred CDs I’d armed myself with for my year abroad.
And so I traded in my insipid pop country tunes for Belle & Sebastian, Pulp, Wilco, and the low wail of Tim’s guitar two floors beneath my bedroom.
. . . to be continued with my possible re-conversion to pop music (possible, I said, not probable), but in the meantime, read John C.’s post about the return of pop music into his life to understand the forces that convinced me to pay $0.99 for a Britney Spears song . . .
* * *
current book: Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street
current music: All Calexico, all the time. I’m nervous that I’ll overdose on it, but nothing else sounds good to me right now. Except that I listened to “A Shot in the Arm” while I was finishing this post, and it sounds pretty good. Always does.
current socks: gray with brightly colored butterflies.
Posted 14 August 2006
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I came across your blog after a couple linky loos.
but I had to stop and tell you what a magical song “A Shot in the Arm” is
I lived in the chicagoland area for most of my life, but never really bought into the whole Wilco thing. And then 2 years ago I began to have these life questioning moments. Career changing thoughts and uncertainties. And I began to listen to “A Shot in the Arm”. I kept thinking “maybe all I need is a shot in the arm.” Maybe that’s all it would take to change my life in general. “What you once were isn’t what you want to be, anymore” ahhhh! I probably listened to that song on repeat for months on end right before I moved.
I’m pleased to hear it had a life-altering impact on someone else as well. Even if it’s not in the same way.
Word. Re my whole journey: I’ve actually observed the whole embracing-pop-music-again phenomenon with other people I know, too, and I think a lot of it is about feeling the need to construct an identity in high school and college that’s largely defined by who you are not — i.e., I am not a frat boy, I am not a jock, I am not “normal,” etc., and therefore, the music I listen to will reflect how much cooler and smarter I am than the zombie masses.
But after a while, you (or at least I) begin to feel more comfortable with who you are, and you learn to accept the contradictions, or maybe even stop seeing them as contradictions anymore, and just listen to music that you like, without worrying about how you come across. A whole world of new music opens up to you, and you relish in all its pleasures.
Or at least that’s the idealist way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is that after college you begin to inhabit a world where it seems like indie rock is the default musical tendency for all white college-educated liberal-arts majors in their 20s (which is the majority of the people you know). And within that context, the homogeneity of that taste feels just as conformist as brain-dead mallrats lapping up the Top 40. And so you start listening to pop music in part because it feels somewhat transgressive, and you like monitoring the reactions when you tell people that you think Justin Timberlake is amazing. And when indie culture decides it’s finally acceptable to listen to Missy Elliott, then you turn to Gretchen Wilson and Brad Paisley. If indie rock is played out, then commercial hip-hop is the new indie rock, and pop-country is even indier.
But that’s the cynical view, and honestly, there’s probably elements of both. As I said to you once, I found it pretty easy to glom onto rap/R&B in 2003 (the year pop broke) because that’s what I was listening almost exclusively when I was 12 or 13, and I’d guess that a genuine appreciation for that stuff is in my musical DNA. So I’m certainly not pretending. But do I think I’m cooler for having such eclectic tastes? Yes, absolutely.
Perhaps you are cool despite liking Brad Paisley, and not because of it?
I agree with you about using music to forge an identity–it only takes one “Indier Than Thou” t-shirt at Pitchfork to prove your point. It seems like music–maybe more than any other single factor–contributes to the way we dress and therefore the way we are perceived. (see: list of ironic t-shirts from Pitchfork or the goth-clown Dresden Dolls fans at Lolla.)
But once I broke from my dad’s music and started listening to mainstream country, I was the mainstream, and, as far as I can remember, I didn’t really have a problem with it. I may have been creating an image, but not deliberately. So the change from conformist brain-dead mallrat to indie rock was largely because the music was so damn good, and more challenging than the trite cadences of the local country stations.
Now that I’m a college-educated liberal-arts-degreed twenty-something, sure, I’m more conscious about using music to define me. I feel pretty damn cool when I recommend a new indie band to 3hive.com. I’d like to think that I’ll listen to anything I think is good, no matter what the indie culture (or anybody else) thinks about it, but I’m also skeptical that I can have the same revelatory experience returning to country/pop than I had turning away from it.
I once said (or wrote or said to only myself) that if I ever met a girl who agreed that Pavement’s ‘Slanted and Enchanted’ was the greatest album ever made I would propose marriage to her on the spot.
But the thing is, if that for some bizarre reason had happened, and I was suddenly engaged to this cool girl, one rainy Saturday while re-sorting our records I would say, ‘You know, someone would have to be an idiot to disagree with the fact that ‘Murmur’ was the best album of the entire decade of the ’80s. And then she would say, ‘Yeah, Murmur is awesome, but actually my favorite 80s album is ‘Daydream Nation.’ And even though I think DN is my 2nd favorite 80s album, I would think to myself: ‘What an idiot!’ My perfect relationship would crumble, and I’d be alone again, spending Saturday nights browsing Soulseek for seven inches that are out of print.
Music is unique compared to any other ‘art’ form because it divides us the most, makes us the most individual. I mean, I love both film and literature, but it is much easier to list my top 100 albums than films or books (largely because so many albums come out in a given year, compared to movies or books. If you grabbed two people with similar tastes and had them make top ten lists for the year for albums, books, and movies, odds are than they’d maybe have one or two albums in common, and most likely 4 or 5 books and 6 or 7 movies.). Regardless of our upbringings, we’ll always find our own way, and I think the trick is to not hold anyone’s (your friends’, Pitchfork’s, Spin’s, ILM’s) word as gospel, but to simply follow your own path. You don’t want to listen to music because your friends like the same thing, and you certainly don’t want to because a magazine or website recommend’s something either. But, I must admit that it’s hard to resist the swelling feeling of superiority you get when you shock your old high-school friends with something after not seeing them for a while (“oh, you don’t like this? You think this is weird? Well, I guess you should go back to listening to America’s Top 40, huh?”) or making yourself stand out more in the peer group you are currently in (‘oh, you don’t think the Timberlake song is awesome? Well, I guess you should go listen to some Boredoms or something, dude.”). I think the real trick is to pretend you are in a room (or a desert island) and listening to music, as it is normally done, alone, and you are not going to talk about it with anyone. It is just you and a stereo, and no crime will be committed if you put on ‘Toxic’ or ‘Work It.’ This is something that is incredibly hard to do, however. It is so difficult to just listen.