Encounterculture

Although lately I've been getting insanely jazzed for rock music again (thanks in large part to this and this and this, still, and even kinda this, the fact of the matter is simply that I am stuck in a retro rut (rutro?) where I'm unable to shake free of yuppie pop music. Since last year - probably in the last six months and change - I have acquired a stash of (*wince*) Billy Joel and Jackson Browne CDs that DWARFS all my Hep Nu DFA-styled stuff, and I haven't exactly been slacking in that area. Sometimes it's just good to retreat to stuff that sounds familiar, since on occasion man has been known to learn things from revisitation.

For instance: Graceland, AKA the Rumours of the 80s (not that that's a bad thing). Seeing as how I was spending the 80s being less than ten years old, I don't remember an awful lot of it, but I do remember that Graceland was everywhere. Graceland was the tape my parents slid into the dashboard whenever we went on family vacations. Graceland was the album that my parents' yuppie coterie (no harm intended, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar) would inevitably put on whenever one of them threw a party. I have few memories of Saturday Night Live musical guest performances, but Paul Simon doing songs from Graceland stayed with me, albeit more as an image memory since I don't remember what he sang. Hell, ten years later Paul Simon came up in a conversation with my friend Cesar and he had pretty much exactly the same memory of its omnipresence; the album was just everywhere, and I'd lay respectable odds that if I put it on around any random person who (A) is under 27 and/or (B) has never voted Republican, we could harmonize every part together.

And when we'd get to "That Was Your Mother", I'd get to see the shock of recognition as the lyrics of the song catch up to The Fictional Other Person. I mean holy crap; here's a song which, for two stanzas, is just bouncy safe/raucous zydeco about Paul Simon meeting a woman in a bar - not exactly uncharted territory for the singer of "Late in the Evening" - but then all of a sudden turns into the bitterest candy bar you've ever heard with the onset of the third verse. Consider:


Well, that was your mother
And that was your father
Before you was born dude
When life was great
You are the burden of my generation
I sure do love you
But let's get that straight


(!!!!)

Call me crazy, but that's a hell of a thing for kids to be singing with their parents on car trips. What's even more striking is the fact that the legacy of this album, and especially this song in the context of this album, is something that simply sounds like a good time. (This is limited to aesthetics, since the South African mbaqanga sound ran up against the anti-apartheid movement inching towards fruition.) And you know what? That's pretty much right; "That Was Your Mother" has the sound of a song where it wouldn't sound like it does if all the musicians weren't playing the everliving fuck out of it. Yeah yeah cultural empirialism co-opting ethnic traditions etc, but I'm not throwing my Eminem CDs out either. There comes a point where you choose between music and politics, even if it's not necessarily a choice that you can make with any real finality and remain a decent human being. There's also an argument to be made that the greatest music is the stuff that's best at obscuring the distinction.

I am fascinated by today's music (although nobody throughout the continuum of time can really be under thirty and be otherwise) in large part because I'm curious to see what turns up in 20 years. No band, including/especially your favorites, is going to be cool forever; the day is sadly coming when Luke Jenner will hoist his 280-pound frame onto a stage at a Williamsburg street fair in front of thirty bald, beponytailed high-school English teachers whose kids all palpably hate the fuck out of them, and it's coming whether you or I like it or not. It's just a fact that if you stick around long enough, you go sour. What *interests* me about pop music is the coming dread of realizing whose toes we have to step on in order to dance like idiots to "House of Jealous Lovers", especially when you combine it with the recent personal realization that I suck monster donkey ass at predicting the future.

And I don't think I'm alone, either. Much has been made of the fact that "Hey Ya" can be descriptively boiled down to a mashup of "Hey, let's have sex and then I'm going to get the fuck up out of here" vs. DANCE DANCE DANCE DANCE DANCE GODDAMMIT DANCE by the hipsterati, even if they inevitably cop to not giving a fuck in the face of, well, a song where it wouldn't sound like it does if all the musicians involved weren't playing the everliving fuck out of it. This is a song which took less time to become a shorthand for "This is happy and fun" than anything since Blur's "Song 2" (house music being the exception, as usual). But fuck, I've also heard about people singing "Hey Ya" with their parents; is it such a stretch to imagine the same people singing it with their kids? And is it such a strange notion to assume that a lot of said fictional kids will, in the year 2028, get "Hey Ya" tracked into their neural shunts as a lark and get whomped by the realization that this is a song about gett'n in and gettng out?

My point is this: Inevitably, music comes from culture more than the other way around. Whether or not you want to admit it, "That Was Your Mother" is probably a pretty accurate representation of the way a lot of yuppie parents felt about their kids; God knows that before my parents came along, my parents could drink and get high and tell illicit stories about their extended families (well, at least *conspicuously*), and it doesn't seem unfair to me to call the object that prompts you to give all that up a burden, and I'm saying that as the burden in question. Nor does it seem unfair to say that a lot of the modern audience enjoys the fucking and recognizes the necessity of the leaving, and so it was really just a matter of time until a song like "Hey Ya" found the notes to evoke it.

But what's oddest to me is that nobody seems to even acknowledge that at some point, this issue will come up. Maybe it's the rise of the MP3 that did it, making the single even more easily accessible and, consequentially, ephemeral; maybe it's that darn MTV that I hear so much about; maybe it's the result of forty years of "revolutionary" being an aesthetic descriptor. All I know is that there is a very prominent, VERY vocal section of the pop-culture audience today that consumes without an eye towards the future, and it's only going to make things interesting for people who get a kick out of things like Putzfuck revising its top 100 90s albums in a calculated effort to maintain institutional relevance worthy of Spin itself. Whether or not "Hey Ya" is as shocking a revelation to The Kidz of tomorrow as "That Was Your Mother" was to me practically isn't the point, and if you can say the same, then congradulations - you like music because you enjoy it.