Some people just have a je ne sais quoi about them, something that makes it clear they enjoy perfect little Swedish pop rock songs. Apparently I don’t have that something.
For anyone who’s been reading my blog for a year or so (or, you know, gone back through the archives), my enduring crush on Nina Persson (oh, Nina) should be obvious. However, apparently to people who don’t know my love for the Cardigans, it seems odd that I would love “Lovefool“.
I suppose I understand this, in some ways. I am, despite my own belief in my ongoing boyhood, a man. If you’re stereotyping, I can see why you might not be inclined to think that me loving them makes sense.
I don’t see it. For one thing, I have a long history of loving pop rock bands; I mean, I love the Beatles, and drawing the line from them to the Cardigans doesn’t take a lot of ink. For two, I never didn’t love this song; I have no context that accounts for me not singing along with it every time it came on the radio.
I don’t know, if we’re stereotyping… maybe it’s obvious why my mom thought I might be gay?
I know that I’d heard the buzz when they released Turn On the Bright Lights. I know that they were hailed as part of the “New York scene” from early in the last decade. I knew their name, but I didn’t know their music.
There’s a lot to hate about them, if one is so inclined. Are their lyrics occasionally pretentious to the point of incomprehensibility? Yeah. Do they have the inbuilt annoyingness common to many bands from New York? Sure. Do they sound a little too much like Joy Division? Absolutely.
But there I was, just before Antics came out, falling under their spell. Those pretentious lyrics were not important to me; sometimes, the voice is an instrument, and what you are singing is less important than how you are singing it. Sure, they may be one of those wanky New York bands, but as a fresh transplant to the city, I found that appealing, not appalling. And you know what? I fucking love Joy Division, and I don’t see anything wrong with a band that seems to be furthering that sound.
Was it stupid when Paul Banks claimed that he’d never heard Joy Division when Interpol was formed? Yes, very. There’s nothing embarrassing about influences, else every band in the past 40 years would be ashamed to mention the Beatles. There’s nothing embarrassing about being the band that filtered Joy Division through ’80s synth pop and early ’90s grunge. Paul Banks’ baritone calls back to St. Ian Curtis as surely as the Backstreet Boys called back to New Kids on the Block.
(It should be noted that, as far as saints go, Ian Curtis was kind of a bad person. Which puts him in line with most of the rest of my personal saints.)
So: through that spring of 2004, learning something new, loving them the way we always love the shiny and new, trying to justify their faults as merits. And they’ve never disappointed me. I’ve never been let down. Which is not a thing that’s happened much in my life.
The fact is, I can’t remember with 100% certainty what was on the list, and it has to do with more then changing tastes. Yeah, new music’s captured my heart, and old favorites have snuck into the rotation. And yes, I still love each and every one of those songs with a pure visceral feeling that I can’t explain, which is lucky, since I don’t have to, given the fact that anyone who cares about music at all knows exactly what I mean.
But I don’t have a favorite. There’s no one song that speaks to me across time and across my whole life, the way some people feel about “Blackbird”. There’s no all-timer for me.
I put forth the question a few days ago to others: “What is my favorite song?” There were a few good answers, some of which will come up later in the month. However, none of them seemed right.
There was one response that really caught my eye, ultimately: favorites are for people who have settled.
I don’t have a favorite because I don’t have something I’ve loved always. In fact, I jettisoned nearly all the music to which I’d been exposed throughout my childhood as an adolescent when I decided to start listening to “my music”; even if I came back to large swaths of it, realizing I’d been wrong to dismiss it, anything that could be considered a “favorite” from then had been stripped of its luster.
(It bears mentioning now that the music of that I jettisoned, the music of my parents, was mostly ‘80s hair metal. It taught me to love music, but it didn’t stand up to the giants that rose in the early ‘90s when I was coming into my own. I still stand by that.)
Right now, I can’t stop listening to Metric’s “Gimme Sympathy”, so I suppose that right at the moment, it’s my favorite song. However, ultimately, I think it comes down to this: there’s no all time favorite for me, which means my favorite at any given moment is at the mercy of caprice, or my brain, or my ears, or, maybe on that right spring day when the world feels fresh and I want to skip down the block, my heart.
Popular music has evolved across the centuries of its existence from what is now known as “classical” (with the lowercase “c”) to its current “it’s not just awful… it’s god-awful” state. Nevertheless, “pop” music as it stands was came into being at the end of the nineteenth century. The songwriters of Tin Pan Alley dominated the pop landscape while simultaneously inspiring songwriters around the world to expand the scope of pop songcraft for decades, until the radio overtook live performances of standards as the key method of dissemination of pop music.
