Neal wrote re: his attempt to explain "the Sparkle Boys":
The moral of this story: I forget that my circle of friends --
physical ones or those in e-mail form -- are a smidgen of a smidgen
of the population. The real world doesn't think the way we do.
Mm-hmm. This is my biggest misgiving about having anything to do with
journalism, at least for the mass audience a daily newspaper (even one
with intellectual pretensions, like the one I work at) implies. I love
writing about music, but I don't want to have to start from scratch
each time - and yet I do want to aid in popularizing things I love, at
least some part of my little brain wants to. So what reference is too
obscure? I wrote the Sparklehorse piece assuming, for instance, that
nobody would get the Vic Chesnutt remarks without some explanation,
that the Flaming Lips explanation would be caught by some but was
ignorable by most, and that people would know who Tom Waits and
Roberto Benigni were, and probably what Down By Law is. That last
assumption seems seriously dubious, frankly - secretly, it
communicated that "if you don't know who Tom Waits is, go find that
out before you worry about Sparklehorse." Likewise the beggarly
description of the Varnaline set as Velvets-to-Huskers, a dead
giveaway of lack of space and one that, again, 10 percent of readers
would grasp.
On the other hand, it's nice to be able to provide some media material
for that 10 percent to read, since mostly they're ignored by all but
the hip-music press and forced to endure endless Celine Dion and
Shania Twain tripe. (This spoken from a Canadian perspective.)
Not that I'm so smart myself - I still have a hell of a lot to learn
about mainstream music history, since I ignored it growing up. I often
think of going and taking a year in popular-music studies at a
university to really give myself the background in straight rock, jazz
and country that I have in more off-beat stuff.
Still, music is one area where I do actually have friends who don't
know the same things I do. And find myself required to explain things,
which (Neal's right) is a good and humbling exercise.
More broadly, though, I look at surveys and see how the vast majority
of North Americans believe they have a personal relationship with
Jesus and still admire Ronald Reagan - and no offense to any P2er who
does, at least not right now - but what shocks me is that I don't know
anybody who answers to those descriptions. Like, not a single soul. In
a sense I'm happy to live that way, since it means I'm surrounded by
people with whom I have some common ground, even those who aren't my
friends - but on the other hand, I fear that I'm not really
participating in society as such. This wouldn't bother/frighten me if
I could make a living writing the strange creative stuff I do, where
being "outside" is expected - but I can't.
Even putting pragmatics aside, I also do feel some pull of citizenship
and compassion to make a better attempt to grasp where Other People
are coming from.
That's one of the reasons I'm feeling more attracted to both
traditional country music and contemporary Pop Muzik these days, both
things of The Real World, while simultaneously getting more and more
fascinated by free-improv and other Outside stuff, methinks: A
soundtrack for the schizo schematics of my mental landscape.
Anyway, thanks for the story and the stuff-to-chew-on, Neal.
Carl W.
