Well, I've held off burdening the whole list with this for a couple of
years now, although I have sent to a few folks I thought would enjoy it.
But since Dave Purcell brought it up, I'll post this behemoth against my
better judgment. I do think it's germane. And I also think that when Fulks
covers "Jet" he takes part in the tradition I talk about in the piece. At
some level, it's part of what puts the "alt" in his alt country
categorization (imho). Actually, I'd argue that it's a big part of what
puts the "alt" in alt-country generally. But I won't belabor that here. I
think it will make more sense if you read the thing.
As you'll see, I'd argue that at this point, it's impossible for Fulks'
actions not to be viewed as somewhat ironic by the audience. Nevertheless,
I view irony primarily as a shield in this context anyway (although it may
not be a shield Fulks himself needs anymore). A good pop song has the
power to touch us at the deepest emotional level, especially one from our
childhood before we knew all about hipness, etc. Unfortunately, many of us
from the post baby-boom generation forgot or have been too insecure to
admit this truth, especially in our late teens and twenties. So irony
helps create a space for us to safely be nostalgic about some rather
absurd times.
Anyway, sorry in advance for the length. I also hope the formatting isn't
too screwed up. I'm afraid I write in pretty long paragraphs sometimes.
This thing has never been published anywhere. Indeed, I'm not even sure
why I wrote it. I guess I just think about this stuff too much sometimes.
That's why I love this list. It's one of the few places where I've found
some kindred spirits.
Enjoy or delete.
JL
Sucking in the Seventies: Paul Westerberg, the Replacements,
and the Onset of the Ironic Cover Aesthetic in Rock and Roll
(It's Only Rock and Roll But I Like It)
By Jacob London, Copyright 1996 All Rights Reserved
A while back, my local "alternative" radio station began playing a
cover version of the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" by the U.K. band
Ned's Atomic Dustbin. The first time I heard it, I didn't even think about
changing the station, even though the Rollers were one of the most
critically unhip bands of the 1970s. I just sat back and listened,
slightly amused, but mostly taking the whole experience for granted. Such
is the state of things now that the practice of "alternative" bands
covering "bad" songs from the 1970s has become so commonplace. If it isn't
Ned's Atomic Dustbin, it's Seaweed or Smashing Pumpkins doing some
Fleetwood Mac song like "Go Your Own Way" or "Landslide."
Few question the full-on embrace of 1970s popular culture anymore.
It's even got it's own "American Grafitti" film in Richard Linklater's
"Dazed and Confused." Linklater's take on the past is a little more
self-conscious and cynical than George Lucas's vision of the early 1960s
in "American Grafitti." But Linklater's remembrance of teen life in 1976
remains a warm one, especially in its unself-consciously reverant use of
the period's music. It pushes all the same buttons as Lucas's film,
although neither Linklater nor his audience would ever completely admit
it. For even as the residue of 1970s has reasserted itself in the American
cultural life of the 1990s, a lingering tinge of reticence remains, as
people continue to adjust to the idea that openly embracing the mainstream
culture of the 1970s no longer entails being instantly labeled a loser or
a philistine.
Back in the early 1980s, when I was starting college in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, things were a lot different. There was plenty of risk involved
in embracing the mainstream music of the 1970s, at least among the
community of rock and roll hipsters I hung out with. A friend later
summarized the stakes very well in a different context: "There's a lot on
the line when you tell other people what kind of music you like; people
know they'll be judged based on what they say. If they give the right
answer they'll be accepted. If they don't, people may look down on them."
This was true in Ann Arbor during that time as it has been
everywhere I've lived since. The rules determining inside and outside were
generally unwritten, but they weren't hard to figure out. Punk rock was
cool. Some New Wave was cool. David Bowie, he was pretty cool (his glam
rock was sort of New Wave and Punk before they were invented). Dylan, the
Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones, the Who, Motown, and the other classics of
1960s rock, that was cool too, as long as you weren't too much of a hippie
about it. But the mainstream music of the 1970s was not cool. Disco
sucked, including George Clinton and his P-Funk allies. Foreigner was not
cool. Lynyrd Skynyrd was not cool. Neither were Black Sabbath, Led
Zepplin, Peter Frampton, Foghat, Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, or Alice Cooper.
Black Oak Arkansas was not cool. Neither were Head East, R.E.O.
Speedwagon, the Michael Stanley Band, the Eagles, Kansas, Styx, nor any of
the other music Richard Linklater put in his movie.
In this environment, it is no surprise that my good friend Larry
felt compelled to show his allegiance to the clan of the rock and roll
hipster by throwing his copy of Led Zepplin IV against the wall of the
University of Illinois dorm room where he was staying during the summer of
1983. I seem to remember trying half-heartedly to convince him not to do
it as he raised the record to hurl it.
"You sure you want to do that man," I said. "A record is a record.
You might regret it later."
"No way man, I'm gonna throw it," he said, cocking it behind his
ear. "I'm ashamed I own this; it sucks. If I hear 'Stairway to Heaven'
one more time I'm gonna lose my shit. It sucks. 'Black Dog' sucks too. It
all sucks." And with that, he whipped the thing at the wall and it
shattered into numerous pieces around the room (he told me recently he
bought it again on CD a few years ago). We put something like "Armed
Forces" by Elvis Costello on the turntable, opened up some cans of Strohs
beer, and cracked up for a while, completely confident that justice had
been done.
Then in the fall of 1984 something happened in Ann Arbor that
turned the well ordered world of our little sub- culture upside-down. The
Replacements came to town and played "Black Diamond" by Kiss. Undoubtedly,
it was not the first such incident nationwide. Nor were the Replacements
necessarily the only band at that time playing covers like "Black
Diamond." Nonetheless, in hindsight Paul Westerberg and his cohorts were
perhaps the most important purveyors of this practice.
Among the rock and roll hipeoise, the band's influence was comparable to
that of the Velvet Underground, who sold very few records during its
tenure, but as many have jokingly observed, seems to have influenced every
person who bought one of those albums to go out and start up a band of his
or her own. In the case of the Replacements, a similar phenomenon occurred
across the country in 1984-85: almost every person in a band who saw the
Replacements cover songs like "Black Diamond" went back to practice with
their own band determined to find their own "Black Diamond" to cover.
For my part, I'm just glad I made it to the show. I came really
close to staying home. I had seen the band once before in the summer of
1983, about three weeks after Larry hurled Led Zepplin IV at the wall.
They had opened for REM, my reigning favorites at the time, and I had not
really enjoyed their set very much. In the band's defense, the sound was
bad for their set that night. But the truth is, I didn't get what they
were doing. I was simply unprepared to assimilate the broad range of
styles they brought to their music. Was it punk? Was it straight hard
rock? It certainly had guitar solos. Was it country?
Whatever it was, I figured it out in Joe's Star Lounge that fall
night in 1984. Or maybe the band had figured it out a little better by
then too. It was certainly a more cohesive unit that came into Ann Arbor
that night. By this time, the band's two LPs and one EP had been well
received critically and they had just begun to tour on their as yet
unreleased third LP, "Let It Be." A buzz was building.
The band opened its set with "Color Me Impressed" from the
"Hootenany" LP. About twenty seconds into the song, my body began to
tingle, as it occassionally does when I hear something really special for
the the first time. Maybe I'd heard the song before at the 1983 show, but
as the two guitars interacted, simultaneously supporting and playing off
of each other, it finally registered.
The tingling feeling in my body continued for quite a while,
because it seemed that every original song the band played was great, a
part of this wonderful all-you-can-eat buffet for the rock and roll
hipster, loud and fast like punk rock, but with a melodic pop sensibility,
great guitar solos, well crafted lyrics, and wonderful stylistic nods to
country music and rockabilly. Everything about it followed our unwritten
rules of rock music hipsterdom to a "T." Indeed, for many of us in the
crowd, these guys had instantly become the coolest band in the land of the
hipoeise.
Then boom!! The Kiss cover.
Immediately, I felt confused and self-conscious about how to
respond. Everything in my rigidly disciplined rock music snob brain said
that a Kiss cover was wrong. This was Kiss. A joke band. A pimple on the
ass of good rock and roll, at least as good rock and roll was defined by
my peers and the pop cultural elite to whom I owed my very sense of good
and bad. But everything in my emotional experience and that of the rest of
the audience simultaneously said the opposite. We all seemed to be loving
it. Although as I looked around the room, I saw looks of guilt or
confusion on more than one faceno doubt owing to the knowledge that
however good the whole thing felt, one's rigidly codified sense of cool
and uncool was rapidly being turned inside out.
This cognitive dissonance was too problematic to endure for very
long. So almost instantaneously we came upon a strategy for resolving our
aesthetic quandary: We could overcome our weird feelings and enjoy this
moment to the fullest extent, as long as we made fun of it at the same
time. So we shrugged off our confusion, reclaimed a little bit of our
white suburban past, and basked in the heretofore forgotten pleasures of
"Black Diamond," shaking our fists and really getting into the spirit of
Kiss and hard rock cartoonishness in general. But on another level we
were all knowing participants in a gag. We all looked at each other with
this expression that said "I can't quite believe I'm doing this, but it
sure feels good. And by the way, isn't this really a funny joke?" Thus,
when the moment was over, we had no problem minimizing the significance of
the whole experience, self-consciously laughing it off as some sort of
weird anomaly.
But reflecting upon the "Black Diamond" experience over a decade
later, it is clear that those of us in attendance dismissed its cultural
significance far too uncritically. In hindsight, the "Black Diamond"
experience is particularlly emblematic of the cultural relationship
between my demographic cohort group what I call the tailbust generation,
the end of the baby boom and the beginning of Generation Xand the core
baby boomers who have preceded us.
Born between 1958 and 1970, we are a transitionary group, who came of age
in the blurry and uneven terrain which separated the previously hegemonic
baby boom culture from the now emergent post-boomer culture. Those of us
in the tail group, my closest cohorts, now in our late twenties or early
thirties, were old enough to experience many of the pivotal baby boomer
events first hand through the eyes of a four to nine year old child. But
despite this first hand knowledge, most of us at the tail end of the baby
boom share a lot more with the members of Generation X (e.g., an
encyclopedic knowledge of Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, and Gilligan's
Island episodes). For in the final analysis, our popular culture framework
has been almost entirely shaped by the core baby boomers of 1946- 1953.
They are the ones who were out in the streets in the 1960s, they were the
ones at Woodstock, and theirs is the large and loud voice which has so
dominated the popular culture in which we latecomers came of age.
Nowhere has the core baby boomer voice been more powerful than in
establishing and shaping a rock and roll canon. To the extent that rock
had a moment in which distinctions between "highbrow" rock and "lowbrow"
rock had validity and were seriously debated, the parameters of this
moment were set out by the rock critics who are members of the core baby
boom generation (e.g., Christgau, Marcus, Marsh, Landau, Loder, Bangs,
DeCurtis, etc.). In fact, it is the ongoing existence and
institutionalization of this rock critic cultural elite in publications
such as Rolling Stone Magazine that has made the notion of a rock and roll
canon a viable one (Rolling Stone glories in its role as a sacrilizing
force, releasing issues dedicated to subjects like the 100 best rock
records of all time). The core boomer critics are the people who did the
initial periodizing of rock and roll history. And in doing so, they
effectively structured, and in many respects, continue to control the
discourse surrounding popular music.
The core boomer rock music canon and the core boomer periodization
of its history are very neatly represented and summarized in the Rolling
Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. It begins with the cannonized
antecedents of rock and roll: blues from the delta, the urban blues, and
country music (including western swing). After that it establishes the
rock pioneers: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Elvis and the
lesser Rockabillies. Next it moves into the core of the canon: the
Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, Joplin, the Jefferson
Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the
whole of the Motown sound, and the Stax/Volt tradition. Following this
material, there is some movement into the 1970s and 1980s by the authors.
For example, Dave Marsh discusses Bruce Springsteen, there is a piece on
Neil Young's solo career, and punk and new wave get small mentions. But
for the most part these discussions continue themes whose roots are in the
sixties.
For it is in the '60s, we learn at least implicitly from this
book, that the sacred texts were fully developed and most fully realized.
And it was in the '70s that rock music got out of hand and began to be
crushed under the excess of its own pretension. Whether it was art rock or
the slick studio music of California, on balance the whole affair was
nothing if not bloated and flatulent. Elvis, it seems, embraced Vegas and
its kitsch, and in the eyes of the canon keepers, so did much of '70s
popular music. Thus when punk came along to save the day, it did so
through its reaffirmation of the basic values of rock and roll articulated
first in the fifties by the rock pioneers and then more comprehensively by
such "highbrow" rock artists as the Beatles and the Stones. Punk was a
cleansing moment which washed away all of the excess which had obscured
the true essence of rock and roll, but it was devoid of any value unto
itself. It's almost as if the canon keepers had said that the 1970s
(meaning roughly 1972-1977) were a big aesthetic mistake from which
nothing of value could be learned.
But while the rhetorical force of this story of rock and roll is
seemingly undeniable, it presents one serious problem for the tailbust
generation: By pillorying the pop culture of the 1970s, it leaves little
room for those of us whose formative cultural experiences occurred during
this period. As a result, the self- conscious, internal conflict,
exemplified by the "Black Diamond" experience, is ever present in the
tailbuster psyche whenever aesthetic judgments are required. On the one
hand, we know we liked bands like Kiss, at least until we learned we
weren't supposed to. We know that liking bands like Kiss is a part of who
we are; we have the positive associations and memories to prove it. We
feel that the music of bands like Kiss has cultural value and that we
should not be ashamed that we like it. We also know, at some level, that
we must reject the story of rock according to the core boomers, because
until we do, we cannot claim the part of our experience that makes us
distinct from them. But on the other hand, we can't escape their
narrative, because it has shaped us. It is always lurking in the
background, an indelible benchmark of perception against which all of our
aesthetic evaluations must be measured. And we are realists. We've known
almost intuitively since we were conscious that directly asserting our
autonomy from the core boomer narrative is not really an option. The core
boomers have us outnumbered, they're far more righteous than we could ever
be, and they'll do whatever it takes to insure that their story is the one
that everyone hears and remembers. Consequently, we've developed a more
covert, guerilla war approach to cultural assertion.
In the arena of rock and roll, the most important tool of
subversion is a sneaky strategy that has been called "preemptive irony."
Preemptive irony is a process of mocking one's self or one's art before
anyone else gets a chance to do it. This is accomplished by acknowledging
explicitly in advance a self-consciousness of the pre-existing critical
categories in which a given work might be placed. It's calling one's own
song a "silly, neo-psychedelic ditty" before the critic has a chance to do
it. It's a way of saying "I already know what you're going to say, because
I know what box I'm working in, and besides, what I'm doing is kind of
silly anyway, so how can you criticize it seriously when I don't take it
seriously myself? You'll look silly." Which is the whole goal of
preemptive irony to begin with: to disarm the critic by calling the
novelty of his or her enterprise into question before the critic has a
chance to call the artist's enterprise into question.
The Replacements' practice of performing covers like "Black
Diamond" is a text book example of the subversive power of preemptive
irony and the terms and conditions of its legitimate deployment. Just any
performance wouldn't do. It was better if the underlying intent of the
performer remained ambiguous. The Replacements seemed to understand this
intuitively. Thus while the guys seemed to enjoy playing "Black Diamond,"
it was hard to gauge their sincerity. Was it an act of reverence from the
heart? Or was it just a bit of satirical play acting? Would the band stop
playing at any moment and start humiliating those members of the crowd who
seemed to be enjoying themselves a little bit too unselfconsciously? Did
the band think songs like "Black Diamond" sucked and deserved ridicule? Or
did the band like them, no matter what everyone else said? It was never
completely clear. And this was probably the way the band wanted it,
because it always provided its members and the audience with a means of
escape. If someone tried to make fun of the band for performing a cover
like "Black Diamond," the members could always just say it was a joke, the
same way those of us in the audience did at Joe's Star Lounge that night
in 1984.
But the covers were definitely more than just a joke. Whether
consciously or unconsciously, there was a full-on revisionist attack on
the core boomer rock and roll canon lurking inside that fog of ambiguity.
At the time of the "Black Diamond" icident, the Replacements were already
a respected band in the "Indy" Scene. A respected band has cultural power,
whether the band itself realizes it or not. The audience looks to the band
for clues as to what constitute the unwritten rules and boundaries of a
given culture or sub-culture. So by including songs like "Black Diamond"
and "Hitchin a Ride" in their set, along with its own excellent original
material and the other covers the band played by critically hip English
punk bands like Sham 69 ("Borstal Breakout") and obscure American New Wave
bands like the Vertabrats from Champaign, Ill, the band encouraged those
of us in the audience to see all of these songs as an interconnected unit.
It was as if the band was saying, "The value of our original songs is
indistiguishable from the value of these other songs we're playing. Maybe
they all suck, but if you like 'Color me Impressed,' why shouldn't you
also like 'Hitchin A Ride?' Fuck those old guys. Lets make our own canon.
" And in its own half joking, uncertain, insecure way, this allowed, and
maybe even encouraged us to entertain the notion that the pop music of our
childhood, our guilty pleasure, the music we heard on the radio in between
heavy doses of the Big Chill sound track, wasn't pure fluff, but music
which merited inclusion in our own personal canons, even if it did not
comport with the established codes of hipness. It was a subtle approach,
self- effacing where the core boomers were self-righteous. But it was
nevertheless one of the means by which the "indy rock" subculture
established a cultural space, at least partially autonomous of the
hegemonic boomer culture. And it was here, at least in part, that the work
of establishing a post-boomer culture could be undertaken.
Even more than the rest of the audience, the musicians who
witnessed incidents like the one at Joe's Star Lounge were profoundly
effected by them. Not only did them encourage them to rethink the boomer
canon, they pointed to a means by which musicians could participate in the
revision process, while simultaneously marking themselves as fellow
traveling cohorts of bands like the Replacements. This is undoubtedly why
so many bands began covering critically unappreciated songs of the 1970s
in the years followed. For after "Black Diamond," the practice of covering
such songs took on a new rhetorical significance. When bands like Soul
Asylum and Camper Van Beethoveen covered Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero,"or
Ringo Starr's "Photograph," they reiteratedat least implicitlythe same
questions the Replacements had asked. At the same time, they also asserted
their common membership in the "indy rock" scene.
And over the years, the practice of playing ironic covers has
become such an institutionalized way for a band to assert its
"alternativeness" that a self-consciously applied ironic cover aesthetic
has developed amongst musicians in the scene to separate the wheat from
the chafe. The specific contours of this ironic cover aesthetic are
difficult to articulate. Nevertheless, while the whole thing might have
begun as a drunken happy accident up in Minneapolis, the cover aesthetic
has developed a high level of sophistication over the last decade. Just
about every "underground" musician I know has a profound intuitive
awareness of its boundaries. I admit that this is probably not empirically
verifiable. But I have had enough conversations with enough different
musicians in enough different places across the United States to be
confident that such an aesthetic sensibility does exist as a fairly
unified entity nationwide.
Generally, discussions of the ironic cover aesthetic boil down to
a single binary opposition that Beavis and Butthead would certainly be
comfortable with: "cool" vs. "lame." In a band setting, the discussion
might go like this:
Band Member #1: Lets cover "Whiskey Rock n' Roller" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
That would be really cool.
Band Member #2: No way, that would be lame. Everybody always does
Skynyrd covers. That whole southern rock "Freebird" thing is played out.
It wouldn't be funny. People would think we really like that stuff.
Band Member #1: But I do like that stuff. "Whiskey Rock n' Roller" is a
great song and I've always liked it. It rocks. I think people would
really dig it.
Band Member #2: Maybe, but I don't think we can pull it off. It's too
close to what we do already. We're not the Butthole Surfers, you know.
They could cover any song and it would probably be cool. It just doesn't
feel right to me. We need something more obscure like "Hot Child in the
City" by Nick Gilder. "Whiskey Rock n' Roller" is too obvious. People will
think it's lame.
As the above example illustrates, not all "bad" songs of the 1970s
are created equal. Nor are all "underground" bands created equal. For most
bands, the risks are high. The wrong cover choice will be perceived by the
audience as lame, reinforcing the impression that the band is lame. But
certain bands (e.g., Sonic Youth) could probably cover any song, no matter
how lame or obvious it seems on the surface, and through pure will or
attitude transform it into something that is accepted as really cool (see
e.g., the Butthole Surfers' almost mimetic re-reading of Donovan's "Hurdy
Gurdy Man"). Nevertheless, the goal remains the same for all bands: you
want to be on the "inside" of the joke not the "outside," because a
successful cover legimates your claim to membership in the "alternative
rock" subculture.
In the decade since the "Black Diamond" incident, the gradual
embrace of the ironic cover aesthetic by musicians and fans in the "indy"
scene has reconfigured the cultural power relations of rock and roll
discourse. Increasingly, a new set of post-boomer cultural standards and
sensibilities have emerged, and the keepers of the core boomer canon have
either had to respond to them or ignore them at their peril. While it is
not that difficult to learn the parameters of coolness implicit within the
cover aesthetic and its cognates, leaping into this fray is not for the
faint at heart. The poor boomer critic who foolishly believes that she can
confront the post-boomer culture with her pre-ironic analytical framework
is ripe for ridicule and embarrassment. For the practice of preemptive
irony transmutes established critical categories: up is down, bad is good,
stupid is smart. Consequently, the critic is all but required to retool
her critical categories to successfully evaluate the ironic cover and its
relations, because failure would mean having to admit that one's criticism
is no longer culturally relevant. Then the critic would be forced to
abdicate her most powerful role, that of the taste maker who discovers the
newest and most cutting edge music. Because like all practitioners within
the popular culture apparatus, critics risk extinction if they don't keep
up with the times.
In the face of these realities, more and more Boomer critics have
re-tooled. They've assimilated the aesthetic categories wrought by
preemptive irony, and in the process, hastened the collapse of the core
baby boomer cultural hegemony. In truth, though, "erosion" may be a better
term than "collapse," for the process has been more like termites eating
away at the frame of a house than a bulldozer leveling it. The house of
1960s rock isn't razed, it just finally caves in one day and lo and
behold, 1970s album rock is back in the hipster fold, after years of
languishing on the margins of the serious rock critic discourse. This
process is no more evident than in the critical establishment's
unqualified embrace of the Seattle "grunge" sound of bands like
Soundgradren and Pearl Jam as a form of "alternative rock," somehow
aesthetically distinguishable from the critically disfavored heavy
metal/hard rock of the 1970s.
Apparently, it is their enthusiastic yet self- conscious and ironically
detatched posture towards hard rock that has allowed the Seattle grunge
musicians to unabashedly borrow from 1970s rock, recycle its musical
content and yet make fun of the whole process in such a way that the end
result comes off as an act of aesthetic sophistication comporting with
canonized definitions of musical hipness. Through some fantastic process,
the magical transmogrifying machine of preemptive irony has taken the
supposed cheese of the 1970s, seasoned it with a little critically
favored, earnest and authentic punk rock, and turned it into the pure
"alternative" gold of the 1990s.
One man's trash is another man's treasure, I suppose. And so as
we at the front of the tailbust generation settle into our thirties, get
fat, grey, and some among us lose our hair, preemptive irony has somehow
allowed us to make a strange peace with the whole notion of nostalgia for
our cultural roots. Over the decade since the "Black Diamond" experience,
our past has been gradually reinscribed into the present in a form that
doesn't cause us too much discomfort. In our case, we embrace it gingerly
with a sort of self-effacing, satirical pride. Sure, the 1970s weren't the
glory years. We were late to that big party our elders threw in the decade
before. Nothing really "important" happened when we were growing up. It
was all old hat by then, at least for all the elite college kids who'd
already outgrown pot, acid, and the counter-culture. Now it was the
philistine masses turn to enjoy it. But we kids still had to get through
it and deal with the dislocations wrought by the counter-cultural
experiments of our philistine parents.
Now we're all here. Grown up. But everyone still has to be from
someplace. Some people get to be from supposedly cool places like San
Francisco or New York. And some people, like me, did time in places like
the Cleveland area, which, Pere Ubu to the contrary, has never been viewed
as a very cool place. But over time, with some work, you make your peace
with your past. Whether it's Cleveland, the 1970s, or Cleveland in the
1970s, one way or another, you find an approach that works. Maybe you do
poke a little fun at it now and again. But when you go back to visit and
you see those ugly decaying steelmills in the flats or you think about
those ugly elephant bell-bottoms of the 1970s, you find beauty in them and
you take a strange pride in having done your time there. Maybe you don't
really want to have to live there full time. San Francisco and New York
are actually pretty cool. But some smart-ass cultural snob from the coast
better not make fun of Cleveland, because if they do, you won't hesitate
to tell them to fuck-off. What the hell do they know? They weren't there
living it the way you did. So they'll never know the beauty of being
sixteen in Cleveland or Spokane or Des Moines or Milwaukee or somewhere
out in New Jersey, and driving down some back road late at night with some
friends, Bad Company or Zepplin or the Eagles on the car radio, maybe
drinking a few beers and feeling pretty damn good indeed. Maybe those
snobs have got their own memories. But this one's your's. Perhaps you are
a little embarrassed about it now. But it still feels good to think about
it sometimes, even if it is with some humor. Whatever works.
And then one day, you hear a Bay City Rollers song on the
alternative station in between the Cult and Soundgarden and you don't even
think about it anymore. You're not embarrassed or outraged. It's not even
really that novel. It just takes you back and it's ok. It's kind of
liberating in a way. You push all of the air out of your lungs, take a big
deep breathe, and let it all flow into you without a lick of shame. The
hard, ambiguous, insecure edge of irony has vanished. And it's ok, because
you don't need it anymore. It's work is done. You're basking in the
comforting warmth of reverent nostalgia now, your own reverent nostalgia.
Not the heavy, self-serious nostalgia of those 1960s baby boomers, people
who really believed that they were going to "change the world," and that
their experience was somehow unique in the annals of history, not just one
more stop in a never ending process of cultural creation, disposal and
reclamation. No, this nostalgia is pretty free of those sorts of
pretenses. It's more like "I remember this fondly. I'm not embarrassed to
say it. No really, I'm not embarrassed. And that's ok. Isn't it?"
Jake London
Jake London
