I walked in to work and couple of weeks ago and the B-52ās āPrivate Idahoā was playing over the speakers. This was new.
Iāve been working at the Big Box for 10 years now and the music there never stops. Something is always playing, and after all these years itās bound to be something Iāve heard before, many times over, from one of the handful of music-service channels the store offered.
Thereās the contemporary(-ish) pop channel, the Country channel, the ā70s channel, the oddly DeBarge-heavy smooth R&B channel, and the Latin channel ā which is just the pop channel with blocks of Spanish-language pop mixed in. āPrivate Idahoā was not in rotation on any of those. That makes sense given the retail musical mandate of playing familiar, comfortable, unobtrusive recordings as background noise for customers. A jarringly oddball dance track that didnāt even crack the Top 40 when it came out 43 years ago doesnāt seem to fit that plan.
But then the B-52ās were followed by the Talking Heads, and then Echo and the Bunnymen, and then Marshall Crenshaw and then āBirdhouse in Your Soul.ā
It seems we have a new channel. Itās an ā80s āalternativeā channel that seems like it was put together by Matt Pinfield from MTVās late great 120 Minutes show.
Itās pretty fantastic, and it doesnāt seem to be a static six-hour loop like the previous channels. Iāve heard songs from the first five REM albums, at least half of London Calling, a half-dozen Replacements songs, and album cuts and B-sides from Elvis Costello. Iāve heard Siouxsie, the Cure, the Smiths, the Smithereens, the Alarm, Miracle Legion, XTC, X, Yaz, the P-Furs, pre-Diesel & Dust Midnight Oil, pre-Kick INXS, Bono-with-a-mullet-era U2, Julian Cope, Aztec Camera, Sinead OāConnor, Kate Bush, the Hoodoo Gurus, the Pet Shop Boys and the Buzzcocks (and not just that one song from Shrek). The synth-pop side of ā80s ācollege musicā is on there too, with plenty of Erasure and New Order and Dead or Alive and Howard Jones.
My initial response to this new channel was sheer delight. I was so happy that they were now playing such cool music where I work.
And then I also came to realize what this actually means.
It means that somewhere at Big Box HQ some marketing consultant has a PowerPoint presentation offering consumer profiles on a series of median customers. For the Zip Code or census block of our location, this consultant has determined, the median customer is a white, male, 50-something homeowner.Ā And probably a white, male, 50-something homeowner who fondly recalls gaming the Columbia Records Club system back in the day to get Standing on a Beach and Blood & Chocolate and the melting-face Peter Gabriel album and the Pretty in Pink soundtrack on vinyl for a penny.
In other words, it means that the music I think of as cool is, now, officially, no longer cool. It has become so wholly and officially un-cool that it can now be played as harmless background noise in a Big Box store in the white western suburbs of Philadelphia.
Thatās mainly because this music, like me, is old.*
That Chinatown line about sex workers, ugly buildings, and politicians is true for Clash albums too. If they stick around long enough, they become respectable. So respectable that theyāre considered safe and tame, no matter how strange it is to hear Joe Strummer in the background as you help some nice customer decide between daylight and soft white LED bulbs.
How did this music get so old? Thatās just math. I got old and the music got old with me.
Consider āJust Like Heaven,ā which came out when I was 19 years old. That song is now 36 years old. What songs were big hits 36 years before I was 19? Nat King Coleās āToo Youngā and Rosemary Clooneyās āCome on-a My Houseā and Patti Pageās āTennessee Waltz.ā If Iād had to listen to that stuff at work when I was 19, Iād have thought it was totally uncool, so I can only imagine what the 19-year-olds on my night crew are thinking now hearing the Cure.**
On the other hand, one could argue that back when I was still a teenager, I ought to have heard āTennessee Waltzā*** because itās a classic American song that everyone should know. Iād bet it was on that list of āessential songsā that Johnny Cash wrote up for his daughter. But words like those ā like āclassicā or āessentialā or āstandardā ā come with too much baggage, too many connotations of some check-list approach to cultural literacy that turns everything it touches into test-prep for some standardized AP exam.
I suppose we could convene a blue-ribbon panel of musicians, songwriters, critics, and scholars to compile a canonical list of the popular songs that every educated person ought to be familiar with as some kind of standard of cultural literacy, and Iād guess that āTennessee Waltzā would belong on such a list. But thatās not what Iām getting at here because, also, ugh, that sounds awful.
I loved āJust Like Heavenā 36 years ago, in part, because I was 19 years old, and I like it now in part because I like remembering what it felt like to be 19, spinning on that dizzy edge and dancing with those Goth girls I was more than a little scared of.
But I also think it was a great song then and that itās still a great song now, even if youāre 19 now and it was already old by the time your parents were 19.
Itās disconcerting to realize that the stuff you once were sure was edgy, rebellious, youthful, and cool has been worn down by time and institutionalized and absorbed to the point where itās no longer any of those things. You get older and your favorite music gets older and you have to give up the illusion that its coolness might somehow make you vicariously cool, but that was always an illusion and a trap anyway.
So go with it. Lose your cool. Listen to what you like and share it with others because you like it and maybe theyāll like it too.
* And itās probably partly because this ācollege radio favorites from the ā80sā format is overwhelmingly white. What later became called āalternativeā was way whiter than Top 40 pop. Try to define āalternativeā in strictly musical terms without any reference to that whiteness and youāll quickly run into a Prince problem. (As in: Why doesnāt that definition include lots of Prince? It seems like it should, but it doesnāt. Hmmm.) This seems especially true of the new channel at work, which hasnāt yet included any Living Color or Tracy Chapman or Grace Jones or any of the other handful of Black artists who made their way onto those old ā80s ācollege radioā charts. The lineup for this channel is whiter than Creation Festival.
** This could change thanks to the Goo-goo-muck Effect and the recent use of this creepy-pretty version of āJust Like Heavenā in an episode of The Last of Us. (Is it weird that I now want to hear a top-notch bell choir tackle that song?)
*** As opposed to The Tennessee Waltz, which is, again, a song that none of us has ever heard. Weāve heard Patti Pageās song about the Tennessee Waltz but, like the Monster Mash, weāve never heard the song within the song.
To be fair to 1951, popular music back then wasnāt all Patti Page and Nat Cole and Perry Como and Dinah Shore. That same year also gave us āRocket 88ā and āSixty Minute Manā and āBump Miss Susieā and āIt Aināt Meā as R&B and early rockabilly acts were straining to invent rock and roll. And if some old person had introduced 19-year-old me to those songs back in 1987, well, that wouldāve been pretty cool.