Grew Completely Indifferent To It
Thanks again to Susie A. for her evocative mediation on the art that grows on you. I feel some kind of Chia Pet joke coming on, but I shan’t succumb.
But Susie’s argument did get me thinking, really just as soon as I read it, of the counter-argument: that equally there are songs (just to limit it to the realm of music), and albums, that I fall for hard when I first hear them … and that first impression proves wrong, but wrong in the opposite direction from what Susie’s articulated so nicely.
Ironically, the evidence for this kind of misperception is a bit harder to come by—because, often, those CDs end up being given away or sold at a huge loss. If an album has lost its (cheap, superficial) charm, one tends not to hang onto it.
So what am I talking about? What are some examples, Kevin? Well, I’m very eager to hear about yours, first, so please do vising the Comments section.
Well OK, here’s one, though I don’t know who might remember it: the Jesus Jones’ album, Doubt (1991). If it’s remembered, it’s probably for the pretty-dang-infectious single, “Right Here, Right Now” (Billboard #2 in the US). I can still hear that song with a good deal of glee, if I hear it on the radio (see, most recently, the posts of Sept. 25 & 26); but I sold the CD back to my record store years and years ago, and no longer have proprietary access to it.
If there’s a pattern to the albums which burn bright in my imagination for a week or a month, then burn out, become black holes, I think it has something to do with the kind of infectious bright sound and groove that “Right Here, Right Now” has in spades. In the case of the Jesus Jones song, there’s both a beating heart and a thoughtful head; the song speaks to the optimism everywhere in the West following the fall of the Berlin Wall (see U2, Achtung Baby). But that’s not why I immediately liked it: it’s because it snuck right into my central nervous system. And like any CNS stimulant, one habituates, the effects become attenuated: you’ve either got to up the dosage or go cold turkey.
There’s another category of record that palls rather than improving with age, I think, but it has more to do with the music’s use value than any inherent aesthetic flaws. I’m thinking here of the record one jumps on—oh all right, let’s drop the impersonal fiction, the record that I jump on—because I think I might be there first. It’s like getting in on the ground floor, buying on the first day of an Initial Public Offering: staking your claim on The Album No One’s Heard Of, so that when Everyone’s Heard of it, you’ll be recognized as a some kind of genius, an uncompensated A&R man.
The example of this particular brand of bad faith that comes to mind for me is the 1999 Mocean Worker (a.k.a. Adam Dorn) album, Mixed Emotional Features. It’s fine; I haven’t listened to it in, oh, ten years. But I had it before you’d ever heard of it.
And y’all? Want to crawl into the confessional and tell us about that awful album you initially thought was pretty swell? You can do so in the room below, marked “Comments.”
Not to change the subject too radically before it’s even begun, but in my case this applies more often to literature– particularly new novels– than it does to music. I’ve had enthusiasms in the past for pieces of new writing (books by, say, Jeanette Winterson and Sadie Smith) that over time lose their allure, often because I teach them, and in so doing discover that there’s less substance there than may intially appear.
I will admit to a hideous summer when I loved Whipped Cream & Other Delights with an unreasoning passion. What can I say? We were staying in a farmhouse, with a limited collection of records, and my sisters kept wanting to play the damned My Fair Lady movie soundtrack. Playing that Herb Alpert album was my only escape from the “luvverly”: no wonder I loved it.
This more a meditation than an example, but:
I had remembered you writing about being “hit hard” rather than “falling hard,” and so began to think about records that actually hit hard sound-wise. In middle school, anything past a certain level of agression was appealing just about right away, although much of it I found to be shallow in the long run. What I stuck with made me reevaluate things, led to a new paradigm, etc. Again, what would at first seem like the archetypal great math rock or emo/screamo (I use this term without derision) song might turn out to feel more stereotypical.
An infectious sound or groove can have the same temporary pull, but I guess I’m talking about some sort of genre-ism: not so much as exclusive of other music styles, but as a general excitement about something you’ve decided you like. It’s like a Superbad excitement that only gets you through other Apatow-style movies for so long.
It probably boils down to a simpler, “Yeah, that’s cool, but what else do you got?” kind of thing.
“’Yeah, that’s cool, but what else do you got?’ kind of thing.” Wow: I do love that.
Though perhaps, in time, it will pall….