A friend of mine mentioned the other day that he had seen a TV ad featuring music and lyrics from The Violent Femmes. Upon hearing the news, my heart instantly heart fell a little, much in the same way it fell not that long ago when I heard The Pogues “If I Should Fall From The Grace Of God” prominently playing during a car commercial.
It’s always painful when something you once considered left-of-the-dial and rabble-rousing and shocking to the senses suddenly becomes lightweight, inconsequential fodder for so-called soccer moms driving kids to soccer practice and the ice cream shop afterward. There’s something knife-in-the-belly painful about when the weapons in your own personal anti-establishment gun rack suddenly get transformed into dull tools used in the name of commerce. It happens all the time (Zeppelin, Clapton, Elvis, etc.), but it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier to swallow as the years go by.
I remember vividly the glee I secretly felt from witnessing the horrified look on my mother’s face all those years ago when, while home from college, I popped in a Femmes’ cassette and “Blister In The Sun” proceeded to play in all its awkward, clumsy glory. If I recall correctly, she said, “What the hell are you listening to?” and seconds later demanded I turn it off. I didn’t protest much. I was respectful of her space. It was her house, and I understood that this was my music and not hers. And while I thought she might have been more open-minded, I can’t say I was too surprised of her reaction when such lyrics as “Why can’t I get just one f*ck?/Guess it’s got something to do with luck” came rolling out the speakers. This wasn’t exactly Simon & Garfunkel, after all.
Hell, I remember the look on my friend Susan’s face the day she climbed the steps to my college apartment and heard Shane MacGowan drunkenly garbling “Let them go, boys/Let them go, boys/Let them go down in the mud/Where the rivers all run dry” over whiskey-fueled, punk-tinged Irish whistles, drums, and guitars. If I recall correctly, her words were very similar to mom’s: “What the hell is that?” And this was coming from someone who had dabbled in The Dead Milkman, Circle Jerks, and the like. In other words, she didn’t exactly have virgin ears where hearing jolting, strange noises was concerned.
I accepted long ago that to find the types of music I seemed to gravitate to and that appealed to me most, I was going to have to search it out. Sometimes, that search was a long and difficult one. Sometimes, that search took me to unconventional places where the scenery wasn’t always so pretty and the people not always so nice. But the search, more often than not, was worth it. That’s why I think it’s so difficult when success comes beating at the door for bands I once adored mostly in semi-obscurity and now I have to share them with far more sets of ears that belong to people I don’t necessarily share a whole lot with otherwise.
This occurrence has happened for me over and over. One day, Black Flag was only for the hardest of hard. The next day, everybody and his sister was sporting black bars on their arms. One day REM is playing The Drumstrick; the next year they’re playing The Civic Auditorium. One day The Ramones are the baddest-ass punkers in the U.S. The next day eight-year-olds are learning “Blitzkrieg Bop” from their guitar instructors.
The struggle for me has always been weighing “There’s a reason I liked this song or band to begin with” against “should that change because a lot more people like them too now?” In other words, am I true fan who says he likes a band for its music or am I just a poser who wants to be seen as having off-the-beaten-path tastes and edgy cool and doesn’t want to be part of the collective? Do I really respect the bands on an artistic level, even if they decide to make a buck from their art?
Part of me believes that if you write lyrics like “It’s a beach party Vietnam, surfing with the Viet Cong/cooking hot dogs with napalm, a beach party Vietnam,” you’re not supposed to be commercial. Part of me believes “who am I to dictate what others should like and what is popular?”
As of today, I choose to stick to my guns and look down my long, superior nose at The Violent Femmes and The Pogues and turn my elitist back. I’m guessing my smugness will last right up until that day when I somehow create something that’s accepted on a commercial level and the offers start rolling in.
At least I recognize the hypocrite in myself.
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