"Don't wanna hear about it
Every single one's got a story to tell
Everyone knows about it
From the Queen of England to the hounds of hell..."
"Seven Nation Army", The White Stripes
One of the beautiful things about having a creative crisis is that you’re under no personal obligation to have any sort of direction at all. Can be kinda scary, but by and large it could prove liberating. Take today for instance. No real goal. No thesis in mind. Just a few stray thoughts in between the yawns. Only 9 pm. Getting old.
So much of what I read in the blogging world is an attempt at non-fictional narrative. The political or the personal. One or the other. Making sense of what goes on around us, either from a near or distant perspective, and laying it out for others to consume. For some, it’s marking 9-11 through the current instability in Iraq. For others, it’s this morning’s alarm clock through tonight’s teeth-brushing.
In both cases, while the renditions are necessarily subjective (we in the blogging world are not bound by the constraints of non-bias unlike Big Media), they are generally pretending to be more or less true. “This is my take on things,” can summarize just about every entry in the everyday blog entry. Makes sense, really. Blogging can and probably always will be the quickest and most efficient means most of us will have to be able to quickly express and publish our viewpoints and any and everything. There’s no real scale of relative worth. Some would claim a story about Saudi involvement in al-Qaeda outweighs who Timmy Patterson hung out with at the 7-11 eleven last night, but try telling that to the 34 readers of the LiveJournal that published Mr. Patterson’s exploits who don't know al-Qaeda from Al Bundy.
What I write here always toes the line between fact and fiction. While the specifics are quite often altered (either consciously or unconsciously), if I’m making a point, then the point will always be something I really mean. When I write satire (either about the Video Music Awards, “The Hulk”, or a trip on the 1-9 in Manhattan), the counter-point to the ironic thesis is likewise heartfelt. I’m generally not interested in the details so much as the message. Specific things happened to engender an overall meaning; the whole is greater than the parts that form it. It doesn’t matter what specific chain of events caused the Boof Phenomenon to be explored for a week; what’s important is exploring why Boofs happen and how that can perhaps unite readers from disparate backgrounds and geographies. Anytime I bring a personal anecdote into the public realm, it’s only interesting if it can somehow illuminate a greater or more universal truth. A story about a sno-cone to me is dull if it’s only about the sno-cone.
I need a Metaphorical Sno-Cone, man.
I need a Sno-Co that’s gonna make people go, “Yea, I’m feelin’ this Sno-Cone. I’m feeling it metaphorically drizzle from that stupid 1-ounce excuse for a paper cup that we were supposed to pour the darn things in before that got all over the furniture and our nice white shorts that Mom just bought at Kmart.”
That’s what I’m talking about.
You watch something like the Video Music Awards, and yes, it’s easy to mock the pomposity. Then again, it’s equally easy to mock the pomposity at your typical Homecoming Dance. In most cases, the home you’re coming from is like 2.4 miles away from the school. About 18 people in 1865 decided it was really important to declare their offspring to be “really hip” and we’ve been socially paying for it ever since. We enjoy movies like “Heathers” because, as dark a comedy as it is, we identify with the protagonists/antagonists so well. High school is one long Homecoming Dance, and most of us are too damn scared to tell the Homecoming Emperor that he ain’t got no letter jacket on.
Thing is, I love the VMAs. Well, the idea of them. Love “Heathers”. Love every aspect of pop culture, which should come as absolutely no shock to any of you. Yes, it’s riddled with trash, garbage, utter wastes of time. Yes, it’s filled with certain individuals who you’re rather see working a Dairy Queen than earning millions by looking pretty. Yea, well, everyone’s got that one cousin that they wish the same thing on, so really, it’s all null and void from that perspective.
Pop culture is worth wading through because, when it’s good, when it’s really on, it’s as good as any of us can ever hope for. Pop culture makes genius seem accessible, and that’s it’s greatest asset. People can listen to something like Mozart, or read something like “Ulysses”, and just sink into a creative abyss. The creative forces at work are so beyond the reach of us mere mortals that the very attempt seems futile. I’m not here to argue that pop culture can never reach that ceiling, but the point is that it doesn’t have to be truly successful.
IN short, I’m never as impressed by moments that makes me think, “I never would have thought of that” as much as moments that make me wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
And that’s what pop culture at it’s finest does for me. It makes me simultaneously overjoyed to have experienced it and unnerved and almost angry that I didn’t think of it first. You know those moments, when you hear an incredible chord change, or hear a great lyric, or listen to a great line of dialogue, or see a breathtaking visual image. You marvel not so much at how new the thing is, but rather, how familiar it is. That being said, it’s just slightly different from everything else before it. Pop culture, at its essence, delivers the same goods over and over again, but finds a way to make them seem like consistent revelations.
There’s a reason, after all, why The Beatles are more popular than, say, Frank Zappa. Zappa was a musician’s musician, tweaking song-structures in ways that made musicologists go, “Ooooh” and the rest of us go, “Um, can you turn down that racket? Thanks. We’re trying to eat here.” The Beatles were simultaneously accessible, identifiable, and utterly original. They didn’t invent the guitar. They didn’t invent harmony. But they did use those two elements, combined with their natural songwriting abilities, to fashion something completely groundbreaking. Thousands of bands have been started by someone saying, “Hell, I can write something as good as ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.” Usually they can’t, but the inspiration is what is important here, not the end result. My inability to write a song as good as “I am the Walrus” doesn’t diminish my love for that band. If anything, it increases it.
To think about all of this another way: consider how many songs there are about love. There are only an infinite amount of chords, and really, only so many words to evoke the emotion (very few love songs use the word “lugubrious”). And yet, people keep churning out love song after love song. I mean, a few millennia after the lute was invented, we can still get a song like Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”. There were a few songs about love written in between, I imagine, and yet that came out of nowhere and still knocked people on their collective ass. To take what seems trite and breathe new life into again: that’s what pop culture can do. It doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but it provides us with consistently new and exciting ways to roll around. And that probably could have been expressed more eloquently, but I'm going on instinct at this point, and need to keep going.
The other great thing about pop culture (among 176 I could but won’t talk about) lies in people’s individual relationship to it. The idea of “Star Trek” versus “Star Wars” has never terribly appealed to me. For one, that’s really frickin’ geeky. Secondly, the very nature of pop culture allows both groups to simultaneously exist without the need for there being a “superior” element. Again, the Homecoming metaphor: there’s no real “cool” crowd running the show here. I love “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. But you sure don’t have to. I wish more people would buy Matthew Sweet's “In Reverse”, but his record sales don’t affect my utter enjoyment of the record.
In fact, for me, the more obscure my object of pop culture affection is, the greater the bond I have to it. Even in a popular element, I try to find one bit of dialogue, one chord change, one snare drum hit, that’s “mine”. Of course it doesn’t belong to me, but it’s what consistently draws me back into that world. In the car the other day, I threw on the soundtrack to the movie “Singles”, and got energized by three chords in the middle of Mother Love Bone’s “Chlöe Dancer/Crown of Thorns”. Hadn’t heard the song in maybe three years. But in the measures leading up to the chords, my body tensed, instinctively knowing it was coming. The 36 months melted away. Everything in me merged with those three chords.
I can’t play music. Can’t really sing an on-key note. Can’t act. Can’t direct a film. Doesn’t matter. These elements all tell stories at their hearts, and storytelling is something I hold near and dear to my heart. Gives it pumping, both physiologically, metaphorically, spiritually, whatever adverb you wanna throw in there. It’s why I did theatre for so many years. It’s why I write now. I’m unimportant, but the story, the story is extremely important.
So, in the following days/weeks/months, I’m going to try and see where blogging and storytelling meet. Find new intersections, hopefully. Ones that will seem really obvious to others if and when I find them. And if I don’t, well, I still will keep looking. And I have shelves of books, music, and movies to keep me going in the meantime.