Aging at the Grammy's

Like I revealed in my 'Defense of Miley Cyrus' post and 'In Something with Lana Del Rey,' I am a fan of pop music, or at least a detached observer, looking in with fascination, though admittedly the fascination part might be wearing off. I was in my early 40's when I first started listening to top 40 pop music, and was at a time in my life when I really felt I was going through a personal reawakening after feeling emotionally dead for my mid-thirties. I started listening to the lyrics and I couldn't deny that their ultraromanticism spoke to that little spark reawakening in me, and I related to the life and death sentiments the singers were trying to express nor did it hurt that Adele's great song "Someone Like You" was a hit. Most of the songs were about love but more importantly a reason to be alive that had nothing to do with real estate, children, higher education, national politics, or anything that had come to define my life almost unwittingly. I used to feel love in a life and death way too just like the singers were, and I couldn't help but feel they were singing my song. I even liked the kind of space age sound of the music, and how the songs were becoming mash ups incorporating all eras, and I knew that if I listened to this music all the time I'd grow as an aesthete unlike my coworkers who mostly saw the top 40 as atrocious. I'm a pizza driver and I started listenin' to Movin' 92.5 in my car, and I chose this station out of a possible two or three, because it really tapped into the culture of the music more than the others that seemed to be missing the fun. The 92.5 DJ's would make little pop culture references and jokes between the songs, but in a familiar way so that when they first mentioned Lorde or Lana Del Rey it almost felt like they were talking about a new kid in school, and I loved it. I started feeling closer to the singers I was listening to because they familiarized them like Greek Gods and Goddesses struggling on some big stage with all the foibles and charms of us mortals, and the crazy names of the new stars helped (Bruno Mars, Lady GaGa, Rhianna etc.), and I started having my favorites. I'm not sure if I hit a good mix or not because I came in right when autotune was going out even though one of my first favorites was "5 o'clock in the Morning" a duet by T-Pain and Lily Allen, but he's not on anymore. Eminem is an old man on Movin' and though he's had a couple of great duets with Bruno Mars and Rhianna, I wonder how many more chances he'll get at the big time, and Movin' is the big time!

I'm not sure what this says about art in our culture, but there's almost a "Logan's Run" like feel to the pop music industry, and if you're 40 you're out. (I know, they terminated you when you were 30 in "Logan's Run" but that was 1976 and this is a new generation.) Ironically, I started listening to Movin' because I didn't want to think of what it meant to be 40 and went into a day dream of a time when you felt so immortal something like a bad date was life and death. I wanted to feel new again, but if I was listening to Dylan, Springsteen, or Eminem, I wouldn't have had the same feeling of being contemporary, and in a pop culture whirlpool the way Movin' made me feel, because it was really about more than the music. It was the entire carefree attitude of the DJ's spearheaded by Brook and Jubal, a kind of comfy guy/girl comedy team, who make jokes about partying in Vegas, or doing a happy hour in Bellevue, all in the same breath. They posit themselves as the cool observers of the pop culture scene that they paint as existing in a make believe nimbus, and you can almost imagine them sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a herd of geeks and nerds, and cluing them into whose cool or not, while the real stars moved outside of their circle, but would come over and shake their hands once in a while, or give them a smile. The other stations were missing the magic of this world where mostly women stars were taking over Mt. Olympus like amazons.

I haven't listened to the mix much lately because a lot of the artists that I came to really enjoy on the Stockholm Syndrome like loop that I think simulates an album are gone, or have had their first big rush of Movin' fame. They have been voted prom king or queen one too many times, and have to give up their tierra or crown, as the case may be, and I'm just not that into the new crop. There is no Rhianna, Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey, Macklemore and Lewis, or Lorde, and I really belive all of those singers/performers are great, but that can't be said of everything they play on Movin'. Brook and Jubal's goal is to find enough good songs in the loop that you really look forward to so they can keep you going for hours like a good crush but if you only like one it is going to be hard to submit to the half-hour between hearing it and that's where I'm at. Don't worry, I like "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift, but it's just not the same as when I heard her burst onto the scene with "Trouble" a few years ago seguing from Country to Pop. Or maybe I'm just growing older and the feelings Movin' were inspiring in me have come and gone like a season in my life that I'm sad to say goodbye to but I'm happy I lived.

I watched the Grammy's a couple of years ago... I meant to write nights but it felt like years! I had a strange disconnect with the music that I wasn't expecting, thinking I'd be right in the groove, but I wasn't. Sure, I knew the songs, the artists, what to expect, but I didn't get the feeling and felt like Sir Paul McCartney dancing all alone to ELO, while he wanted some of his fellow musicians to join him. I had a really weird feeling watching the video to Pharrel Williams's "Happy" a song that was the beginning of the end of Movin' for me, not that I hate it so much but it's a Marvin Gaye rip-off that's kind of empty like Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy," a song that made me want to kill as a teenager. The image that really got me was of Williams in a gospel church singing "Happy," and maybe it was just a bad image from a bad video but for a moment I really felt like I didn't have a clue what the song meant, or what Country I was living in, an almost eerie silent feeling that came and went as quickly as a slit to the throat. Whatever context I was putting the music into had evaporated almost instantly, and though I'd already left the loop, I was still in it, but like a shirt that had been left in the cycle too long, and was ready to be dried. I wasn't in the washing machine of pop culture anymore, the mash up, mix up, of adolescent feelings, and it was a strangely nerve wracking sensation. No, it's not easy growing older, even when you're going through a third or fourth adolescence in your Forties.