Incomplete, non-linear ramblings on melody and the concept of “fake love”
I have been thoroughly entertained recently by Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, a set of pop-culture related essays by Chuck Klosterman. Especially interesting is the first essay, “This is Emo,” in which the writer rails against the notion of “fake love” that we’ve absorbed from too many John Cusack movies and Coldplay CDs.
Fake love. The cynic in me smiles at this term that I’ll probably continue to toss around for the next several months in conversation. It summarizes the Hollywood, fantastical pap that is voluntarily ingested and that warps our minds into thinking of idealized, perfect love as an entitlement. Klosterman is justifiably miffed when a girl he’s dating turns down a weekend with him at the Waldorf-Astoria to go to a Coldplay show. (I can empathize to a lesser degree: a couple months ago, a girl turned down a second date with me to watch the penultimate episode of Friends.) He takes much of his frustration out on Coldplay because they’re a “perfect illustration” of why almost everyone he knows “is either overtly or covertly unhappy.” He goes on: “Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real.” This is hardly a revelation—fairytale romance stories and songs shape our unrealistic expectations of love—but when Klosterman beats up on Coldplay and their ilk, you can’t help but feel that his manifesto is a call to arms. I agree that most people I know are not satisfied with their romantic lives, and slickly packaged, bite-sized sentimentality provides a convenient punching bag. For more evidence, there’s just enough truth to Klosterman’s claims that “When Harry Met Sally cemented the plausibility of that notion [that two platonic acquaintances are refusing to admit that they’re deeply in love with each other],…it gave a lot of desperate people hope.”
Is our own possibility of fake love just another carrot dangled at the end of media culture’s stick? I’m not ready to go so far as to say that real relationships can never be as satisfying as those that we watch or read or listen to, but maybe we have set the bar too high for what we’re looking for in romance. And the mass media are not uniquely culpable; societal trends and the overwhelming array of choices we face in our lifestyles contribute to this idealization. Again, though—it’s more convenient to blame John Cusack when your object of courtship has too lofty aspirations than it is to blame generational mores.
Another problem here is that we choose to spend money on this hollow, digitized sentiment. I say this with as much ambivalence as anyone—Coldplay is one of the best bands to surface in recent years and John Cusack is one of my favorite actors. Thinking about why Coldplay is so successful and appealing goes well beyond their lyrics, and I’d be a very poor aspiring musicologist if I didn’t discuss the other elements of their music. (Klosterman is dead right, however, in referencing the hokey lyrics of “Yellow,” a song that I still think is one of the band’s weakest.) What Coldplay does extremely well is write melodies. Melodies that you can sing (“The Scientist”), melodies that drip with emotion (“Trouble”), melodies that stick with you relentlessly (“Everything’s Not Lost”). Add some contrasting harmonies, repeated eighth-note and syncopated rhythms for a sense of urgency, and passionate lyrics (“Clocks” possesses all three features), and you have an internationally successful rock band. It’s a working formula, and damn if it doesn’t make for some attractive sounds. “It does not matter that Coldplay…sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead),” writes Klosterman. “What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as the Ford fucking Motor Company manufactures Mustangs.” As big of a fan as I am of the aforementioned bands, I still feel a bit sheepish sometimes about being seduced by their sensitive lonelyman charms. Radiohead at least expanded the paradigm, in part by becoming less direct in their sentiment in each subsequent album after Pablo Honey. Travis, however reversed the trend; they started out with Britpop sing-along exuberance (Good Feeling) before moving into weepy pining music for pathetic lonely straight guys (The Man Who, The Invisible Band). Coldplay caught my attention with “Politik” and “Clocks,” but kept me interested on the strength of A Rush of Blood to the Head, an album that swims from beginning to end in rich melodies.
And so it came that on the same day I bought Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs at the Virgin Megastore—yeah, I feel pangs of guilt for shopping there, but their corporation used low prices like roofies in my drink to take advantage of me—I bought the new Keane CD, Hopes and Fears. For those unfamiliar, Keane is the latest in the lineage of melodic affect-laden bands I listed above. They’re a guitarless trio—piano, bass, and drums, like a stripped-down Coldplay—with lyrical melodies, important-sounding harmonies, and the type of non-specific, melodramatic lyrics anyone can paste into their instant-messenger profile. (Sample from “Can’t Stop Now”: But I can’t stop now/ I’ve got troubles of my own/ Because I’m short on time/ I’m lonely and I’m too tired to talk.) While it’s impossible to put aside the influences of Coldplay and Travis when you listen, it’s still an enjoyable record. Anguished melody is a powerful and lasting element of interesting music; this is what makes Schubert forever relevant. But who knows? Our collective taste in popular music is fickle, and maybe ten years from now the Coldplay sound will be mocked on VH1’s I Love the’00s and this Keane album will be a blemish on my CD collection like a Hall & Oates LP.
It’s easy for Klosterman to criticize Coldplay for being derivative and insincere to mask his own irrational personal reasons for disliking them, just as it’s easy for me to loathe Friends for c-blocking me. (Although even before my run-in, I thought Friends was woefully unfunny and the sitcom genre itself is stale and outmoded. Only the decidedly unconventional and appallingly funny Curb Your Enthusiasm is the exception that proves the rule.) Similarly, it’s easy for rock critics to pick on the Strokes: they, too, are derivative, over-hyped as rock saviors, and cocky. (The same terms could have been applied to Oasis eight years ago, but Oasis genuinely sucked.) But the Coldplay family and Strokes axis still appeal to me for reasons I can’t fully articulate. Yeah, I’ve already discussed how Melody (with a capital M) matters, but that’s not the full story. Ultimately, I believe that so much of our taste in music is tied to our personality that it’s hard not to like certain music even when our intellectual side thinks we should know better. For this reason, I’ll probably still play my Travis and Coldplay CDs ten or twenty years from now and I’ll probably still be attracted to contemporary equivalents. Sure, pop fads change, but melodic music tends to have more staying power than less lyrical stuff. (I’m sure someone can come up with a better example, but compare early ‘90s Pearl Jam to Alice in Chains: the former is still good for a drunken sing-along while the latter sounds dated.)
Anyway, I threw a lot of thoughts out there in this diatribe without ever bothering to add a conclusion, and I’d love to get some discussion going on anything I wrote.
posted by Matt @ 8:40 PM
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