I Don’t Hate These Songs!

Friday is music day. With playlists. You know this. Today there's a bonus one - a special, special treat.

Way back when I was young and silly – and now I only have the one excuse – I would blog every day for a national news website. My photo was on display. My name attached. And yet, somehow, people would still say I was “hiding” behind my views. And that I was “some anonymous troll”. They would say this with names like MyAwesomeMixTape#6 or EweDirtyBird or Goodspeler8wot or Trollz4lif3 or ChrisBishop.

Anyway, one of the things they would sometimes say was that who was I with all this superior taste anyway. And why was I so sure that my taste was even all that good at all. And of course, I wasn’t ever sure of that. I was quite sure that I also had quite shitty taste too. Because to have ‘good’ taste you have to know what ‘bad’ is. To be aware of one, you must be aware of the other. And to be aware is to dabble. And also, I’d played in covers bands, and worked in music stores, and basically rubbed up against a lot of bad music. Some of it had rubbed off on me. Talking about rubbing up and rubbing off is making me uncomfortable. Sorry. I should never use that term in consecutive sentences.

Anyway, I was always quite happy – I thought – to admit to just liking what I liked.

It’s a funny thing though, taste. It changes.

And that I’m not longer young, just silly, I find it even easier than it ever was before to just like things. Also, to not even have to try to say why. I used to love reading those Chuck Klosterman essays where he’d get all breathless and defend Billy Joel or KISS…I didn’t believe him. Which is to say I didn’t agree with him, I believed that he actually thought what he was saying, but it didn’t convince me to change how I felt. And I never thought the writing I was doing about music was having much sway at all in changing how other people felt. I was mostly writing to convince myself actually. I see my own thoughts in print – I get to finally find them out. It’s a process. A way of dealing. A way of seeing.

All of this is to say that the other day we saw Vanessa Carlton being hurtled along behind her piano down the road singing about walking a thousand miles or whatever.

And I stopped and said that I liked that song. And that I always had. And my son said that he too thought it was, “a bit of a banger”. He and I both then shared that it wasn’t really our usual jam, but we agreed that the song had a charm. Maybe even some oodles of that ole charm-thing.

Vanessa Carlton released Be Not Nobody in 2002 – that’s 20 years ago! I didn’t even have to look that up (quick math!) But now I’m feeling slightly queasy from using the exclamation mark in consecutive sentences. I did have to look up Carlton’s discography to find that she even had one, to now know she had released six albums in total, the last of which was a couple of years ago. I haven’t heard any of her music at all, knowingly. The only thing I know is that song, A Thousand Miles, the killer lead single from her possibly very-dated-sounding debut.

In fact, until today I thought she was in a relationship with the drummer from The Black Keys. But that’s actually Michelle Branch. And I’ve never really listened to anything by Michelle Branch either, but apparently her and Carlton are kinda similar.

This stuff used to bug me because I’ve always been a record-buyer. Which means that you bought the album, and you absorbed the info. You got into the facts. Read the liners, read the reviews, found the interviews, and got hooked on all the stuff around the music – as well as the actual music. Being a fan was a decision. The music might grab you and you’re powerless in that moment of first response. But it soon became a choice to follow-through or not. You went to the store with your lawnmowing money to buy the tape and you counted out your change and hoped it was enough to get a copy of the magazine that might carry a review or even a pin-up poster. A little something else. Something to hold onto.

I’ve always been envious of people that can just like a song (or two) by an artist without going all in. It took me a long time to realise that wearing the badge of what you like – and not just by buying the t shirt or tote-bag, I mean philosophically wearing the badge, owning and announcing your complete fandom, is a super outmoded thing to worry about needing to do.

That is to say, it’s still as cool as it ever was to go Stan-fan on a band. Which might mean it’s actually profoundly uncool too – or instead. But it’s just not an issue to me anymore. I like what I like. I always said that I always have. But it’s only now that I realise, I don’t need to pin colours to masts. I don’t need to sound off.

Which of course is why I’m up to nearly one thousand word saying all this. Um, lol…

Hearing that Vanessa Carlton song the other day, and then hearing it again a few times more, made me want to make up a playlist of all the songs that I probably think – on some level – that I should hate. I used to really dig into the term: Guilty Pleasure. But I’m too old for guilt. And I know that life doesn’t always bring you pleasure. So why not just like what you like, right? And just like it when you can.

There are songs that I love by artists I don’t care about at all. I haven’t investigated them further and I never will. There are songs that maybe I shouldn’t like – which is to say they don’t really fit in with the styles I generally go for, or the sort of music listener I generally figured myself to be.

Sometimes I just got batted over the head by a cheesy ballad because I worked in a store selling books and Xmas junk and the same song every day delivered in the same way became some sense of order. Sometimes I just heard the hook and loved it but felt I should never say so because it wasn’t ‘cool’. Sometimes it felt cool to be uncool or it was uncool to be cool or, erm, well, you can see how I thought Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch was the same person…

So, I sat down the other day and made this playlist. It’s called I Don’t Hate These Songs!

And that’s the gist. That’s it. These are all songs I don’t hate. But maybe you thought I would. And maybe – at some point – I thought I did. It didn’t take me long to assemble this random selection. In twenty minutes or so I had 70 songs and nearly five hours of music. That’s one hell of a car-ride. It might actually be your idea of hell. But you should dive in (or drive off) and find out.

It's a separate conversation for another day entirely about how I could nearly-instantly recall 70 songs I like in a guilty-pleasure kinda way.

I thought it was a bit of fun to ‘own’ this stuff, well, own up to it. I mean it’s just music, right?

A wise man once said, “You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it matters”. (I wince to see that typed out in this context – it makes me worry about many of the days I turned up for that blog across close to a decade, punching those keys like they owed me some money).

But was it even a wise man that said that? You might think it was Eugene McCarthy. I certainly did. But the David Shields book I’ve just finished reading tells me it was Peter Griffin. And so, now I’m questioning everything. And, hey if I started this by talking about Vanessa Carlton I might as well end it by name-checking Peter Griffin.

Anyway, it’s Friday. And in New Zealand that means that this week it’s the start of a very long weekend. So, R.I.P Lizzie. And if you don’t like my I Don’t Hate These Songs! playlist, there’s always Vol. 83 of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good!

PS: You think Vanessa Carlton was inspired by The Proclaimers – and was also into doing a bit of quick math?