Rock 'n' roll, vinyl stores, and the hyporisy of COOL.

A few months ago, I was on tour in Toronto with Alex G. A handful of us had decided to take in the town before the afternoon's setup and soundcheck duties, and we happened upon a vinyl record store in a particularly pretentious sector of the city's downtown. One of the members of our little crew decided that he wanted to see if he could find a certain record, so we moseyed on into the shop.

Upon asking about the album, however, the employee who had found his way over to help us wasted no time in revealing himself to be a troll of the ugliest distinction. The conversation went something like this:

"May I help you all?"

"Yeah, I was wondering, do you have any copies of the Escape album by Journey?"

"I think you need to leave the store."

"Uh, what?"

"Yeah, I think it's best if you just leave."

Now, this wasn't the complete verbatim total of our conversation with this individual, your honor. Someone else in our group asked if he had Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in store, which, I believe, he did. And there may have been one or two other albums asked about, too, but the main gist of our conversation centered around asking about the Journey recording and promptly being asked to exit the store without the slightest sense of humor or irony.

This guy? Not nearly as hilarious in real life.

Once my brain caught up with my ears and I actually realized what was going on, I looked my friends in the eyes and told them something along the lines of, "I'm leaving, because if I don't, something very bad is going to happen and you're all going to be really embarrassed of me."

Ok, stop, reload real quick.

I've spent my entire life despising condescension. As long as I can remember, I've hated conformity, trendiness, and the cult of COOL. And being confronted with it in such a naked, unabashed way is something I am not at all equipped to abide. That day in Toronto, the record store employee with the hipster clothes and nerd glasses awakened something primal and dangerous in me, and it was probably best for everyone involved that we just walked away. (You can ask the people I was with: I think I remember saying something about how it would be well within the boundaries of common sense and moral justice for the Canadian authorities to allow me to firebomb annoying, ostentatious businesses. Or something.)

This story highlights one of my greatest frustrations with the music world and greater culture in general. Namely, not just the existence, but the elevation of and reverence for fakery and self-important vanity within the arts. The haughty record store salesperson demonstrated this reality in spades: condescending to and insulting my friend for wanting to purchase a Journey record while proudly displaying, of all things, Katy Perry's latest release on their shelves.

Here's the deal, folks: the world is full of pompous, arrogant pretenders. People who couldn't record a decent song to save their own lives will pronounce judgment on the work of others as if the entire universe genuflected to the power of their own particular tastes. And what do those tastes tend to be based upon? Not musical criteria, obviously. But, usually, a kind of sludge of trend, public perception, unearned confidence and projected cultural intelligence.

 

Hated on in Toronto, plugged on my blog. 

With "award season" (ugh... shoot me for even writing that) coming up, I felt the need to share this story in order to remind us all of something we know deep inside but rarely give expression to: the world is full to the brim of people who can't wait to tell you what is cool and then wait expectantly for you to fall in line. I can only imagine what gave our Canadian flower the idea that Journey was such a undeniably despicable and universally distasteful band that asking potential paying customers searching for their record to leave his store seemed like a sensible decision. My guess? He's probably read too many issues of Rolling Stone, too many Pitchfork articles. Now, he doesn't have to like Journey. That's fine. But they're a musically powerful band with almost 50 millions albums sold. You can label them corporate sellouts or whatever other hipster indie label you want to use, but what-in-the-world kind of criteria can you use against them that will still allow you to sell a Katy Perry vinyl with a straight face?

And this gets to the heart of the issue: the hypocrisy that drives the hive mind of what's COOL. See, I'm not old. But, I'm old enough to remember things like when Nickelback was just another band (and not the universally labeled WORST BAND IN THE WORLD), when Creed genuinely was the biggest band on the planet (and not regarded as the WORST BAND IN THE WORLD), or when Jay-Z was just another wannabe Biggie Smalls replacement (and not the MOST GENIUS ARTIST IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC). This is kind of my point. Far too many of the labels we attach to various bands and artists are completely arbitrary and fluid. One day, an artist is just walking along, doing their thing, trying to figure out how best to survive in the industry and stay true to themselves. Next day? They're the worst music anybody's ever heard and only the terminally un-hip would ever dare to listen to them, or they're a genius akin to Beethoven whose music we are all undeserving to even set our ears upon.

Someplace somewhere there are rooms full of music writers - that is, people who write about music, not people who write music - attempting to determine for you, for me, and for everybody else what we "should" be listening to. What you'll notice, though, if you pay close attention, is that none of the criteria used to justify their pronouncements is ever truly musical. It's always related to nebulous ideas like "importance" or "notability", i.e.: what the wizards of smart and keepers of cool have capriciously determined to be worthy. Case in point: Kanye West has 21 Grammy Awards, Queen and Jimi Hendrix have zero. That make sense to anyone?

And here's the real kicker: of all the subcultures, of all the arenas of life, of all the groups to belong to, wouldn't you think that rock 'n' roll, for crying out loud, would be the very last place that conformity, trendiness, and falling in line would be expected of anyone? And yet, here we are, living in a world where the people who scream the loudest about non-conformity and expressing one's self as an individual can't help but prejudice themselves against anything that doesn't look or sound exactly how they think rock 'n' roll should look or sound. They just can't help themselves: keeping things in nice, tidy, little boxes is just part of their DNA. 

Don't fall for it.

Think for yourself. Decide for yourself. Don't let your tastes be hijacked by anyone else. Don't listen to the siren overtures from the cool kids' table telling you that the good life is determined by how well you fit in with them. Let them have their pointless tastes and indefensible pronouncements. Instead, listen to the music you want to listen to for the reasons you want to listen to it. Recognize the hypocrisy and vanity of people who want to tell you what is good without having the slightest ability to produce it themselves. See through the trendy clothes and indie labels and pay attention to what's really going on.

The real cool is being able to tell the people who want to define it for you where to stick it.