Jive Talkin' and Other Delights

I'm supposed to like less stuff when I get old, not more

The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack fucking slaps, and I don’t know what to do with that information.

This might be the final step in a 35-year unlearning process.  You see, when I came up, the elder rockers were still peddling that “disco sucks” propaganda as if every ass shaken to “Ring My Bell” made God blow up a guitar amp, or something.  It was repressed and dumb, racist and homophobic, zero-sum tribal bullshit, and it wouldn’t have had the staying power it had if every one of those rockers’ heroes hadn’t dabbled in dance beats and given them confusing feelings in their groove thangs.

“I was Made For Loving You”?  You fast-forwarded through that song on the 8-track every time?  Sure, you did, Pop.

More than that, there was an almost universal cultural progression when you got into metal, punk, or what we used to call “college rock.”  I remember going from Bon Jovi to the Ramones to Metallica, quickly diving into Sepultura, Celtic Frost, Coroner and Kreator, and almost immediately getting rid of the mainstream pop cassettes I’d started buying when I was old enough to realize I liked some songs on the radio more than others.

Yes?  Genesis?  The Art of Noise?  Joe Jackson?  Make way, this tape case harbors no poseurs!  I don’t remember anyone telling me to do this, or shaming me for owning music from popular artists.  I just started digging deeper into the underground, and shedding the Top 40 stuff seemed like the most natural thing in the world.  (I remorsefully replaced most of these well before I turned 30.)

Look at das Poseur, mit his “99 Luftballoons” 45! Let us now mock him!

This was the era of casting aspersion on anyone who “sold out” by putting their music in ads, signing to major labels, or otherwise failing to meet our parasocial standards of integrity.  Neil Young wrote a whole song making fun of rock stars who shilled for beer and soda companies.  Metallica had an ironclad rule about not toadying to the MTV corporate overlords, right up to the moment when they did (we talked about the “One” video in study hall the next day the way people in the 60s talked about the Zapruder film).

I never went full contrarian.  Even at my most insufferable, I never had a “the Beatles actually sucked and I’ll tell you why” phase.  But if I heard a Top 40 song, anything that had penetrated mass consciousness enough to waft overhead in a grocery store, it became less-than to me, unworthy of serious discussion or enjoyment.  How could a song have a bassline worth noticing or perfectly-recorded backing vocals if “the people” liked it?  Preposterous!

Taylor Swift seems unremarkable to me, so the level of fan devotion sent her way by the most iconoclastic people still throws me off a little bit.  It’s like Beatlemania if all the surly jazz snobs and sophisticated sweater-wearin’ easy listening guys in 1964 got just as slobberingly excited as the teenagers in the front row.  Maybe it’s better marketing, or maybe it’s an evolutionary improvement in musical taste on a macro level?  I dunno.

Part of me wonders if it’s just dead mall nostalgia.

That sounds like an insult, but I don’t mean it to be.  Hear me out.  When I was a kid, and malls were hot shit, there were people who unironically loved them, but they were also seen as tacky, chintzy, downtown-destroying shrines to crass and superficial blandness.  They were the cookie-cutter bug zapper drawing in the dopiest valley girls and jocks to hang out in the food court and be commercially uncool.

The least scary Dalek takes the Kaufmann’s wing of the Edgemont Mall without firing a shot

Fast forward forty years, juice the nostalgia train with a million social media accounts regurgitating washed out Kodachrome pictures, and everyone loves them a mall.  Most of the actual shopping centers still hanging on by a thread with no anchor stores aren’t seeing much light at the end of the corridor leading down to the boarded-up Elder Beerman, but in our minds at least, we’re awash in fond memories of Orange Julius food courts and list-price CDs at Sam Goody.

How else to explain the Gen-X’ers who would have jumped into a volcano clutching their Dead Kennedys tapes to their chest rather than check out Debbie Gibson or New Kids on the Block suddenly becoming Swifties, standing with Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, and pledging allegiance to Dolly Parton?

There’s certainly a political component to it – when the most regressive minds in the public sphere go after someone, as the MAGAverse has done with the likes of Taylor and Dolly, it makes them seem like an underdog, and supporting them feels like a tiny act of radicalism.  But these are people as corporations – Taylor’s a billionaire.  These same folks are not, if the memes are to be believed, keen on billionaires!

Maybe we’re just evolving beyond gatekeeping.  Thanks to streaming you don’t need to plunk down $15 to cast an economic vote about whose music you support.  The concept of the “guilty pleasure” is outmoded in a world where all of pop culture is your salad bar.  And maybe after a lifetime of watching arbitrary social mores and scene rules change, without the world tipping off its axis in the process, we’re all just loosening up a bit.

I never expected to be over 50 and still listening to Napalm Death, but that surprises me less than my dumbfounded reaction to Saturday Night Fever.  The musicianship on these tracks is jaw-dropping (maybe it took decades of hearing this kind of magic relegated to samplers and keyboards to fully appreciate how hard these studio cats are cooking) and the songs are intense.  The fact that this record sold eleventy-billion copies doesn’t change that, and it was dumb of me to think it did somehow.

Does this mean I’m overdue for a reckoning with Madonna’s greatest hits?  Does Richard Marx warrant a revisit?  (Shit, he’s a great guy on social media and totally self-aware.  He’s already cool again!)  I’m not sure I have it in me to spend that much time on an apology tour for the mainstream acts I sneered at in my Army surplus jacket while I waited in vain for my complexion to clear up.

But being the last person on earth to the Saturday Night Fever party seems significant enough for now.  It’s a mile marker, like when I first started digging in vinyl bins and realized Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights was in every single one of them for a reason.  So if you pass my window in the dead of night, and yours truly is tackling “If I Can’t Have You” with karaoke gusto, either mind your business, or let the Night Fever take control and come join the party.