A rchive Date
[ 31-05-2000 ]
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[ Art & Literature ]
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[ Mass Media ]
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Getting nostalgic over life's soundtrack
Top-40 music lets each generation find its aspirations and values
By Herman Gooden London Free Press
April 9, 2000
Reviews of the new John Cusack film, High Fidelity, have been for the most part exasperated, petulant and dismissive; a tone beautifully summed up in the headline for Katrina Onstad's review in the National Post Who would date this guy?
Well, my wife would, for one. We had a wonderful time at a matinee screening this week which uncannily at times felt like we were leafing through a sort of motion-picture scrapbook of our own on again/off again courtship.
The guy in question is Rob, played by Cusack; the owner of a grubby record shop who sees everything in life through the prism of the popular records he's been collecting and obsessing about since the dawning of his own consciousness.
Rob turns to pop music for guidance, enlightenment, inspiration, confirmation and consolation. His shop, Championship Vinyl, serves an almost exclusively male clientele of fellas much like Rob (or much like Rob used to be) who will pay exorbitant prices for rare recordings by lesser-known pop stars and put up with all kinds of guff from the hipper-than-thou staff in the process.
Championship Vinyl's two part-time clerks, Barry and Dick, work there full-time because there's no other business that would ever hire them and no other place in the world that would allow them such swaggering scope for exercising their ruthless expertise in pop music arcana.
There's one excruciating scene where a pimply kid wants to buy an early Captain Beefheart album but can't convince Barry that he's worthy of being allowed to possess such a treasure at any price.
When his latest girlfriend moves out, Rob immediately seeks to put his life back into some kind of order by again rearranging the mammoth record collection which overruns his tiny, dark apartment. I remember that ruse so well; how a couple thousand scattered LPs could transform the neatest apartment into a bomb site; what solace it was to handle such beloved and constant companions at a time when the world was in such disorienting flux.
Previous break-ups have inspired Rob to re-sort his albums alphabetically, generically, geographically and chronologically. We know this latest break-up has affected him at a far deeper level when he sets himself the mind-warping task of reconfiguring his collection in what he calls "autobiographical" order. By this system, records will be filed according to when they turned up in his life and the associations they evoke. This is the equivalent of undergoing heavy-duty psychoanalysis and sets our hero on a humiliating, investigative journey through his history of failed romances.
Both the splendidly funny 1995 novel by Nick Hornby, and this faithful screen adaptation directed by Stephen Frears, brilliantly capture what has hitherto been a neglected male archetype.
I tell you from personal experience, Rob and Barry and Dick are legion. I wonder if those snooty critics who dismiss these characters as trivial have perhaps never known what it is to have their perspective broadened, their aspirations sharpened, their community defined, or their values influenced by popular music.
Top-40 records represent most kids' first meaningful encounters with art of any kind. For those who sign on for the full ride, exploring all the byways and side streets of their generation's musical expression, the experience is genuinely transformative and takes them out into a wider world. Music provides the soundtrack to one of the most intense and receptive periods in your life, and, in a play upon one of Rob's observations, "what you like" becomes a shining emblem of "what you are like;" a means by which you are known and come to know others.
But eventually that day comes (in Rob's case, he's pushing 30) when it's time to pick up your diploma from Rock 'n' Roll High School and get on with creating a life more solid and enduring than some one-hit-wonder's moment of glory. It's a sweet touch at the book and movie's conclusion when Rob tells us he's putting together a compilation tape for the woman he hopes to marry: "something that's full of stuff she's heard of, and full of stuff she'd play. Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it's done."
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears regularly in Sunday's A&E section.. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com. |
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