A rchive Date
[ 24-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[High Fidelity
Matthew DeBord
What happens when a music critic has to get his hands dirty learning how to play? Douglas Wolk reports on beginners' guitar class in the Boston Pheonix.
"Taking guitar classes also meant making my peace with classic rock, which was the hardest part... You learn a few basic chords and then you play 'Heart of Gold,' which all of a sudden seems like a miracle of elegance and simplicity, like the Pythagorean theorem."
"WHAT REALLY MATTERS is what you like, not what you're like," John Cusack argues midway through the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's best-selling novel, High Fidelity.
In the realm of suspended adolescence that the movie embraces, Cusack's comment functions as a brisk revelation: His character, an underachieving record store owner named Rob, is sort of like a downmarket Hamlet that way, endlessly turning toward the camera to soliloquize anxieties which seem to engage the world, but which actually engage only Rob. "Which came first," he asks, "the music or the misery?" Not a terribly difficult question to answer, at least where Rob is concerned: It was the misery, stupid. If the music ever came first, Hornby's characters would have to do something alien, profoundly uncomfortable, and deeply unfamiliar: They'd have to shut up and listen.
I might sound as if I hated the movie, but the truth is I didn't. I liked its riffs on the crisis of masculine identity crises, on romantic frustration - the warp and woof of testosterone futility - all delivered through the zippy Esperanto of postwar pop music. Hornby's cast of moody, music-obsessed losers hailed from London; director Stephen Frears' cast occupies a Wicker Park-ish Chicago, circa the haut-slacker mid-nineties. The transposition works, and the casting is smart (if you can overlook the apperance of Lisa Bonet as an indie-rock chanteuse who recrafts Peter Frampton songs as sinuous ballads). The production designer ought to get an Oscar for nailing the context so chillingly that young men in the audience will spot at least one object (and certainly one album) that they've owned in Cusack's apartment. This is big piece of the movie's ineluctable allure: The guys who see it will see themselves.
IT'S ALL THE FAULT OF THAT "What really matters is what you like, not what you're like" crack, a line that will spur the shock of recognition in countless young men between the ages of fourteen and...oh, say forty, just for the sake of argument. In the film's aesthetic and ethical context, this declaration amounts to a mantra, a weltanshauung, and a manifesto, rolled up into a cavalier admission that today's white American has lost all faith in the thing-in-itself. Instead of relationships, Cusack and his friends experience three-minute, three-chord distillations of what a relationship might be like. Rob and his hipster pals harbor no shortage of romantic illusions, but can't handle the real deal. (Of Rob's two main cronies, one seems gladly asexual, the other closetedly queer.) You give them credit for loving music and wonder if they can love anything else. In particular, girls.
Before I saw the movie, I was convinced that it would confirm - with brio and charm - my personal Record Boy nightmare, and that I would be powerless to do anything about it. I was prepared to be seduced by two hours that entertainingly explored a world that I (no pulled punches here) utterly despise. A world of autofellating monomania and self-lubricating irony. A world whose inhabitants are incapable of unmediated experience. A world where hobbies become lifestyles, and pasty young men sell their souls for kick-ass record collections and a pile of insights compliments of Lester Bangs.
A little background: I used to own perhaps the most embarrassing record collection on the East Coast. Certainly in the hipster vinyl-snob borough of Brooklyn, land of the soul-patched Williamsburg boho deejay, his two turntables and microphone, and his incontinent views. And I knew it; I've always had crap taste in music. My record collection was ample evidence of this: fifteen years spent assembling it so I could show off...what? My Rush albums? Dire Straits? Bob Seger? Van Halen? Pathetic. If you scour used-record stores for discarded vinyl, you see my record collection all the time. No one ever hangs on to these albums. They're everywhere. I paid, on average, ten dollars for each one. You can now pick them up for four bucks a pop. If that.
FINALLY, I ESCAPED my rotten record collection. I lacked the constitution for it anyway, and I didn't want to collect anything, much less records. The talent wasn't in me, my monomania wasn't up to snuff. So I sold everything - hundreds of discs - for a pittance. Freed myself. Lightened my cultural load and formed a plan of attack for the future, whenever confronted with a band of record-boys huddled in argumentative conspiracy, nicotine clouds gathering above their bowed heads, sour pilsners all around, some obnoxious debate over whether Dylan or the Stones or Fugazi or Yo La Tengo or Pavement were the greatest ever. Pure horror - my head inches toward explosion when I recall it. So I made a pact. Whenever confronted by this scene, I would flee, ending my evening right then and there. Furthermore, I vowed to never write about music (I had done a little bit of that in college), and for the most part have stuck to my pledge, making exceptions for The Dixie Chicks and Sleater-Kinney. (I think perceptive readers will detect a theme there.)
Of course, High Fidelity is a powerful cultural document. I was foolish to think that I could evade it - could evade what it encapsulates - based simply on willpower.
LOVE IS NOT THE DRUG that High Fidelity's vinyl junkies crave. Certainly not Rob, whose champion narcissism effectively precludes love, but still demands servile, supportive companionship: girl as collectible, as commodity to be ranked. Midway through the movie, in the throes of a full-on post-breakup bout of self-delusion, he undertakes a quest to divine the flaws in his "Top Five" previous relationships. To most viewers, the central flaw in each case is obvious: Rob. (Because what kind of schmuck would contrive such a list in the first place?) But to the intrepid man-child himself, the undertaking is worthy, if less satisfying than sitting on his ass for several unfettered hours, smoking American Spirits, with headphones on and some lusty tidbit of soul music trickling into his callow ears, supplying rhythmic clues to what authentic passion might actually feel like.
In the end, I decided that High Fidelity was the conversational equivalent of a Broadway musical. Rather than bursting out in song, like Tony in West Side Story, Rob and his cohorts bicker about Green Day's formative influences, or banish Belle & Sebastian with a nice, hard hit of Katrina and the Waves. The music is in them, but it doesn't emerge as music. Instead, it comes out as opinion, criticism, knowingness.
Again and again, the boys refuse to stray far from their treehouse. When they do - in Rob's case, when he's invited to dinner party thrown by formidable former girlfriend Catherine Zeta-Jones - they talk like conversationally-disadvantaged stooges, while the banter of adults with whom they awkwardly collide is presented as superficial bullshit. Bullshit, it seems, because it emphasizes durable insight over hasty pop-song sentiment. Zeta-Jones and Cusack enjoy the best moment in the entire movie, he sullenly excavating her motives for dumping him, she casually eviscerating him for his faults. It's a neat scene, reminiscent of one of the exchanges between Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate - exchanges that, when viewed young, favor Benjamin, but which, as time passes, favor Mrs. Robinson.
Still, everybody loves Cusack and his fumbling hipster cohorts - even me, in spite of myself. But it's a disturbing love, based on the forces that induce us to embrace the "autobiographical" organization of albums, rather than autobiography itself. A love spawned by mediation, not by embrace. A frightening conclusion, when you consider that once Rob does finally come to his senses and proposes to his girlfriend, Laura, the highest profession of love he can muster is the crafting of a really great compilation tape. Unplug the headphones, Rob. Hear the music in her voice. It won't be as good as Stevie Wonder's, but chances are, it will ultimately sound sweeter.
Matthew DeBord is a contributing editor at FEED. ]
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