Yea and I’m writing this while listening to Beck’s Odelay Deluxe Edition.
So you know how first dates go or any cliché getting to know you convos go? One of the fave questions I think I can be asked (and I can understand why we ask this) is, “So who's your favorite music artist?” I try not to press my lips together and send me eyes rolling to the back of my head as I again notice the “uniqueness “ this boy in Provo is trying to portray with his DI clothing or non branded vintage wear. (I too choose not wear letters and logos across my clothes). The question is prepping the conversation that he would like to begin that will allow him to display his mysteriously non conforming individualistic personality. It will start with bands, to clothes, to TV shows and foreign films then the hole in the wall local restaurants and down to the very house he rents in south Provo that is not a part of the popular student housing advertising. So this conversation again awaits me and I feel my creativity becoming suppressed because the words will be almost routine to the date/convo before. But none the less he asks, “So what’s your favorite band?”
My training and experience has led me to know of only one right answer which is, “Oh hell. Anything that you or don’t already know about cuz that’s what makes you cool!”
(Please don’t be offended by the word hell. My strong mormon upbringing and family quirks will be explained later. But I’m a very religious person. Humble too.)
That’s if I had the guts to say it to their face. That line is like the daydream clips shown throughout the Pride & Prejudice” Mormon Chapter”) But what I’d really like to say in a much kinder note is, “Smatchoo?! Don’t you know that in your efforts to become so unique you have created exactly what you hate? You have reversed the goal by making it a goal. Being your self is tricky, I know. “
Ironic when you love something, and that something is new and special and it’s still your own to tell people, “This is what I love. I found it. I want you to experience it but also know that I had it first.” It’s inevitable that this special something will not be your own for very long. And then, at that moment of sweeping popularity will the “true” lover of that thing abandon it cowardly while waiting to announce, “No, I don’t like them. “ I think celebrities use this thought process with choosing their Wedding reception dates. Except it’s to their own weddings.
So it’s out now. Back to the computer searches to find the next underground whatever and hide the Facebook evidence that shows you ever loved something so cliché. The backtracking -the having to run the other direction and scout out their new identity. Poor Dave Mathews. The football players started liking you and now you’re not fit for the mission of this generation. Poor Dwight. You’ve been painfully not cool to reaching ridiculous popularity to being categorized as old news. Café Rio- get another name but make the same food so I can claim to like something less popular. And they did. And then we tried to sue them.
Trying to convince someone that they did not like something until it had been tested and tried and passed the popularity test, is impossible. You can say, I remember you not liking it when it first came out? But they will defend their love for this “thing” from the beginning like a parent does with its newborn cone head alien looking child. (And of course they do.) Or “I liked it before everybody else.” Don’t we love this claim? And isn’t it most contridictory that after you have realized how annoyed you are when someone else claims the Before anyone else fame…. You realize that there are a couple of things you too would like to claim as the first to love it.
It’s the next best thing to having created the song, the design, the sitcom idea…. Is to say you loved it fist. What if you were the creator of “The office”. Not the American one, but the first one in Great Britain. Wouldn’t it bug you that everyone in the world is claiming your idea! And I’m sure that with all the minds in the world, someone did have the idea at one time and lacked the ambition to be its tangible creator, but all I’m saying is, “Ryan” must cringe as he hears how many are trying to get as close to his fame as possible by saying, “I loved it first.”
So Beck, you’re a genius musician, but did you ever think to ask yourself that if we succeed in killing the cliché, we will eventually have nothing left in existence but our pride in announcing we- ourselves were never caught in the flow of mainstream? When in-fact, following a whole generation would be that very thing. Smatchoo Provo?! Be yourself.
