Proud to be uncool
Marcus Berkmann
Ts it dignified to remain obsessed by pop 'music well into your forties? I used to worry about this when I was about 28, but now I'm 43 I find I don't give a monkey's genitals about being dignified, and I'm waiting rather anxiously for all the seasonal celebrations to end so I can sit down and listen to all the CDs I was given for Christmas. How did this happen? By rights I should have settled down into bourgeois middle-age by now. I should be listening to Radio Four, or at the very least Classic FM, whose DJs have had all the blood removed from their veins and replaced by Golden Syrup. But instead I'm staring rather greedily at these ten CDs piled up in front of me, knowing that three will be useless, four will have a couple of good tracks on. two will be OK and maybe one, if I'm very lucky, will be the soundtrack to the next three months. That's all you're interested in as a long-term music fan: what's next?
But there's another characteristic we never quite shake off: the abrupt dismissal of music we don't much care for. In common with all other 43-year-olds and indeed virtually everyone else old enough to vote. I now find Radio One intolerable. The All New Top Of The Pops, which should have been called Same Old Top Of The Pops, seems to come from an alien planet in an old episode of Star Trek, where females are prohibited by law from wearing any clothes. There are vast quantities of pop music out there these days, and more and more of it, I find, I just don't want to listen to. In his book 31 Songs Nick Hornby explains that he won't listen to an album he has been sent if 'the artist in question is pretty, or has big hair, or is snarling, or has blood coming out of his or her nose, or looks like he or she has appeared in a teen soap, or looks very old, or looks very young, or simply vaguely clueless'.
Fair enough. In your forties you know there's no point bothering with stuff you are not going to like: time and energy are short, or at least shorter, and you have given up trying to impress anyone, as you know no one cares. Over the years in this column I have become braver about admitting to some of my profoundly uncool musical tastes because I don't care about being uncool any more. My friend Russell, who still cares about being cool, will wince when he reads those words, but to me it's a joyous liberation from the weightiest burden of youth. (It is also the subtext to Hornby's very fine and highly uncool book, and the main reason why cool rock critics of every age reviewed it with unanimous contempt.) But hang on. Didn't we also hate certain types of music when we were younger? Didn't we loathe them with a righteous indignation, even a horror that anyone could listen to such garbage? The only thing that changes, as I see it, is that as you age you come to hate different things. Now, its any manifestation of youthful taste that gets my goat; then, it was, specifically, Justin Hayward's recording of 'Forever Autumn' from Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds. And I could never stand The Clash. Now I quite like The Clash but can't stand all the new young bands who sound like The Clash.
No one would deny that as the years pass you lose that youthful fervour that once made you grow had beards and formally support the overthrow of Western civilisation. We can only sympathise with the former political firebrands who are now in the Cabinet and who are constantly required to justify the revolutionary politics/facial hair of their tender years. But pop music, for its most ardent followers, somehow escapes this process. I find that I am not just a man who loves the Lilac Time and Semisonic and Grandaddy. I am also a man who can't stand Pop Idol or nu metal or virtually all black music of the past 15 years or Radiohead's last few albums or David Bowie's overpraised new album or bloody Damon Albarn or Westlife singing 'Mandy' or Led Zeppelin or most 'world music' or 98 per cent of the rest of it, to be honest.
In the end, I suspect you can't love pop music without hating even more of it. And I don't think any of us would have it any other way.
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