It's that time again. Spring Weekend is coming, hopefully bringing spring with it. And now we know who's doing the bringing.
My first thought was ‘Doesn't TV on the Radio play here every year?' It seems like the quintessential band for College Hill — trendy, pseudo-intellectual and originally from New York. Diddy-Dirty Money is a different proposition altogether. I remember Pong Daddy — or whatever his name is or was — as the bloke who did the really bad rapping on that rubbish cover of the Police song about a fat guy. I should have thought that that alone would have been enough to force him out of the record industry. Now I find that not only has he been around the whole time, but that he has acquired reinforcements.
I have been raging quietly against the dying of the pop-cultural light for the best part of a decade. It is a truth fairly widely acknowledged that men tend to reach a point in their early 20s where their knowledge of pop culture comes to a screeching and particularly embarrassing halt. How else does one explain the enduring success of U2? Surely they can only be selling records to middle-aged men who heard one of their albums, thought that the joke of calling their squawking pixie frontman Bono Vox — which doesn't mean ‘unlistenable wailing noise' — was hilarious and are still laughing desperately.
My attention was brought to this point a few weeks ago, when my wife, who is three years younger and 100 percent more American than I, stopped me during our ritual test-reading of one of my columns. My wife almost spat out her coffee, comedy-style. "Did you just make a Maroon 5 joke?" she asked. "Yes, my sweet pumpkin," I replied. "Isn't that what the kids are listening to?"
"Please tell me you're kidding me," she retorted, slapping me with wifely scorn. "They were popular in 2002!"
"Hang on — what year is it?" I asked, nonplussed."2011." At this point, I had to lie down.
Of course, I haven't been living in a hole since 2002. Mostly I've been living in the extended strip mall that is the New-York-to-Boston corridor, which is much less pleasant, as I'm sure you'll agree. I've been on Facebook since before they started letting in those non-university types. I've been a willing participant in the journey of the iPod from clunky-but-adequate music player to a fancy-but-entirely-inadequate telephone/camera/virtual companion and occasional sexual partner. I've even tweeted, if only to ask if anyone had seen where I left my trousers.
Even so, it's hard to keep up with the times. For every Vampire Weekend, there's an Arcade Fire. I've spent some time in Montreal — there are a lot of great bands and a lot of very attractive people. Who decided that this braying pack of greasy corpses would be the Next Big Indie-ish Thing? I've just about caught up with Taylor Swift — although I'm fairly sure that it's just Avril Lavigne on stilts — but I have no idea what a Justin Bieber is. Is it a woodland mammal?
As I've remarked before, one of the downsides — and there are a few — of being a graduate student at Brown is that we're not really integrated into the social and cultural life of the University. I get it. After years of subsisting on Narragansett and tinned soup, we're not the most appealing creatures. Even so, I think our second-class status is to everyone's detriment. Let me give you an example. In days of yore, some friends and I went to see the Flaming Lips at Spring Weekend. While the band rolled around on top of a delirious crowd in giant balloons, pounding out its psychedelic poptasticness, my friends and I stood to one side, muttering to one another, "Aren't they the guys who used to sing the song about Vaseline?" Now, any youngsters in the surrounding area, knowing the Flaming Lips as a popular purveyor of lush, dreamy pop, may not have known that once upon a time, the band bashed out hallucinatory punk, occasionally about people blowing their noses on magazines. Thank goodness, then, that we bitter and jaded fogeys were there to remind everyone that things were better way back then, and now everything is too loud and you can't hear the tune.
Before you cast this column aside, gentle reader, exclaiming, "That'll never be me — I have the zeitgeist indelibly connected to my spine via wireless connection," think again. It just happens. One day you're the cock of the cultural walk, cracking jokes about singers' peccadilloes through six layers of irony. The next, you're wondering what ever happened to My Chemical Romance. So enjoy your time in the sun, bask in the warm glow of your cultural relevance and try not to think about the fact that you're going to be stuck remembering the Jonas Brothers for the rest of your life.
Stephen Wicken GS, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History, is pretty happy with the trouser-joke-to-sensible-opinion ratio of this column.
He can be contacted at stephen_wicken@brown.edu.
