Bandstand Grandstand

Your Favorite Band is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal about the Meaning of Life by music critic Steven Hyden explores various sorts of rivalries within and between bands, but more importantly among listeners of the same generation. The classic example for my generation was the common question, “Do you prefer the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” On the surface this seems as simple a matter of taste as asking what toppings you like on a pizza. It was understood to be bigger than that. A statement about one’s personal outlook and values was inherent in the answer. (I tended to sidestep the question by answering “the Animals,” which come to think of it also was telling.)

Hyden is Generation X so he doesn’t get around to Beatles/Stones until chapter 6, and then only reluctantly as “dad rock.” Mostly he speaks of what had emotional import for him, e.g. Oasis vs. Blur, Cyndi Lauper vs. Madonna, Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam, Biggie vs. Tupac, White Stripes vs. Black Keys, etc. I wasn’t even aware rivalry was a thing for many of his opposing pairs, but I get it. Whether or not it is accurate or fair to regard, for example, Nirvana as outlaw and Pearl Jam as corporate (in the 90s I just lumped them together as grunge and rather liked both), I can understand what a youthful listener of the day might have been trying to project by passionately advocating one over the other. It’s all about self-image really, and we are inclined to get passionate about that. Hyden gives fair warning of what can happen if you play Metallica’s Black Album in “a room full of borderline psychopaths waiting for Megadeth to come on stage.” I’ll take his word for it. “Musical rivalries don’t matter,” he says, “until they matter to you personally.”

Some of the more interesting rivalries (touched upon by Hyden only lightly) are over alternate interpretations of songs by fans of the same band, but these are intellectual disputes and less likely to be quite so intense. Not always. As a non-pop example (not mentioned by Hyden) Friedrich Nietzsche developed key elements of his philosophy by arguing with himself passionately over Richard Wagner, first as an advocate and then as his fiercest critic. Even when the emotional volume is dialed down, such arguments can be more revealing than other kinds. For obvious reasons I won’t give a name, but in the late 90s a woman insisted to me in all sincerity that Cher’s Believe single was about addiction. Do you believe in life after love of drugs? For her (though I doubt very much for Cher) it was.

This brings to mind an old high school assignment about which I haven’t thought in decades. Every single school day in addition to other class assignments my senior English teacher required a 500 word essay. “On my desk by 5 PM. That does NOT mean 5:01!” To this day I feel I’ve forgotten something as 5 PM approaches. He usually let students pick their own topics but sometimes he would assign one. On one occasion we were told to interpret the lyrics of some popular song of our choice. My first inclination was to pick something truly weird such as MacArthur Park, Windmills of Your Mind, or Some Velvet Morning. I just about had settled on the last of those when on reconsideration I decided it was too much work for only 24 hours. (This was pre-internet, remember, so you couldn’t just look up interpretations online; you probably couldn’t even get the lyrics in 24 hours unless you owned the record and copied them yourself.) Instead I just went with the Beatles Nowhere Man, which really needs no interpretation at all. It means what it says, so that’s what I said in prose. I felt I was just skating by on minimum effort and was surprised (and oddly discomfited) by a good grade. Perhaps my punctuation was good or something. Then again, perhaps the rest of the class had been just as lazy as I in their choices. As that may be, I now realize Some Velvet Morning would have been a mistake. I hadn’t yet read Hippolytus by Euripides. (In case the reader has forgotten, it is about an ascetic young man who refuses to revere Aphrodite; Aphrodite punishes him in tortuous fashion by making his stepmother Phaedra fall in love with him with tragic consequences.) No one on this continent would write lyrics with the name Phaedra in it without intending the reference. I would have missed it. My well-read English teacher would not have. He would have given me an argument and won. I was better off taking the easy route.

Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra – Some Velvet Morning