In the midst of the last Blogger Book Club, Corey passed me this quote from an essay by Andrew O’Hagan covering new books on The Smiths and Morrissey. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but this was my hook:
Pop music is nostalgic in its bones–it is part of Morrissey’s gift always to have known this–and fans who adhere to its magic are in love with something that was passing as soon as it was made. True fans live in exile: that is their nature, their glory and their tragedy. People who love Elvis actually love a time when it was possible to be defined by your love of Elvis; people who continue to admire The Undertones want to believe they recognise an essence that defies the present.
A few days later, my pal Daphne let me page through her copy of Go Ask Ogre, a collection of intensely personal letters a young woman wrote to the front man of Skinny Puppy. In her distress, she confided in a stranger who it seems she felt closer to than most, if not all of the people around her.
Long before you could be “friends” with artists on MySpace and stalk them on Twitter, you could join their fan club, buy posters of them to paste up on your wall (your real-life bedroom wall) and feel that you belonged in their special circle even though they had no idea who you were. (You may have had Bye Bye Birdie fantasies, but for most, that’s not really how it went down. You signed up for the dream, not the reality.) Often the artist, as much as or even more so than the art, represented safe harbor, conjured a sense of identity, bridged confusion and pain (with or without a heavy dose of cliché, depending on your tastes), and offered companionship not in silence, but in songs that never asked for anything back.
I got lost thinking this over, tried to get unjaded enough to follow my gut on this and see how much people need music to actually survive in modern society, but even more so, depend on and cling to musicians.
You can sing along with them if you want to. No one else will care.