Show me show me show me how you do that trick
Rainy day music + a playlist from a pop simpleton
Yesterday I drove through the south suburbs to look at a house my parents might buy in the Laurel Highlands—which all sounds very tra-la, except that they’re in the market because a gas well is going in on their land and they have to leave by spring, when production begins. (When I tell people this, they are shocked—shocked—that a gas company can do something like this, but if the family you bought the house from managed to retain the mineral rights through a shady loophole, there’s nothing you can do.)
Anyway, it was a gray day for an errand. It was that kind of rain that seems to fall in all directions at once, not heavy enough to count as a downpour but persistent and ugly. And Route 51 is also pretty ugly, in a way that I’ve mostly seen in Pittsburgh and some Boston suburbs: it’s some combination of brutalist bank buildings, hectic street geometry, rowhouses with windows in odd places, and vinyl bar signs.
This should have been a little bit of a bummer, but I was actually having a fantastic time because the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” came on shuffle while I was driving. And there’s a weird alchemy with rainy days and certain kinds of pop music, which somehow makes me grateful to be exactly where I am, gloom and ugliness very much included. Certain kinds of pop music—often British, synth-y, from the ‘70s/’80s—make it possible to find a perverse enjoyment in a collection of seemingly depressing, annoying things.
I am, at heart, a pop simpleton. I want that I-V-vi-IV progression. I want some fuzz and synths and maybe a little loud-quiet-loud, but mainly I want to hear the same riddle over and over again when the minor chord resolves. Don’t get me wrong, I also like “difficult” music—noisy, atonal, durational, etc.—but honestly, I like even those things the most when they have a hook or two hidden in all of their static.
I once had an argument with a guy I was dating about jazz vs. the blues (and you can probably tell what a stupid argument this was because the premise that those things are opposed is deeply misguided in itself). Actually, the argument was a little more nuanced: I held the position that there was some kind of transubstantiating magic in the blues progression, that the chords in their sequence could almost open up a pocket of impossible non-time, that even though the blues vernacular has been played so, so, so many times that it should be completely skeletal, you can still give it to Eddie Hazel and get the solo from “Maggot Brain,” which we should have put on the golden record we sent out into space. Whereas he held the position that the blues was dumb, only played now by mediocre white people in suburban brew pubs, and jazz was infinitely better. (As if jazz isn’t also played by mediocre white people in suburban brew pubs!! Come on.) (And as if Alice Coltrane wasn’t essentially playing the heaviest blues riffs maybe ever on Lord of Lords.) Dumb is kind of the point. There’s a spaciousness in it, and maybe even a kind of humility.
And I feel the same way about the various pop music progressions. They are absolutely predictable, yes. But something happens in my brain every time. I get some little endorphin spark. Every. Single. Time. There’s something about the movement into a minor chord and the release from it that still feels surprising even when I know it’s coming. And isn’t it rare for a moment to be both surprising and comforting at the same time? It’s like that Buddhist notion that god is in everything, hiding from itself and finding itself in an endless game, with endless punch lines, except in a Yo La Tengo song.
But then again, maybe my dopamine-chasing rainy day Brit pop thing is just junkie shit. It reminds me of the opening scenes of Young Adult, where Charlize Theron’s alcoholic writer Maeve listens to the classic mixtape track 1 “The Concept” over and over and over while she’s driving back to her Minnesotan home town, in retreat from professional failure and romantic failure and alcoholic failure. It becomes clear that this isn’t just any mixtape, but an offering from her high school boyfriend, Buddy, who has just had a baby. (That’s the event that launches her back home: She has decided to repair her life by reviving that relationship, massively ill-fated though this aspiration is.) Maeve isn’t just listening to the song; she’s using it like it’s a fix. The song is a portal to the time before everything unraveled, and if she keeps listening to it, she’ll get to float there.
So yeah, maybe I’m up to some junkie shit with pop music. I have demonstrated a tendency toward dopamine-hungry brain chemistry, the kind that will use a drink, a drug, a cookie, or a dress in exactly the same way: over and over, to fix my life. (That’s why they call it a fix, babes.) In fact, part of why I liked drinking so much was because it also did that magic trick of making me enjoy exactly where I was and who I was. This dive bar, this version of me, this snowy night, whatever.
But the danger of such magic is that if you lean on it too much, you get stuck in the unlikable place. You take the weather personally. You reach for the escape hatch when there’s a letter in the mail box. You stop changing the lightbulbs, you get cavities. Do you really want to be in that snowy-night dive bar forever, are the angles of your confinement really worth staying in, even if you can light them up with something a little transcendent occasionally? Minor pain is supposed to be treated instead of fixed, and there is a difference between the two. I believe that magic is real, but I concede that it can be hazardous to your health.
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m at least three digressions away from where I meant to end up, which is: I made you this playlist! Not exhaustive, but jam-packed with the rainy day pop songs I actually reach for over and over again. There is absolutely zero deep-cut flexing going on here. You’ve probably already heard all of these songs, actually. I hope it will make wherever you are the perfect place to be today. But also, go to the dentist and get your car serviced and return your phone calls. Tchüss!
P.S. if you have an especially tasty slab of shimmering harmonic predictability I should add to my collection, please drop me a hint!