Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time

by Courtney E. Smith

  How did a ten-year-old recognize Hall & Oates in the street, you ask? My cousins and I spent a lot of time in our grandparents' bedroom watching MTV. It was our primary group activity in the mid to late '80s, aside from playing Dukes of Hazzard (which involved the two of them running around pretending to be in a car and me sitting under a tree looking at them like they were morons). Hall & Oates were certainly no pretty-boy act like Duran Duran, but their videos were live-performance based and showed me what they looked like up close and personal. I have always had a knack for keeping track of what bands sang which songs, even as a child. I knew all the lyrics, what everyone looked like, and the salient details of rock stars' personal lives, thanks to the helpful asides from MTV VJs. When I wasn't watching MTV (like when it was temporarily banned by my grandfather after he saw the stripper- and motorcycle-heavy video for Mötley Crüe's "Girls Girls Girls") I was listening to the radio and making mix tapes or playing records on my sweet Fisher-Price turntable. What I'm saying is: You bet your ass I knew Hall & Oates when I saw them.

  I also knew there was no point in telling the other kids at school about this celebrity sighting. No one was going to be impressed. Hall & Oates had no cachet and had peaked five years earlier—half a lifetime to us. I wasn't savvy enough about music to think of Hall & Oates, or anyone, as a guilty pleasure. I just knew they weren't cool enough to matter. You can imagine, then, how legit music snobs with a greater body of knowledge than a ten-year-old Whitney Houston fan must have regarded them at the time.

  I can safely say I didn't think of Hall & Oates once for the duration of the '90s, and I doubt anyone else did either. The next time they entered my stratosphere was in 2005, with the launch of the Internet series Yacht Rock.

  If you have somehow gotten to this point in your life and haven't seen Yacht Rock, Google it right now. You won't be sorry. The series creators staged lo-fi mockumentaries following the faux history of a genre of music they dubbed Yacht Rock: smooth pop hits from 1976–1984 by a loose Los Angeles collective of artists, including Steely Dan, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, and, of course, Hall & Oates. The songs are all perfect for lite rockin' while sailing on a yacht in Southern California (see: Christopher Cross's "Sailing"), but the artists—who are all from a music scene that was largely ignored by the music press—are recast in fictional reenactments that confound expectations and exaggerate the personalities. For example, in Yacht Rock episode twelve, Oates becomes a hyper-aggressive, ninja-kicking ball of anger who trash-talks everyone around him and abuses Hall, which is ironic because Oates is commonly known to be silent. In the finale, a fight breaks out, with Loggins and McDonald taking on Hall and Oates, only to be soothed by the smooth sounds of Christopher Cross playing the aforementioned "Sailing." The extreme interpretation of all these characters whose real personalities went unexamined in the music press during their heyday is very funny.

  Yacht Rock garnered a limited Internet audience but became a cult hit. Yacht Rock artists began turning up in pop culture much more often, which explains why a forgotten band like Hall & Oates was suddenly back in the popular consciousness. The show inspired live reenactments by the creators and the featured players, Yacht Rock karaoke nights, and a Yacht Rock tribute episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

  In the Seattle Weekly, John Oates credited the Yacht Rock phenomenon with revitalizing their career, saying, "I think Yacht Rock was the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection. They were the first ones to sort of parody us and put us out there again, and a lot of things have happened because of Yacht Rock." Things like the inclusion of "You Make My Dreams" in a song-and-dance scene in the movie (500) Days of Summer and a controversial 2009 Grammy nomination in the Best Pop Performance category for a live performance of the then thirty-four-year-old song "Sara Smile." Naturally, they lost again that year to those bastards the Black Eyed Peas. The duo have, to date, never won a Grammy and are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, although they are eligible. Even suggesting Hall & Oates for Hall of Fame consideration before the emergence of Yacht Rock would have gotten you laughed out of the room, but now it seems inevitable.

  Yacht Rock made Hall & Oates (and possibly Steely Dan, but we'll get into that shortly) cool. It cemented a tacit agreement among music snobs that Hall & Oates wrote some damn good songs that we all liked while shoving them in the spotlight again for the masses. A key part of their return was that acceptance among a select crowd first. The word of mouth generated among people who could be considered influencers ensured they would be cooler this time than they were in their first go-around as pop icons. This is true because the masses are driven by the lowest common denominator: whatever the least (educated, cultured, knowledgeable) among the masses likes is catered to by corporations in order to make the most money. In some instances widely popular music can be good, but in other cases you get throwaway music like Justin Bieber (and the Backstreet Boys before him and New Kids on the Block before them, and the Monkees before them, etc).

  There's a credibility to liking what music critics (who are often also music snobs) endorse, and that is why the return of Hall & Oates in 2005 as a trickle-down phenomenon steered them out of guilty pleasure and into just plain well-liked. It also introduced a new generation to Hall & Oates and recast the aspects that were originally uncool about them (like their terrible haircuts) in a humorous light. If you never had to witness the embarrassment of their '80s mullets or live through Michael Jackson rendering their blue-eyed soul outdated, they seem like pretty okay dudes.

  Yacht Rock didn't have the same sort of effect for all the bands it name-checked. There hasn't been much of a groundswell of support for Steely Dan, whose tunes are arguably just as smooth as Hall & Oates', although certainly not as soulful. I once met a guy at a friend's holiday party who was interested in my musings on using "Beatles vs. Stones?" as a pickup line, which you can read about elsewhere in this book. He Facebooked me the next day to ask what I thought it said about a man's sexual agenda if he were to use, "So, do you like Steely Dan?" as a pickup line. I told him the best reason I could think of to do such a thing was as a coolness litmus test to see if the girl he was attempting to pick up had seen Yacht Rock. If she hadn't, then he could seem cool and share it with her. If she had, then they'd have that in common to chat about.

  He protested, claiming it could just be that some people (like him) grew up listening to Steely Dan and called Yacht Rock babbling idiot music. I grew up with a mother who listened to Linda Ronstadt, but I won't be using that as a pickup line. Ever. At any rate, music fans clearly aren't going to conspire to resurrect the career of Steely Dan, in spite of their endorsement of Yacht Rock. This sort of thing only works some of the time for some of the people. The next band this is going to work for is Electric Light Orchestra, who'll be the Hall & Oates of 2010–2020. Mark my words.

  As a rule, popular music is rarely cool but often catchy, like the fine work of the Pussycat Dolls and Steely Dan—two bands you never thought you'd see in a sentence together. The conundrum presented by popularity is that it has the power to shame music into being uncool. You might find this force pulling some of your favorite bands from cool into the mainstream (which is how a guilty pleasure is born). That is when you have to decide what you are: loyalist or elitist.

  One instance of such shaming went down between the Shins and the Zach Braff movie Garden State. I have to preface this story by telling you: I knew about the Shins a million years before you did. Or at least it feels that way.

  This is how the music industry works: someone hears a promising new sound and then calls everyone in their network phone tree to give them a heads-up. Before long, you have 500 people in the industry abuzz about some new band. If you've ever wondered how Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend happened, that's a pretty good summary, minus some boring marketing plans that got drawn up after the initial "Hey, these guys are awesome" phone calls were placed. Not one story about the surprising rise of either of these bands ever mentions that they
're both managed by powerhouse music-industry stalwarts who could pick up the phone and call just about anyone they wanted to get their bands listened to. Who you know really is important, but it's also possible to make things happen in this industry by sheer force of personality (please refer to Andrew W.K., R. Kelly's whole Trapped in the Closet saga). Obviously the music someone is standing on the mountaintop shouting about should be worth shouting about, but that's the only caveat.

  I got a promo of the first Shins album, Oh, Inverted World, in the little white sleeve that Sub Pop used to send CDs in. I still have it, but it's too scratched to play without skipping. As soon as CDs with artwork were available, I asked for a case of them so I could personally hand them out to my coworkers at MTV. My God, I was in love with the band, and I was going to the mats for them. I wasn't just spreading the word at work. I made dozens of friends buy this album. This band ...well, saying they changed my life would be the sort of overly dramatic thing that makes you want to vomit, but I was madly, badly in love with them.

  The Shins came to New York for the College Music Journal's (CMJ) annual conference in 2003, circa the release of their second album, Chutes Too Narrow. Sub Pop's general manager, Megan Jasper, and I were talking about how we might all get together. I forget exactly whose idea it was, but we decided we would take the Shins and the esteemed cofounder of Sub Pop Records, Jonathan Poneman, to get pedicures. Poneman fell asleep in the massage chair and the Shins singer James Mercer had each of his toenails painted different colors. They all had hideous, hairy man toes. It was the most memorable spa treatment I've ever had.

  By the time this second album came out, the slow but positive word of mouth on the Shins' first album had taken hold and people were actually starting to care. MTV2 played their video, McDonald's used "New Slang" in a commercial, and the band played on an episode of Gilmore Girls. It felt like music everyone was starting to know about, but in a good way. Then, in the fall of 2004, Garden State was released.

  You know what happens next: that scene where a dog humps Zach Braff's leg, Natalie Portman tells him that "New Slang" will change his life, and then they stare at each other while he listens to it for about fifteen seconds. It is the most jaw-dropping moment of music and film merging in recorded history.

  When this movie came out, the characters and music were a revelation. There were other contemporary filmmakers who had captured our ethos and aspirations—Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, even John Hughes—but no one had ever done what Zach Braff did. No one had crossed the line between placing cool music in a movie and actually using dialogue and characters to tell the audience what music to like. Molly Ringwald never turned to the camera to explain that Pretty in Pink was so titled because she'd played the Psychedelic Furs' songs for Hughes and he thought it was cool. It was simply understood that what we were hearing was cool because we trusted the source. We now live in a world where using music to make you feel something while watching a movie, TV show, or ad has been de rigueur for decades. No one even notices anymore, much less thinks of it as selling out on the musician's part. Hell, we take it for granted to the point where music snobs will decide a cheesy soap opera like The O.C. is cool based largely on how great the musical cues are.

  The proclamation from Natalie Portman's character that the Shins would change my life was exciting at first, but when it became apparent the movie would be a mainstream success, I became increasingly annoyed. This is nonsensical to the average person, but any indie-rock fan will know this feeling. It's insane to dislike something because more people know about it, but being the first person to find a band in indie subculture feels extremely important. Considering all the effort I had put into telling people about the Shins up until then, it probably seems counterintuitive to be irritated by something that accomplished exactly what I wanted, doesn't it? I promise it wasn't just that I was immature and jealous, which I certainly was a little. It was the way the film went about it—like the world needed to be bludgeoned over the head with the importance of this band. Leaving it in the background and letting people discover their own connection to the song would have been a move we all respected. The shout-out was just too much, and now every Pussycat Dolls fan and soccer mom who saw every rom-com showing at their local mall were on to the Shins—and worse yet, thought our band would change their life.

  When the floodgates opened and mainstream culture came to collect the Shins, the indie-rock subculture had to let go of exclusive custody, but they didn't have to disavow them. Nevertheless, before long the Shins were being derided in the indie-music press, along with Death Cab for Cutie and Sufjan Stevens, as yupster music. That's yuppie + hipster, if you managed to miss the ridiculing types who coined the phrase and publicized the trend. The term was meant to characterize toothless indie rock with mass appeal that was fit to be endorsed by "alternative" parents and "edgy" coffeehouse consumers. It was also meant to knock indie-rock bands down a notch or two, by associating them with an unappealing, and much larger, demographic. The more yupster music was painted as mainstream, the more shameful listening to it became—and the bands unfortunate enough to earn the moniker started to decline into guilty pleasures.

  The yuppie–indie music debate has raged on with rock critics, as many deride the placid tones that some more successful indie bands—from the Shins to Grizzly Bear to Feist—have embraced. In my book these bands don't qualify as guilty pleasures because the majority of the music-listening public still has absolutely no idea who they are. The Shins write hyper-literate lyrics and their music has broad appeal. The whole genre of music they represent is becoming part of the mainstream, and it's a shame the catalyst for their exposure had to be a blowhard moment in film. I cannot, however, agree with the idea that making music accessible to the masses is the same as making bad music. For those who just want to rail against the perceived complacency in yuppie indie music, I have a few Black Eyed Peas albums you need to listen to while you get in touch with true mediocrity, because your insular worldview has become drastically skewed.

  Depending on which demographic you fit into, the Shins could be seen as either uncool or extremely progressive. If your record collection is full of obscure artists, they might be the most mainstream thing you own; if you're less of a record-collecting type, they might be the most out-there album you own. Unless you're into teenage music full time, that is—then you will probably never like them, because they aren't nearly good looking enough for the genre and are an epic fail at dance routines (unlike YouTube sensations OK Go). If someone tells you they don't like the Shins, I would suggest asking them since when. It could be an interesting harbinger of their loyalty to you.

  Maybe you have perfect taste in music and like all the right things, all of the time. I love the Shins, no matter how uncool pop culture attempts to make them, and I like the Pussycat Dolls, no matter how slutty they act. If you say you have no guilty pleasures, I think you're a liar. And as Shania Twain, another of my guilty pleasures, would say: That don't impress me much. Yes, I like Shania Twain. You secretly do too. She is awesome.

  GUILTY PLEASURES PLAYLIST

  THE BLACK EYED PEAS, "Let's Get Retarded"

  SISQÓ, "The Thong Song"

  THE PUSSYCAT DOLLS, "Stickwitu"

  THE PUSSYCAT DOLLS, "Buttons"

  THE PUSSYCAT DOLLS, "Beep"

  DEVO, "Through Being Cool"

  SID VICIOUS, "My Way"

  MÖTLEY CRÜE, "Girls Girls Girls"

  CHRISTOPHER CROSS, "Sailing"

  HALL & OATES, "You Make My Dreams"

  HALL & OATES, "Sara Smile"

  R. KELLY, "Trapped in the Closet"

  THE SHINS, "New Slang"

  THE SMITHS SYNDROME

  YOU KNOW WHEN you like music (and when you hate music), and you know your own record collection well. You have a good idea what songs to put on when your heart's been broken, when you need cheering up, when you need motivation to exercise, when it's raining out—you know what works for you. But ho
w much thought have you given to what your music choices say about you to other people? Boys who love records (and let's face it, at some point we will all date a boy who is a little too into his records) are totally obsessing on what music you like when they meet you. They're using it to figure out how crazy you are before they get involved. They're using it to figure out what songs to include on a mix tape to demonstrate how into you they are. They're using it to figure out how much they're going to have to teach you about really "good" music. They are quietly sussing out what kind of person you are and how they should relate to you by taking a peek at your iPod.

  True story: One night at a concert I met a boy who grabbed my iPod out of my hand and scrolled through it for the express purpose of judging me. He got to the Hs before giving me the nod of approval and making a move on me. That's not to say he wouldn't have tried to make out with me if he thought I had shitty taste in music. He would have. But our conversation the rest of the night would have been very different, without our shared musical taste as an anchor. As it turned out, he worked at an agency that places songs in commercials, and I started getting loads of IMs from him when he was fishing for suggestions to fit projects he was working on (and, you know, for hints about when we could make out some more).

  There is a lot to be gleaned about a person by finding out what bands they like. I can guess a lot of things about your personality and what your life has been like (or what you wish it had been like) based on the music you listen to. When I compress all the mental data I've compiled about what my ideal partner will be like, I find I have one unbreakable rule:

  NEVER DATE A GUY WHO LIKES THE SMITHS TOO MUCH.

  Boys who fall under the thrall of what I refer to as Smiths Syndrome are my must-avoids. Years upon years of friendships, crushes, and relationships, coupled with immense public embarrassment at the hands of love, have taught me that ardent Smiths fans are simply not the right guys for me. Some of my closest guy friends are now or once were overly enthusiastic Smiths fans, but there is a damn good reason I've never kissed any of those guys. Romantically we are peanut butter and tuna fish: two great tastes that are a disaster together.