October 4, 2009
lately i have desperately pondered
10/4/09
A couple of days ago, Tessa and I were wandering around the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver when Lovefool by the Cardigans came on the ambient sound system. I always loved that song, but it reminded me of one of the bitterest cultural moments I'd ever experienced, so I might as well lay it down here.
It was Saturday night of February 22, 1997, and I was in the last few months of my twenties. Already Chapel Hill had become an utterly burned-over district for me personally, culminating in a Valentine's Day party somewhere on Rosemary Street, where I'd walked in just in time to hear my roommate (Pink House alums will know which one) holding forth in the kitchen about how I was a conniving asshole trying to seduce the girl he was trying to date.
This had the unfortunate element of being partially true, but it was certainly not a high priority, nor something I ever acted on... but I digress. The point is, I had basically had it. I didn't need to walk into a fucking party of hipsters, by myself, on Valentine's Day to hear a laundry list of my shortcomings at high volume in front of a rapt crowd desperate for any sort of gossip to shake them out of their po-mo ennui.
The next day, I found out the Cardigans were coming to the Cat's Cradle for a show that had been planned months before their new album had come out. "Lovefool" had shot up the charts over the winter, and as luck would have it, the song was #1 on the charts when they played that Saturday.
The Cardigans
I don't know about you, but I thought that was pretty damned cool. I'd be willing to bet that the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro had never before - nor has since - hosted a band with the #1 single in the country the night they performed it. It's the kind of thing you can't take lightly when you're trying to make magic happen in a formerly sleepy railroad town in the Piedmont of North Carolina, and it didn't hurt that the song itself was catchy as hell.
So my friend Lisa A. and I went to the show - which, admittedly, was packed - and slid our way up to the side of the stage (still the coolest place to watch bands at the Cradle). The band was really tight, Nina Persson was gorgeous, they introduced "Lovefool" with a self-deprecating remark about the Billboard charts, and then launched into it. Lisa and I started dancing until we looked around at everyone else in the club.
Nothing. Faces without emotion, barely any swaying, just blank stares up at the stage. Old school WXYC disc jockeys with arms folded, younger hipster types staring into middle distance, a giant mosh pit of pure inertia. I slowly scanned this sea of nonchalance, this tundra of gape-mouthed, slack-tongued boredom, and recognized it as the place where spontaneity, unabashed fun and unbridled glee went to die. In that moment, I decided to end my 13 years in Chapel Hill and move away.
Say what you want about Ben Folds (as our roommate at the Pink House, we certainly did) but he coined it perfectly as the "battle of who could care less", and I knew I was going to lose all my remaining oxygen if I stayed there any longer. Obviously, this was way more about my problems than the easily-maligned Cool Kids™ scene in Chapel Hill, which no doubt continues to hum along quite nicely without my righteous indignation in the way.
And certainly folks who stayed there longer than I did managed to make it work in their own amazing way - Annie, Greg, and many other of you who read this blog. But it struck this particular pair of PreciousPants as a metaphor for everything my generation had not accomplished in general, and everything I had not accomplished in specific. My brother Sean was looking for a house in Los Angeles, and within a few months, I was living in the Hollywood Hills.
Of course, that was its own nightmare (read one of my first blogs, ink still wet with anger, about that) but at the time, I figured if I was going to be miserable and full of resentment, I really ought to do it in as large a town as possible. It's funny, when you look at your own past, you see the many opportunities you had to get off the train, and how many times you decided to keep going because, well, surely the scenery had to get better.
I used to think I'd ruined Chapel Hill for me by staying those last two years, '96 and '97, which were so destructive. For many years, it was true; I could barely go back. But now, all that tomcat bullshit and Saturn-returning despair is utterly gone, and when I drive into town, all I think about is being 19 years old, living in the dorm with Jon, Chip and Bud, and loving my Tar Heels.
They say that the act of giving birth releases a chemical that makes the mother forget about the pain soon after the event, allowing her to contemplate giving birth again someday. I would be very surprised if that weren't true about almost everything.
As always, enjoy your writing. You're really good. If you lived in Oklahoma, which would like, never happen, we'd be friends. =)
Yes. You nailed this one.
I love the way songs can conjure up memories that you see from a different angle at every age. Isn’t it amazing how your cumulative experiences (or memory loss) offers you a different context for each reflection? I like the way that tune allowed you neatly reconcile the highs and lows of that part of your life in the spread of probably less than 3 minutes. Time heals all wounds, doesn’t it?
I remember a twangy Beth Orton tune that DH and I enjoyed while cruising the canyons and coast of the West Coast, drop-top style, in 1999 (Fabulous year for budget air travel. We flew across country about 4 times that year for no more than $99 RT). The song is "She Cries Your name" (link above).
Years later, I would hear this obscure tune playing in the Tampa airport, and it would bring back fond memories of carefree days (I was carefree the whole time we were in Tampa, so not so big a reach at the time).
Then...I'd be in TPA again, and hear it again. And again, and again, and again. Didn’t they EVER change their ambient tunes? To this day, I am willing to put money on it. Kinda ruined the flashback for me.
Such a shame how bad WXYC sucks. Chapel Hill deserves much better.
Nice post.
Ian, I was at that show, and love that song.
I was myself a non-dancing, head-bobbing WXYC dj. I was only just learning to let myself dance a little bit at parties, but only WXYC dj parties. But it wasn't because I was a pretentious hipster devoid of emotions, it was because I was a total nerd and too self-conscious to actual move with utter abandon to the music. In my experience, that's the case with most WXYC djs. At parties with mostly music nerds, everyone sort of felt free to relax a bit, or maybe it was just me.
And Paul G, I take offense. WXYC is an amazing radio station, one for which any Tarheel should be proud. Completely free-format, passionate about music instead of obsessed with training drive-time djs, and the first radio station to host a live internet simulcast. And maybe you don't like free jazz, or musique concrete, or microtonal art music, or Tuvan throat-singing, or any of the other million different genres of music that some describe as "noise", but they're forms of artistic expression that some people find valuable, and WXYC was just about the only place to hear them. And being entirely free-format, djs constantly strove to find ways to find points of common contact between disparate types of music, serving a genuine educational function. It is a both jukebox and living museum, and I am honored to have been a part of that.
Out of curiosity, Paul, what would you have preferred?
Um, yeah. What Ehren said. I was also a non-dancing, head-bobbing WXYC dj. And it's not because I was engaged in the battle of who could care less, it's because I'm a self-aware, uncoordinated white chick.
going back to chapel hill is always the lovely time that i didn't have during my years there. i don't mind it, actually -- less about being happy in the moment and more of a "see, this is my town too, mofos."
and did you see those horrible sculptures of oversized breakfast foods in cherry creek? children climbing on a giant bowl of mini-wheats and an omelette is just plain weird. and i usually like weird.
About the hipsters of which you speak: I once wrote a song for them called "I'm Too Cool To Do Anything."
About Chapel Hill: Done-diddy-dunzo. Nuked and paved, and we were lucky enough to be in the glory days as the Next Seattle Who Never Nexted... Like Ben Folds said, now we've got Office Town.
About WXYC: I will defend that most awesome of radio stations to the death.
About my time as a Tarheel Thrillian: Wouldn't change it for the world, ennui and cultivated body odor and hair grease included.
Suddenly, I miss Zen Frisbee...
You are big. It's Chapel Hill that got small.
I liked WXYC, Tuvan throat singing and all. Isn't Anne Litt of KCRW a former WXYC dj?
WXYC kicks ass. I still listen to it over the Internet sometimes.
Ehren,
WXYC is the feather in the cap of the elitism Ian brushes past in this post. And my problems with WXYC while I was at UNC were the following:
From my first days at UNC after I saw that catchy-ass alphabet bumper sticker, I couldn't wait to hear what I had built up in my head to be the end all, be all of college radio stations, WXYC. I couldn't wait to hear classic rock shows, hip hop shows, talk shows, different genre shows, all that is unique and beautiful about a student-run radio station, but what I heard was nothing like that at all.
The free-format programming you describe constrained WXYC more than it liberated it and effectively cut the station off from the mainstream, making it less part of the University and more of a sideshow. You would think that a free-format style would allow different college-aged kids (and their burgeoning loves of music) to decide what music they wanted to play and how they wanted to run their radio shows. But instead the czars at the station forbid any college student from trying to show personality on the radio and even went so far as to control the genres they were allowed to play from. A college radio station should not be so prohibitive and limiting.
I applied to be a DJ my first semester at Chapel Hill and at the main interest meeting, the station manager said something to the effect, “Even though we may not be popular in Chapel Hill, we do have overseas internet listenership.” Touting your overseas internet listeners to make up for the fact that no one in your own town wants to listen to your station is sad and should be a sign to maybe take things in a slightly different direction, but not for WXYC. And please believe me (since I mentioned it) that I hold no real bias against the station b/c I was not selected to be a DJ.
WXYC could have been so much more. I attended two of the WXYC sponsored 80s Dances at the Cradle, which were a blast. They were also frustrating though b/c they let me know that the Tar Heels running ‘XYC did in fact know fun, good music, they just chose not to ever play it.
I truly feel a radio station can be the pulse of a college campus when done properly, but instead WXYC is more like a failed art experiment. I understand that it is a place for certain genres of music to be heard that have no other listening forum, but I don’t feel the sole radio station of a college should have to take on that heavy burden alone.
That’s my take on it, a few years removed. Glad it was something that gave you enjoyment through your time at the Hill.
Go Heels,Paul G (’03)
Paul G, I also went to a WXYC '80s Dance at the Cradle -- only the one I went to was in 1992!
Ian-
You can't have it both ways. You romanticize Chapel Hill at every opportunity but then distance yourself from those ennui-drenched hipsterati of the late 90s. It's as if the Chapel Hill you inhabited was the 'real' Chapel Hill and everyone before and since weren't as cool and how you left at the right time.
I could do the exact same post about Iowa City in the early 90's. How Buffalo Tom played Gabe's w/JSBX on the night they topped the CMJ Charts with "Let Me Come Over" and that I broke up with a girl over 'Taillights Fade'. The Deadwood was never the same after 1993. Shooting hoops with BJ Armstrong at the Field House. How I sat a table away from Reagan when he ate at Hamburg Inn No. 2 or that once Fries and Dillburger closed, all culinary life ended in IC.
Everyone wants to think that their college town peaked while they were there. And apparently Chapel Hill and Iowa City did.
p.s. - Thanks for the Chapel Hill tip on that AT&T TV ad, I didn't know that.
Ken - What good are memories if you can't have it both ways?
Ian –
Consider this a warning in advance that this post is only tangentially related to the topic.
I doubt you remember me, but we exchanged a few e-mails a while back when I discovered this website. I’ve been checking in on your blog every week or two for several years now. I was a senior (and #4) at Chi Psi in spring ‘97, and man, I wish I’d known you better. To me you were a bit of an enigma – the old bro who showed up for basketball from time to time, and folks at the Lodge said you’d written a book and had been on Oprah. But I never really got to know you.
I’m not sure how we’d have gotten along. To be honest, I disagree with some of your political/social philosophy, even if it’s more a matter of degree than direction. I feel insulted by some of your more vehement posts, but I come back because even when I disagree with you I can feel the truth of where you are coming from. You’re the kind of person from whom I could have learned a lot, in terms of alternate perspectives and value systems, and I wish I’d given myself that chance – so I guess I do that now in a more passive way by reading what you have to say.
Anyway, more topically, I’ve recently rediscovered the Cardigans through my 14 month old son. I realized that whenever they showed up on my mixes he’d stand transfixed and listen. Something about her voice just mesmerizes him. Just today my wife was able to clip his nails (my, how the ‘difficulties’ in life evolve!) in peace for the first time in months by distracting him with “Erase and Rewind” on youtube. So somehow your story – the time, the nostalgia, and the Cardigans – managed to motivate me to post here for the first time. Even though you cite this concert as your motivation for leaving Chapel Hill, I suspect that I would have enjoyed being there with you.
Bruce, that is a very kind comment - no doubt we would have bonded over hard apple cider down in the basement at Hell over pool, yes?
I think I remember when you went to that show, Ian me boy. I split town two months later. I think you can remember it both ways; I had completely exhausted all my possibilities there, but I'm still nostalgic for it.