Sometimes stupid and cute ARE enough!

Or, why music snobs can come off it

She wasn’t too bright
But I could tell when she kissed me
That she knew how to get her kicks

—Raspberry Beret, Prince and the Revolution

Every so often I’ll get in a mood to float down the lazy river of musical taste. I put on a Spotify mix and let the songs just slap themselves down on the nostalgia buffet—sort of like that one broccoli salad that you’d never think of outside of a salad bar, but for some reason it’s the most scrumptious “vegetable” on the planet now that it’s right in front of you. Most of the songs I haven’t heard since I was a kid, while listening to the classic rock station in the car with my dad. Turns out “classic” rock, and “oldies,” are moveable terms depending on what decade it currently is.

sigh.

Scootching themselves in between these memory nuggets are a few pleasant surprises of a different sort: songs I’ve never heard by bands I definitely have. Some noteworthy additions include Amnesia by the Tubes, Cindy Incidentally by Faces, and The Unidentified Flying Tuna Trot, by REO Speedwagon. OK so that last one probably slipped in whilst on an “I’m mad at your dad” road trip to Nebraska with an out of pocket (in both senses) gas station cassette purchase. But I don’t remember it, alright?

I was on a similar conveyer belt a recent evening ago. Unintentionally matching the pace of my daily walk with the beat of an especially synthesized willow tree-like 80’s era YES song, a realization snapped into my mind as I double tapped to skip.

I need something dumber.

Lo! and behold the next two tracks were T.Rex.

Now now, keep all the insinuations you think I’m making in your pocket. The measurable difference between Shoot High, Aim Low, and Hot Love, may as well be the Grand Canyon, but that doesn’t make either one of them not good. The peculiar bit here is, that often times, music that doesn’t require as advanced of technical ability, is relegated in light of the fame that being deep, technical, unreachable, or “cerebral,” hustles. Basically, we¹ give too much weight to the “smartness” of music.

I realize this is rich given that we live in an age where more and more music takes less and less effort to make, and to make money on. Makes “Money For Nothing” seem kinda cute now, doesn’t it?

Back to the bands at hand, man.

T.Rex jammed, but they’d never step foot in the same lofty (Greg) lake as YES did. Even now, all the die hard YES fans are frothing up an eloquent rant over the rivalry between YES and ELP—but you’d be hard pressed to say that any of them were born to boogie.

Marc Bolan was never a big generator of complex melodies overlaying dizzying time signatures, but he could do groove, and he could do art. The diehard glam fans might have had a word of two about prog, but they were too busy feelin’ the noize to trifle. Funny, in a roundabout way.

Their contributions to music were entirely different, but both just as valuable, and relevant—you can hang your hat on that.

This brings us to the lyrics prompted at the outset.

Prince himself never forgot the crux of a song is the groove, and his pathological perfectionism always drove it, rather than rub it out. He’s a perfect example of technical prowess, both in playing and performing, balanced seductively with all the addictive and kinetic energy of danceable pop. So, maybe we should choose music a bit more like Prince chose his women, and let the songs (and bands) shine for what they do well, standalone. If you didn’t notice, he never chose any slouches this way.

My last ditch effort to make a point summons Whole Lotta Love to the stand. The song is literally two chords, a blues riff, a blues solo, orgasmic vocals, and absolutely every inch of attitude you can ram into each of those things as humanly possible. Plus a pretty wild experimental section wherein a theremin may have actually blushed. It’s dripping with incitement, and the predominant components are fundamental. Do we care that it’s not Stairway to Heaven? Not any more than we care about how the 20 minutes it took to write Blowin’ in the Wind pales in comparison to the 20 years it took to write Hallelujah.

All I’m saying is, it’s ok to like it because it just feels yummy.

My time in the Spotify sushi carousel gave me time to reflect on the wisdom of loosening up the grip on esotericism in favor of unpretentiousness. As connoisseurs of the auditory banquet, we should relish both the symphony of complexities and artful simplicity. More time, more concerted thought, more deliberation, and more technicality is not necessarily better than a banger that took significantly less of all of those.

After all, there probably wasn’t a whole ton of any of that going on during any of our conceptions.

1. we: the collective self-proclaimed music connoisseurs, with a bend toward the songs of yore