All I Want Is You
This is about liking stuff.
Last weekend I met up with a new friend, S, who toward the end of our time together mentioned to me that it’s now cool among those in-the-know to dislike Radiohead. I understand the temptation, if you have heard Autechre or Can or Mingus or Aphex Twin, to let everyone know that, actually, Radiohead isn’t that original; they were just doing stuff that had already been done by these other musicians. I also understand the impulse to dislike popular things, since popular things are often designed to be that way to make someone a whole lot of money. They are lowest-common-denominator goods; they are made to be consumed easily and frictionlessly; they are trendy; they are virtually meaningless; they represent the worst of what capitalism has done to culture.
Because of all of this, I for some time nursed a general skepticism of things a lot of people like. I thought that if I let myself enjoy things that were popular it would somehow compromise my taste, that it would delegitimize opinions I had about more obscure things I liked, that it would dull my senses to things that are actually good to the point where I would stop being able to differentiate the things I like from the things other people like, as though that distinction is somehow important, as though the beauty liking things — music, art, food, whatever — isn’t to be found primarily in the moment when we discover someone else likes them, too. Imagine spending the rest of your life going to concerts where you’re the only person there because you’re the only person smart or cool or enlightened enough to like whoever the artist is. I have a hard time believing the loneliness would be worth the feeling that somehow you are special.
I’ve been on a U2 kick lately because a few days ago the Spotify algorithm played me their song “All I Want Is You,” and I remembered how much I love that song and how much I love a lot of U2’s music. When I first heard U2 approximately twenty years ago, it was already considered mildly embarrassing to like them, and now I’m fairly certain that arbiters of taste would say liking U2 is “cringe,” the word we use to describe things that reflect the kind of uncut earnestness which, when we witness it in other people, makes us want to pretend we would never stoop to such unashamed depth of unvarnished feeling ourselves.
I think embarrassment is a waste of time. I don’t understand how anyone can listen to Edge’s edging (sorry) guitar on “All I Want Is You” and think “yeah this is bad.” The level of rock restraint in that song is spectacular; there is a whole lot more that could be happening guitars-wise, percussion-wise; it could be louder; it could have a sweeping bridge; it could be huge and screaming, but it isn’t. It inches right up to all of that but doesn’t get there. Restrained form matches longing content, like in Bruce’s “I’m on Fire,” with its two-and-a-half minutes of pure unmet desire, or Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film),” with its gesturing toward a big release that never comes.
I only know a few of U2’s records (Rattle and Hum, The Joshua Tree, All That You Can’t Leave Behind) well enough to really write about them, and, unlike with Radiohead, I do not believe everything they have ever made is a ten out of ten. So, it would be easy for me, a person who has in the past exhibited tendencies toward snobbery, to dismiss U2 as embarrassing or cringe.
The impulse toward snobbery is a defense mechanism in a world wherein both our individuality and interconnectedness are under constant threat. We can’t be one of millions just like us if we choose to differentiate ourselves first. We can’t be alienated if we choose to isolate ourselves first.
Sometimes I send my friend M songs accompanied by the message “you’re welcome” to let him know that 1. I know he will for sure like it; 2. I am proud that I know him so well; 3. I am smug that I found a song he will like before he found it himself. (Sometimes 3 is not the case, as when I recently sent him a couple of Big Thief songs, and he quoted Gang Starr at me: “son, I am not new to this; I am true to this.”) He’ll send me stuff, too, lots of people will, and I will be filled with a deep desire to like it, and then to figure out why I do, and I’m never scared or threatened because it turns out liking stuff, and liking ever-more of it, and liking it ever-better, with greater conviction, with more of myself, feels great. It is all I ever want to do.