You Can't Go Home Again: Revisiting The Music Of Your Past
by Howard Cressi-Stallworth
There is a difference between the music you choose to define yourself with and the uncontrolled music that soundtracks your life. Increasingly, headphones and earbuds allowed individuals to shut themselves out in cars, at parties, and the general environment and define who they are via the music they choose for themselves. However, just as often the music surrounding them is so inhumanly popular that it defines that person as well.
As you age into your teen years, choosing your music is the first real choice of defining who you want to be based on your own terms. For many people this is often soundtracked by music set out by their peers or young adults operating on “cool” terms or looks, the der rigur bands/artists deemed cool. For a certain kind of music nerd, you’re often forming your identity on what you define yourself with rather than what you’re surrounded with. Many thought that they had figured out what they wanted to be their entire lives based on what they wanted to hear. However, what truly impacts them is what they were surrounded by as children musically. Oftentimes, you have no choice but to be surrounded by your Faith Hills and Christina Agularas in any situation at any time, be it a restaurant, movie theater, or school dance. This seeps into your psyche more often than you’re willing to admit.
Situation and control are very interesting concepts to consider when growing up. What you are ultimately exposed to could predicate itself based on your internet connection, let alone what your older or younger siblings expose themselves to. So if by some cosmic contusion you ended up in the culdesac nextdoor (or with a different teacher in school), you could’ve been exposed to classical music and nu-metal instead of classic rock and golden age rap.
Regardless of all those minute changes, there are some unavoidable cultural watersheds and movements that exist within one's life via music. The kinds of songs deaf people are aware of. Crazy In Love, Photograph, Band of Gold, the eternal and ever ringing songs that play throughout malls, cheap roadside stores, movies, television shows, the radio, and cars. The kind of inescapable environments that conform and cloister the young men and women who are often traveling in and out of those environments as children with the child barely keeping up with mom while holding her hand and crossing the street. It’s in the air, it’s in the car, it’s around the corner. Even if you don’t know her name, you know who sang Girl On Fire.
Hanging in the inescapable air of my youth were a multitude of different styles and sounds. Rock was finally falling off its perched cliff. Pop, merging with hip hop and rap, became more widespread than ever before and electronic music was the preferred music to do drugs to more so than it ever was before in the 90s. It was becoming more clear from initial memories and casual music discussion at school, well before we could even tell RnB from rap, that rock was not the preferred nomenclature outside of stalwarts such as RHCP, Blink 182, and Foo Fighters.
What one could callously call the pablum of the mid ‘00s music was a combination of multiple eras and genres crashing against the fall of the music industry and the concurrent rise of rap and hip hop as the dominant cultural force. This wasn’t that. This isn’t about how pop in the 2000s sucked and how rock is real and the only option. If anything I am thankful that rock died out as the dominant cultural force and discussion. Finally, swaths of bearded young and old dismissive rock dorks could finally go away so we can actually treat pop, rnb, and rap as culturally legit, class level importance paramount with the Led Zeppelins and Elton Johns of yore. It was an era when the dominant class was buckling against the far more exciting younger generation that had been building for years and years. This same aging generation complained about a group with such a massive effect on the radio market, that a few songs that played endlessly throughout my upbringing were allowed to exist freely. That group that opened the doors was the endlessly targeted Coldplay.
Without Coldplay gathering the new and old audience of U2, the youngest of Radiohead fans who didn’t like their artier tendencies and tween fans, none of these songs would’ve had outlets. Coldplay were marketed like a rock band but pushed like a pop phenom. They were treated like royalty off of the backs of U2 and Dave Matthews Band, ready to take on any stadium that was willing to fit them and their hoard of fans inside it. They were soft enough to touch the hearts and minds of Christian/Youth Group kids but had just enough power and ease of songwriting to get into softer rock fans’ heads (and of course the teeth gritting begrudging boys in their older sisters’ cars and girlfriends bedrooms.)
Coldplay was the peacemaker that reached multiple audiences: some already built from the start, ready for them to take over, and some new fans who didn’t even know who Radiohead or Travis were. Parachutes and the much larger A Rush of Blood To The Head were the first CDs bought by millions of kids around the world in the latter half of the Millennial generation. More young people have had emotional brushes of the spine to the drums entering on Clocks in a movie trailer than they have enjoyed a Nirvana song. It’s a brand new era, it feels great.
Coldplay were the group that ushered in not only the songs we would hear in those unavoidable situations as younger people but also the groups that would follow suit. When something so large swoops into our hearts and minds there’s often runoffs, skid marks, and car wrecks along the way, the consolation prizes available to the also-rans, the habitually late to the un-cool office parties and moms. This came in the form of two groups specifically, Keane and Five For Fighting. They were the true targets the rock critics should’ve (and some did) sharpen their arrows for, not Coldplay. Take for instance Owl City, who owes their existence to The Postal Service, but really that door was kicked wide open because of Coldplay.
If rock and rap fans thought Coldplay were adult contemporary then they should’ve waited until they were introduced to Five For Fighting. Five For Fighting were every den mom’s favorite new artist, and probably the first act they downloaded onto their brand new ipods. While Superman garnered them national attention in late 2001, One Hundred Years was the big one for them: a lilting Dave Matthews falsetto’d melody accompanied by simple piano and some strings was the song for every trailer and fan made background to Gilmour Girls and The OC footage.
One Hundred Years is a strong enough song carried by its concept, borrowed from Harry Chapin’s Cats In The Cradle, of “here’s an aging narrative about letting one’s life slip away faster than you realize”, all wrapped up with a sentimental chorus and drums right out of a late ‘90s LA soft rock tune. The music itself does enough clever tricks throughout it to keep one’s interest, particularly the 2nd half of the chorus right before the title is mentioned. It's definitely a song that resonates with people, but its concept wears thin quickly with a bridge that feels like it's going to build into Creed territory but doesn’t quite want to reach it.
It’s a tune that does just enough by din of it being a sentimental song, but not enough to warrant elderly emotional investment from a certain kind of music fan. That didn’t stop thousands of people from investing in it themselves, some young and some old. It was no matter, it was a huge hit all coming out of this new era of softer rock and pop. Granted Five For Fighting had been around for a while, but this new layer of soft was more than enough sugar to get this music down.
In addition to Five for Fighting, Keane were the immediate star dust coming out of Coldplay’s supernova explosion into the canon of successful stadium acts. Keane were the drama kid nerds busting out of their bedrooms waiting to sing a chorus to you, whether you liked it or not, along with Panic At The Disco and The Killers, but in scarfs instead of skinny jeans. Bursting onto radio everywhere was the song Everybody's Changing. It’s barely a song, more of a hyper compressed loop based around 3 songs and chords taken right from a Coldplay chordbook. Filled with the kind of synth noises and percussion loops right out of a Groovebox, it flows with ease across your mind every time you hear it in a store.
It’s so strange how this song seemed so big and emotional as a young person but now listening back it's just so flat and uneventful and so underwhelming dynamically. The compression just sucks the life out of any sense of movement on top of the cheap loops. But the worst offender is the soft fey vocals. Who knew that generations of falsetto singers would lend themselves to creating generations of singers who relied on singing falsetto to compensate for their complete lack of pitch and vocal power. It’s unfortunate because there is enough coming chord wise and melody wise that if delivered properly it could’ve been even stronger! You can tell they wrote the entire song around the chorus. It's a great chorus don’t get me wrong but there’s one verse and half of another. None of this mattered because as a kid, the chorus with its ever rising chords and confused lyrical sentiment resonated even if I hadn’t ever felt (or even would feel) that sentiment before. Keane however was no one hit wonder, their other hit was Somewhere Only We Know.
For a song that was written with a tempo and feel lifted directly out of a Coldplay songbook was a song that related to everyone I could think of. It’s lyrically clunky and overtly sentimental and yearning. However at least the singing was a bit more daring in this pre-chorus and chorus! For my money “Somewhere” is a stronger vocal song than “Everybody” but less musically interesting. And yet again, another song written around a chorus! Forget the chorus though, the most important factor is how universal the message of the song title and chorus line is.
To budding young sexually awakening tweens, young children with active imaginations, teens daydreaming in classrooms and young adults wanting to run out of their cubicles is the title Somewhere Only We Know. The title is the strongest part of the song. The aspect that resonates the strongest when you look at the boy or girl, man or woman you’ve been pining for in equal measure and go “hey let’s go somewhere only we know” you know exactly what that means. It can be a Bridge To Terabithia or it can be the back seat. It can be any escape you want it to be.
Despite the escapist aspect, these songs were inescapable in the mid 2000’s. Barnes & Noble's’, coffee shops, and increasingly suburbanized outlets taken from the city and slapped up in faux brick and wood were all soundtracked by these songs, the ultimate peak of softening items for a safer audience. It was all music without edges for situations without identity for people who couldn’t do a thing about it. There was no way this would be escapable until I was a late teenager. I could put on my headphones and turn up whatever music I wanted to soundtrack my life all I wanted but the minute I took them off Keane and Five For Fighting were right there coming out of a speaker near an exit.
It was unavoidable and shaped our lives more than we knew. In the same way kids my age were experiencing Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson with their parents despite hating it, they still have unavoidable fond memories shaped by this situational music. The kind of nostalgic envelopment that was almost impossible to separate when listening and remembering it. I wish I could say that “One Hundred Years”, “Everybody's Changing”, and “Somewhere” were good enough to revisit continuously.
The music is placid and pallid. It is weak and under delivers on returning back to it. Is this what we got when we allowed ourselves to get involved with Coldplay? At least Coldplay had enough of an emotional pedigree to have elder statesmen enjoy them and some amount of album craft to back it up. Brian Eno would’ve never involved himself in Coldplay’s company if he felt they couldn’t have been capable of delivering a solid album or two. I don’t think he could say the same about Keane or Five For Fighting. Quite ironic since in a bid for authenticity and wizened experience the leader of Five told interviewers he grew up on Dark Side of the Moon and Quadrophenia. Well where is your concept album now John? Keane themselves trotted along for the rest of the decade but fell to lackluster songs and under performing albums. No surprise when going back to their previous two biggest hits. But there is something I can’t shake and I continue to mention.
It’s a consistent issue with these types of groups spurred on by a larger groups success. If they can’t deliver big albums allowing them access to a cannon of artists worthy of investing large amounts of time into, then why should we continually revisit their singles? The grandiose classic album statements Five For Fighting were striving for ended up being done in a much better fashion by My Chemical Romance. They couldn’t deliver on their promise of a classic album let alone more than just a single or two. Keane didn’t fare much better, with the majority of their songs relishing in lower chart placing obscurity or to hardcore fans. Groups like Snow Patrol and The Fray capitalized on these failures to become massive successes in the classic sense with their hits How to Save a Life and Chasing Cars.
You can take the groups above and replace their big chart hits with Five For Fighting and Keane’s but it doesn’t replace the intangible. The fact is, certain songs might be stronger but they can’t replace a moment in time continuously revisitable. It’s something born out of control. I enjoy How to Save a Life and Chasing Cars no matter how melodramatic and eyeliner inducing they may be, but at least they are better songs. The issue is, it wasn’t there in those specific moments. And you and I have no control over that. Once you attempt to control every moment of your life you become neurotic and there’s something to letting go that aids in a great spontaneity. Upon repeated revisitation I am only struck with disappointment. Not even nostalgia can shield the reality of these songs. Each time, more and more flaws expose themselves to me. Even “Everybody’s Changing” starts to seem less interesting each time and that is the one that affected me the most musically.
The most important thing to point out is how this music always sounds better in my mind. Every time I hear those opening melodies or chorus they always sounded more explosive and powerful and more resonant in my memory than they are now. There is something to point out about the emotional resonance of a kernel impressed upon someone emotionally at such a specific age in their lives. Right as you are defining your identity but also right as you are impacted by anything in the media regardless of its quality. Like an obsession, I keep coming back to these songs.
That's the problem. I realize recapturing that moment is simply not possible but it’s not an issue because of how the music sounded to me in my memory acting stronger than the music itself. I can’t get out of my head however why I don’t care about this music’s shortcomings. Their melodies fleet throughout my mind amidst other songs of that era. It’s the way the vocals invoke stores visited for the first time, and school hallways to be continuously revisited for the next three years and beyond all soundtracked by those drum sounds and piano chords. It is a very specific tonal temperament of the times that will never be repeated or soundtracked to a life moment again and that is why it’s worth investing in the revisitation.
Disposable but ultimately impactful whether you realize it in the moment or right after it passes. There’s a reason why so many coming of age movies are made. It’s because those directors are consistently trying to capture a moment in their young lives when everything went right because it drives them absolutely crazy that they can’t go back and change time. It’s a mental health neurosis! All of the above mentioned groups had various failures and successes. I could spend time pointing them out but it’s worth more time to meet other people who experienced these songs along with you. These songs have something universal to them due to their features in commercials and television/film.
They were everywhere for a reason, they elicited emotion and genuine feeling no matter how hardened. If their place in the pantheon of great music isn’t accepting towards them, then the individual feeling emoted by each person who experienced it is. You’ll most likely only meet a handful of people who experienced The Electrician by The Walker Brothers in real life or on a big screen, but your connection to people will be magnified when you are an hour into a conversation at a bar in a few years when you mention these songs.
The greater sense of connection overrides these song’s ability to allow people to connect and emote which is greater than the sum of its parts. These songs weren’t meant to be looked at critically, they’re dare I say disposable much like a happy meal toy. However I can say without a doubt I remember and still own some happy meal toys and there are some CDs with artistic merit I would never return to. Overall that’s the important thing to keep in mind. There’s no point revisiting this music with a certain mindset, it's worth revisiting on a night with people you love and strangers you’ve never met in your age group and listen to on the ride home and pack away for the next ten or so years. Why would you want to listen to these songs and feel sad? The point is to enjoy connection and moments of days gone by. You can throw away the toy but not the time spent with it.
When I listen to these three songs I’m not instantly thrown back to that era. If anything it feels lesser each time I hear them. The past feels warm but was impressed upon due to the music that soundtracked it despite not choosing that at all. The memory can remain untainted, no one is forcing me to revisit these songs. Perhaps refusing to revisit the cause of the memory is the best way to remember the memory.