Nothing But Flowers

As things fell apart,

Nobody paid much attention.

-The Talking Heads, Nothing But Flowers

As I creep towards 40, I am aware that I am becoming old.  As a Pastor, I am privileged with the perspective of regularly interacting with people who immediately laugh when I refer to 40 as old, but hear me out.  The world is changing really quickly these days, and things get dated really fast.  The music that I listened to growing up is now considered "classic."  Like The Talking Heads, a band who made waves in the early days of MTV, when it still had something to do with actual music (see, the MTV comment?  It's basically my generation's version of "hey you kids, get off my lawn!" or "pull up your pants junior!" I'm cranky because things aren't like they used to be in the good ol' days.)

Now I pull up the Talking Heads on Pandora (okay, so maybe I'm not letting the world completely pass me by), and I am treated, courtesy of computerized magic, a selection of songs that I really, really love: The Cure, David Bowie, Queen, The Cars, The Police, and The Ramones, I never have to use one of my skips!  By way of contrast, if I set Pandora on a newer band that I like: say Arcade Fire or Passenger, or even Coldplay, I may hear some stuff I like, and some stuff I could live without, but I hear almost nothing that I can sing along to without thinking.  I find that the latest I can go and still feel really "at home" are the Radiohead and Pearl Jam channels (so 1990s, maybe early 2000s for those of you who are thinking, "who the what?" and probably still chuckling that I referred to 40 as old).

The stark reality now is that all of my musical heroes are either decidedly middle aged and some of them are eligible for medicare.  I can listen to the youngins, and even enjoy the music but it doesn't grab my soul like listening to David Byrne's quirky tenor.

As I was listening the other day to The Talking Heads song, Nothing but Flowers, I was struck by the satirical lament of a man who misses the "honky tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-11's" that have been reclaimed by nature as human society reverted to an agricultural way of life.  We experience progress, or regress as favorable or deplorable depending on our perspective.  The song ends with "I can't get used to this lifestyle!"

Nothing but Flowers, is a sort of counterpoint to Joni Mitchell's song: Big Yellow Taxi, (you paved paradise and put up a parking lot).  And while The Talking Heads are certainly urbophiles, they are not seriously criticizing nature or agriculture, they are examining the human response to change, and our innate longing for the familiar.  If things are familiar, no matter how shoddy, cheap or unhealthy they may be, you will find their presence at least vaguely comforting: think McDonalds.

There is nothing inherently wrong with desiring familiarity, but one needs to be aware of the danger of becoming stuck in a narrow perspective: for instance, since we're talking about music, I'll tell you about a journey of mine regarding a certain Alanis Morrisette.  When I was in college Alanis was on major over-rotation on the MTV (again, back then they did actually still play some music) and on the radio, and I was not a big fan.  Actually that's wrong, I was filled with the most righteous of hatred for Ms. Morrisette, because I thought she was shrill and vulgar and cynically using the anger and disenfranchised feelings of "my people" for commercial success.  That and the fact that she made this song called Ironic, which actually had not a single example of irony in it, which made the title and the chorus: "isn't it ironic?" rather annoying to someone who fancied themselves literate, but apparently not to the general public, because the song was super-popular and on the TV and radio all the time.

But the core reason why I hated Alanis, was that she represented the commercialization of something that I had held very dear: alternative music, going back to the Talking Heads and The Cure, and going all the way up to Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, I was, and am, a fan of "alternative" music.  And Alanis was a Nickolodean child star trying to crash the grunge party, and I was just kind of like, "GRR, get off my lawn you crazy... girl."

Then she played God.  Literally, in Kevin Smith's movie Dogma, and it was really good, and I have to admit, playing God can't be an easy thing to do, especially for a young woman, when usually that part is reserved for guys that look like George Burns.  Then, I guess, at some point, when I was feeling pretty crappy, I happened to hear Thank You and also saw the video, which is visually striking and mirrors the rather startling vulnerability of the lyrics.

It was also in the waning days of music videos as a true expression of popular art.  In a medium that had so massively marketed sex, here was a video that had a nude woman (the blurs were always there, it was for TV after all), but it wasn't about sexuality.  The song and the video tread a very fine line between being powerful and being sappy, but in my opinion, it holds that tension rather well.  Something that doesn't happen very often in the age of mass-market entertainment.

We live in tensions like that, we need to learn to be open to new things, even if they make you a little uncomfortable.  The reason I think we become most attached to the music of our youth is because we invest our feelings in it when we're young.  It becomes a part of how we grow, but at some point we start to learn to make ourselves less vulnerable, and thus we stop growing, and perhaps even think that it's okay to stop growing, stop trying new things, stop being vulnerable.

And that's when things fall apart, because there's nothing else for them to do.