In retrospect, I learned the wrong lesson from my teenage years. I spent most of high school listening to increasingly obscure bands, the more alternative the better, and I had nothing but disdain for mainstream culture. Whatever happened out there in the real world, I didn’t care. It wasn’t for me. In fact, I wore my ignorance like a badge of pride; I loved the fact I had no idea what this or that pop star had recently been up to.
What I was good at was talking about garage bands from the 1960s and post-punk bands from the 1970s with kids like me who had nothing better to do with their time. We’d one up each other relentlessly; you knew you’d won the MSN Messenger conversation when you’d come out of it without a single “oh, I haven’t heard of them!”
Ideally, you wanted to not only mention some deeply random singer with maybe one great single from 1981, but also explain that the best version of that song wasn’t online, and only existed on a physical record. Did you own it? Pah, of course you did.
I changed as I grew up, but this tedious hipster streak stayed quite firmly with me. I let some of my defences down and allowed myself to, once in a while, sincerely appreciate a very mainstream pop album, but that was an exception. Even as an adult, I looked for the indie little TV show that got cancelled after two seasons; the movie that barely made it into cinemas; the book you definitely wouldn’t have heard of.
The great thing was that the internet kept rewarding my hyper-individualist streak. Algorithms got better and better over time and they could tell me what I’d like, even if it was something few others would enjoy. It made me feel special, and it was something we joked about with friends and relatives. Somehow, at some point in the 2010s, we all ended up doing our own thing.
Every conversation about cultural pursuits felt like absurdist comedy, as you would ask “Well have you seen this film? It’s great!” But then the other person would say that no, in fact they’d never heard of it before, but have you been following this TV series? And you’d have to confess that maybe the name rang the vaguest of bells but honestly, you couldn’t even remember where you’d seen it. You’d both promise to make a note to add X or Y or Z to the list and then you wouldn’t do it, and they wouldn’t do it either, and you’d repeat it all the next time you saw each other.
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I feel a bit ashamed of it now, but it took me years to realise what I’d lost. What had happened wasn’t a continuation of what I’d known as an edgy kid, but quite the opposite. What was so good and fun about my blogging years wasn’t that I kept winning at knowing the most bands no one else knew about; it was, to fall head-first into a cliche, the friends I made along the way. What the internet offered me seemed good but it was ultimately quite hollow. As it turned out, finding media you enjoy and that feels like it was made for you will never be truly fulfilling if you can’t then chat about it with real, live people.
This epiphany came to me shamefully late – namely, the other day when I left a party where I’d discussed Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Knives Out movie, with a group of acquaintances. The drinks had been of the networking kind, and they threatened to be a tad awkward. In order to break the ice, I opened every conversation by saying that I’d just come from the cinema. Amazingly, everyone had seen at least one of the movies in the franchise, and both had opinions to offer and were keen to hear my own.
It felt – well, it felt oddly old-fashioned. Talking about a newly released flick? Which I’d left my house to watch? Hang on, I’m sorry, I think my beeper’s going off. More seriously, it was a minor event, but one which I told myself had to matter. I can’t fix an entire culture by myself, but I can choose to make more of an effort.
I can go out of my way to listen and watch and visit things which I’m pretty convinced won’t be my thing, because they may come up in conversation with other people, and finding common ground is pleasant, even if it takes the shape of (polite) disagreement. Really, it’s a conclusion I should have come to a few months ago, when I went to see the Ithell Colquhoun show at Tate Britain with a friend. I was convinced I wouldn’t enjoy it and – lo and behold – I didn’t. I really disliked basically all the works. None of it moved me. I found some of it actively annoying.
Do you know what the best bit of it was? I got to whinge about it to my pal afterwards. It was glorious. How did I spend so long not realising that, most of the time, that’s the whole point?
