I was in college the first time I heard "Love Fool" at my friend R's apartment. She was drunk and really stoned when she put it on and the first thing she did when it started playing was apologize for having chosen it. I liked the song fine, but wasn't really paying attention. The rise to fame on the sparkling froth of that song made it easy to dismiss The Cardigans as some fly-by-night producer's invention. A few years later I ducked into a coffee shop to get out of a rainstorm and heard First Band on the Moon playing on the stereo. I listened to it while sipping black coffee, trapped indoors, waiting on the weather to lighten up. That's when I realized that I really like The Cardigans.
I liked the self-deprecating lilt in Nina Persson's voice and the straight-laced fuzz pop that played beneath it. When I heard their version of "Iron Man," like a dilated pastel lullaby of Black Sabbath's rusted metal angst, I was convinced. It was surprising to listen to a band that I had already dismissed and still find something that I responded to so strongly. "Does this mean I like bad music?" I wondered to myself.
A while ago I confessed my affection for The Cardigans to someone I was seeing, trying to explain the allure of Persson's confrontationally vulnerable lyrics. I euphemistically invited her back to my apartment to "listen" to The Cardigans. She rolled her eyes and scoffed. At my place I had to turn off the Cardigans record after two songs because it was too distracting.
I've got a long history of getting attached to crappy music. I wore out my MIlli Vanilli tape in high school. Long after the controversy about the fake singing had subsided I kept listening to the cornflake pop, indulging my teenage yearnings with their glossy sledgehammer of musical emotion. My affection for The Cardigans is probably closer to that indulgence than I care to admit. It's easy to look back a few years and dismiss who you once were based on inexperience and stupidity, but it's something else to do that in the present tense. When I was single and stuck in Prague through the dreary gray months of a winter, that music had been like a sparkling diamond.
Years later, in a new room, hearing all of that defeated indulgence was embarrassing. It wasn't that the music was so bad, but more that I had underestimated how I had changed in the intervening years. It was like trying to have sex with someone surrounded by a peering wallpaper of embarrassing high school pictures of myself. I wanted to have fun and enjoy my body and the body I was with, but suddenly felt like I was trapped in a wallowing flashback from an unhappier time.
Listening to music with other people is such a different experience than listening to it alone. When you're with someone else music is meant to stay out of the way, to be a subconscious lubricant. Alone it becomes physical. It gains intensity and layers of meaning that aren't there when your attention is trained on someone else. Playing The Cardigans was like trying to give someone a gift that I really just wanted for myself. It was selfish and callous and stupid.
So instead, I put on "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey. Listening to her rap along to the ODB breakdown was just about as smitten as I've ever been. I had never listened to the lyrics before that night. I still remember the first line, hearing it in duplicate tumbling from her lips like a begrudging confession of her own stake in the song. Me and Mariah, go back like babies and pacifiers. Swoon.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog
Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings
Love Machine: What Work Is
Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked
Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message