Hootie & the Blowfish Killed My Rock and Roll Dreams
Two poems by Daniel Nester
Hootie & the Blowfish Killed My Rock and Roll Dreams
The death of college rock: September 5, 1995
I’m drunk on a Tuesday at the old Knitting Factory and stumble into Milano’s, where by chance the MTV Video Music Awards is on. Drew Barrymore presents the Video Vanguard Award to R.E.M. and I am 15 again, pogoing in the mud in Piscataway, hearing Michael Stipe sing for the first time. I wore white jeans and a Corona poncho. I cut off the jeans, chucked the poncho, and wore a Murmur shirt for months. I thought I’d outgrown band worship, but watching R.E.M. on the screen feels as if my childhood had won, as if arty kids everywhere had won. The feeling does not last. Not much later, Hootie & the Blowfish play their hit, “Only Wanna Be with You.” If you were able to establish which songs were objectively awful, this song would be the index case against which all other objectively awful songs were compared. Hootie wears a backwards baseball cap. The Blowfish are all in cargo shorts. As they play, the audience bobs their arms like they’re at a frat house. And then comes the real atrocity. After the guitar solo, the Blowfish stop strumming and raise plastic cups. “We’d like to drink this to R.E.M.,” Hootie says. “If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be a band.” The crowd cheers. The cameras do not cut to members of R.E.M. because if they did, we would have seen their looks of disgust and horror. This is the moment college rock died, in case anyone is wondering. The band plods on, cargo shorts and baseball cap, and my night ends like most nights ended back then: I stumbled outside, hazy, unchanged.
On Realizing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” Has the Same Chords as the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular”
Of course we’re always disappointed on some level, and since of course we know the opposite of logic is regret, by which we mean the act of regretting, and therefore the prototype of heartache are songs about cowboys who sing sad songs, which is to say that for each brainy kid who flips through Edith Hamilton there is a freak who looks for certain kinds of danger, but not the usual stuff, to wit, epic snafus or wrecked careers, we’re talking about the opposite of bluffing, which is betrayal, by which we mean the act of betraying, and a sad cowboy song will always break you down, irregardless of one’s cowboy status, just like the opposite of myth is description, which is to say the act of describing, or why every Greek maiden pulls a double-cross, or every poor god gets tied down to a rock or turned into a cow, to which I would add every barfly I’ve ever met will croon along to Don McLean to drown out a rehash of their fuck-ups, which is to say, short story long, that every barfly to whom I’ve told a joke says they’ve heard the joke before, which is to say the opposite of a poem is just like the ache for one more poem like it.
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