“I don't know anything about art but I know what I like.”
That simple yet deep nugget of personal insight comes from the master himself, the legendary Orson Welles, offered up during a series of conversations he had with director Peter Bogdanovich. They were discussing... well, everything, really, as Welles was known for being quite the raconteur.
But in this specific instance, he was explaining that if a "work of art" doesn't speak to him, then he doesn't feel like he has to make an effort to relate to it. He likes a lot of stuff, but he doesn't go out of his way to appreciate things that don't speak to him on some level.
Welles and I are on the same page. There's an entire spectrum of pop culture and fine art that I've been exposed to that does nothing for me. I gave it all a try, but at the end of the day, none of it spoke to me. Many people love reggae… I don't. Some people really dig David Hockney... I could care less. Some people live for the ballet... I'm a no-show. But that's not unusual, or petty. It's just human nature. Everyone has their "likes" and "don't likes". Some stuff gets you going, some stuff leaves you cold.
And is there any subject - apart from politics and religion - that divides people more than music? Music fans harbor very passionate opinions about the bands and artists and genres that they love. And boy do they love to debate them. Elvis or The Beatles. Rock or country. Milli or Vanilli. Everyone has an opinion when it comes to music.
Every once and a while, however, something comes along that can surprise you and change your opinion about a band, or even an entire genre. For instance, take jazz. Back in the day, I gave everything jazz a wide berth. It wasn't that I hated it, I just had no interest in it at all. And to be honest, I didn't get it. My mind wasn't ready to accept what jazz had to offer. Then one day in maybe 1997 or 1998, a review of Stan Getz's and João Gilberto's self-titled album from 1963 (the one with "The Girl From Ipanema") enticed me into buying the CD. And that one album opened my eyes and ears to the wonders of jazz. I now have hundreds of jazz albums, and listen to my jazz playlists a couple of times a week.
But the merest possibility of enjoying jazz couldn't have even dented my thick "I don't like it" skull if I hadn't had my attitude adjusted back in 1983, around my seventeenth birthday. Completely by accident, my teenage self discovered that opening your mind to something new can actually change everything for the better. Thanks to the cultural revolutionaries who ran MTV, my entire way of approaching the world was upended by the majestic New Wave sound and style of...
A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS.
May 24th, 1982 was a day that changed my life forever. I experienced an event that rocked me to the very core of my soul. Everything I considered right and good in the world was upended and torn asunder.
What was their earth-shaking tragedy? No, neither of my parents died. Nor did we lose our house to the bank. I wasn't diagnosed with a terminal disease. The US didn't declare war with Russia. But any of those things would have been a walk in the park compared to what happened on that fateful day.
That was the day that Queen released Hot Space.
I'm going to allow myself a moment here to absorb your expressions of sympathy, your condolences, your wails of empathetic grief. Thank you for understanding the abysmal depths of my pain. Because as a young man whose entire worldly sense of self was based on the musical stylings of Freddie Mercury and his bandmates, I was existentially gobsmacked by the unexpected sonic left turn Queen took with their eleventh album.
Even though the overdubbed bombastic vibe that Queen had cultivated since Queen II had been stripped down to just pure rock 'n' pop for their platinum-selling album The Game, Freddie decided to push the band into the territory of the electronic dance scene he'd discovered in the clubs in Germany. The result was a synthesizer-heavy funk/rock platter that confused everyone. It was not well received, and that's being polite. The reception was so bad in the US that Queen didn't return to America until 2005, twenty-three years later. To this day, Hot Space is the most divisive album in Queen's entire catalog, one of those "you either love it or hate it" things that polarizes fans.
At the time, I was defiantly in the "hate it" camp. I mean, I tried to embrace it. I really did. But it was difficult. Apart from a couple of songs (including "Under Pressure", which had actually been released in the US on their Greatest Hits album first), it was so different from what came before, I just couldn't get into it.
I was so bummed out, I turned my back on Queen completely. Yeah, I know that sounds like the reaction a pissy teenage girl has when she finds out her high school crush is going to the prom with the class slut. But at the time, my life was incredibly simple. I only had four things taking up space in my brain: School. Friends. Family. And Queen. When Queen let me down, especially coming on the heels of the worst year my family had ever suffered through, I was crushed.
So I stopped listening to them altogether. I went completely cold Queen turkey. My friend Tom, who introduced me to Queen in the first place, wasn't as willing to toss them aside as I was. He was a real fan. He maintained the course. I couldn't. It was too painful. I put my LPs and tapes aside and moved on.
For the next year, I was adrift musically. Sure, there were some songs I heard on the radio or MTV that I liked. Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes" finally got him some much-deserved attention on this side of the Atlantic. Peter Gabriel channeled his love of Motown songs into the inscrutable "Shock The Monkey". Def Leppard's "Photograph" video kept me company during a week I recovered from foot surgery. As a teenager, there's no way I could escape the lure of contemporary music. But none of those bands captivated me. None of them came anywhere close to replacing Queen in my heart.
And then one night in the spring of 1983, a few days before my birthday, when I was absentmindedly watching the boob tube, this happened:
HOLY CRAP.
This commercial knocked me for a loop. Go ahead, laugh all you want, you unbelievers. But everything about this upcoming video for "Wishing" sucked me in. Outer space! Synthesizers! And that glorious, glorious hair!
For almost twelve post-Queen months I'd been hearing music in shades of dull gray. Yet just like Dorothy stepping through her tornado-tossed home into the Technicolor fantasy land of Oz, I found myself in the presence of a song (well, a snippet of a song) that splashed every color of the rainbow all over my musical spectrum. There's actually just a few seconds of the song and the video in that commercial, but that didn't matter to me. My mind was officially blown.
So that following Friday, I canceled all my big plans for the night so I could experience the glory of this World Premiere Video. (Ha! Fooled you! I was a nerdy unattractive geek that no woman wanted anywhere near them! Sitting in the den with my family was my plan every Friday night!) I uncharacteristically put my foot down and made it clear that I needed the TV during the hour in which the video would air. I guess since it was my birthday, the family humored me. They all gave me a wide berth that night, and I claimed my spot right in front of the set.
And that night... well, not to put too fine a point on it, but... my life changed forever.
"Wishing" was everything I'd hoped it would be, and more. (I'm talking about both the song and the video.) Musically, it's a classically constructed pop song, with a strong but simple melody that sticks in your brain. The band mixes their analog guitar and bass work with synthesizers and electric drums, creating a unique sound that I wasn't expecting. And since I was a hopeless romantic back then, the lyrics clubbed me over the head with all sorts of lovesick notions.
And the video itself... Looking back on it now, it's kind of spare, and the video compositing isn't the best. But at the time, as I was in the first stages of really scrutinizing the skill behind sci-fi design in movies and TV shows, the various space vistas and spaceship corridors gave me all sorts of ideas for the comic books and superheroes I was concocting in my bedroom. Visually and musically, this first viewing of the "Wishing" video was a watershed moment in my pop culture education. Some of you might not consider "Wishing" to be art, but I definitely knew I liked it.
The weekend after I had that awesome World Premiere Video experience, I sauntered into Jerry's Records at the mall and purchased the 45 for "Wishing". Not long after, I stumbled across a picture disc LP of Listen, the album that "Wishing" was on. And that fall, when I got my job as a bagboy, one of the first things I purchased was the band's debut album on tape. (Arista used this cool orange-red plastic for their cassette cases, which really stood out on the shelves.) I snagged a promotional poster for Listen from Marty's Records that Mom took to work and laminated for me. For a good ten month span, I was all Seagulls, all the time.
Listen wasn't just a one-trick pony, either. The Seagulls took the clout that their debut album afforded them and set out to create something that was familiar yet different. "Nightmares" is one of the most haunting things I've ever heard, all gossamer minor chords and nearly-whispered vocals. "(It's Not Me) Talking" is a hard-driving New Wave rock hybrid that draws on more sci-fi elements, this time communication with aliens. There's a short instrumental called "2:30" that sounds like an improvised jam that the band decided was too good to stuff away in a drawer. And the version of "Wishing" on the album is a full minute longer than the radio version! I gave Listen a... well, a listen every day for months. The Seagulls made a life-long fan out of me.
I would give almost anything to have that hair. It’s iconic.
Okay, so maybe my ranting about how "Wishing" affected me is a tad hyperbolic and over the top. It's just a stupid music video for a stupid pop song, after all. But experiencing that four minute promotional film actually shifted something inside me, something I wasn't able to identify until later. So perhaps it's more accurate to say my mindset changed forever. Or maybe my attitude. Whatever type or level of personal change you want to ascribe it to, the impact was deep. And permanent.
See, I had been very very rigid in what I liked and what I didn't like. When Tom sold me on the greatness of Queen, the amorphous nature of my youthful musical tastes kind of ossified into this monolithic "Queen is all" mindset. A mindset that made it impossible for any other band to gain even the tiniest of handholds.
My birthday falling squarely in the month of May makes me a Taurus. You may or may not put any stock in the esoteric nature of astrology, but there are some truths to be found if you look deep enough. For instance, one of the main trademarks of a true Taurus is that they're stubborn. Not easily swayed. "Bull headed", if you will.
And I can honestly say that I struggle with that particular trait at times. In some ways, I'm carefree to a fault, like running off to California with a girlfriend and only the merest hint of a plan. Yet in other ways, I'm as immobile as a mountain, as evidenced by my decades-long refusal to eat raw tomatoes. (I don't care if they're delicious and healthy. They're the Devil's fruit, so stop trying to change my mind, Suzie!)
For instance, my brother had really gotten into Men Without Hats, when "The Safety Dance" stormed the charts in 1982. It got to the point where he badgered Mom and Dad into buying him their debut album, Rhythm Of Youth. But me, I wanted nothing to do with it. I refused to listen to any of the songs he tried to play for me. If it wasn't Queen, I wasn't going to give it more than a casual glance. (I was the same way with comic books. My friend Brett tried to get me to read X-Men, but I refused. I was a Captain America man all the way.)
Being Queen-less for the better part of a year, however, returned me to some sort of primordial state of music appreciation. And when A Flock Of Seagulls soared into my life (see what I did there?), with their sci-fi stylings and New Wave sonic palette, I was a tabula rasa again, a blank slate ready to be imprinted by a worthy band.
Thanks to AFOS (that's what us real fans call them) making room in my head for an entirely new style of music, I was ready to open my arms and embrace an incredible amount of bands. Ultravox. Naked Eyes. Roxy Music. Pete Shelley. Real Life. Talk Talk. Thompson Twins. Modern English. Howard Jones. Even the aforementioned Men Without Hats. (Especially them!) An insane amount of new and exciting music embedded itself into my DNA, to the point where it's all still a vital part of my regular listening habits. And to think it all started with Listen.
My first day of college. And one of the only things I brought with me was my precious AFOS poster.
A Flock Of Seagulls didn't last, unfortunately. The original line up splintered after 1984's The Story Of A Young Heart, and despite a couple of reunions, there's never been even a slim chance they'd get the band back together and continue the legacy. But while they were together, they burned white-hot in my little world.
The sad thing is, before AFOS decided to call it quits, they'd already became sort of a joke in certain circles. In almost no time at all they went from being New Wave pioneers to music snob punchlines. People would look down on them with an unearned air of pop culture superiority and slam almost every aspect of their existence. They got raked over the coals for the inexpensiveness of their early videos. They got taken to task for their simple, uncomplicated lyrics. And don't get me started on the abuse Mike Score took for his iconic hairstyle.
I found myself defending my unshakable love for AFOS on a regular basis. People would walk into my dorm room and point to my precious Listen poster and shake their heads. One British guy in the dorm who considered himself cooler than everyone else because he spiked his hair and listened to Motörhead went through my tape collection one day and, pulling out an AFOS cassette, told me that everything I listened to was crap. And there was one specific night when The Ex's sister's douchebag boyfriend found out I loved AFOS and spent a good hour pontificating about how empty and commercial the music of the early 80s was.
Thank goodness for my star sign, though. One of the few ways my stubborn Taurean nature served me well: I refused to back down! Every time some jerk or know-it-all would sneer in my general direction about AFOS, or Queen, or any of the bands I unapologetically loved, I'd let them have it with both barrels. Sometimes I'd lecture them with a carefully crafted counter-argument. Other times I'd just lash out with cathartic vulgarity. Either way, they left my presence knowing they'd messed with the wrong fan.
But all this pointless music warfare taught me a valuable lesson: you have no right to judge what someone else likes. The years of being beaten up for my musical tastes made me realize that by slamming someone else's favorite musician (or director, or author, or painter, or baseball team, or whatever), I was being just as narrow-minded and blinkered as the troglodytes who'd been attacking me for years.
Here's a perfect example: I'm no fan of the band U2. Back in the day, when someone would bring them up, my knee-jerk reaction would be to blurt out "U2 sucks!" That's a a broad, general statement, declaring as fact that U2 is in no way good at all. These days, though, with a little clarity and life experience behind me, I know that just isn't true, even as someone who isn't into the band. U2 has a legion of fans who hang on their every note and lyric. I learned that "I'm not a fan of U2" is the way to phrase my stance. That's a personal opinion, not a statement of absolute unchallengeable truth that undermines an actual fan's opinion of the band and their music. There's a big difference between the two approaches.
That's why I stand firm in my belief that A Flock Of Seagulls crafted three classic New Wave albums. That Norm Macdonald's comedy is side-splitting. That every John Waters film should be in the Library Of Congress. That Howard Stern is one of the greatest entertainers ever. That every brushstroke Salvador Dalí ever put to canvas is a work of genius. That all the stuff that makes me happy is the highest of art.
You, on the other hand, may think all that stuff is garbage. But that's okay.
It may not be art to you, but I know what I like.
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and - finally - an award-winning screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.