It was a relief in the Berlin airport, right before a long flight back to the US, to find a book to read that I was sure to enjoy: Just Like You by Nick Hornby. Sure enough, I did enjoy it. It was vintage Hornby, and it lasted almost the entire sleepless flight. Almost. I did cut into it at one point to pair it with a movie, a fruity French farce in which two debt-ridden scumbags, on the lookout for free food and drink, charm their way into a cell of eco-protesters, with surprising consequences — one of which is however NOT the final scene, a schmaltzy dénouement in which the clueless savoir-flair of one of the scumbags receives a dose of While You Were Sleeping gravitas and is -- of course -- rewarded with the partnership of the Statue-of-Liberty-visaged sparkplug of the Ecolos in a waltz on a bridge. (I did wonder what the pont was.) This was for me decidedly too much party fizz: I guffawed and snorted throughout much more than one should on a crowded Airbus. I was glad to have Hornby to chase the Folies with sense and sensibility: lightly humorous and cool handling of well-delineated individuals in thrall to a romantic attraction that raises eyebrows at first (sorry, more details would spoil it for you if you want to read it), but in the end reveals itself to all to be a postmodern summum bonum: good enough for now is good enough.
I have always enjoyed Hornby — High Fidelity, A Long Way Down, About a Boy, and another one whose title I don’t remember, maybe About a Band or something like that, or maybe he didn’t write it after all (but who? Roddy Doyle?), but it doesn’t matter because the point is to say that one of the pleasures of Hornby is how he uses music and talks about music.
Pop music, anyway.
Before this book I wouldn’t have used the qualifier “pop.” It never occurred to me that someone as seemingly attuned as Hornby to music’s modes of appeal would turn out to be a musical isolationist who rejects entire colors from the musical rainbow.
It doesn’t spoil any of the story to delve into this apparently defining quirk of his. On page 66-7, Hornby -- via the thoughts of one of the main characters (presumably, but the paragraph reeks of the narrator on high) -- trashes the lute and lute music: Two hours of Its “lugubrious” sound (via movie soundtrack) is enough to make Hornby, in his disguise as a character, want “to gather up every lute in the country and burn them on a gigantic bonfire.”
Ho-hum: would that be the same bonfire of already-disfavored instruments that includes banjos, accordions, and bagpipes, the one lit by tiresome, self-appointed tastemakers of music?
Lute music is lugubrious? There’s plenty of joyous lute music out there, and lots of lively, fleet-fingered stuff as well. Can Hornby really be that ignorant? I set out to find his published musical beliefs, and it turns out that he is similarly clueless about classical music in general. Ah, but savoir-flair makes up for so much.
One of Hornby’s books is Songbook, about songs that have meant something to him. I want to read this book someday, and I’m sure it’ll reward my reading. One of the chapters of the book is about Van Morrison’s song Caravan; the chapter was published online by Medium in 2016.
I suppose I have to give Hornby credit for his disarming honesty. And when I say “disarming,” I mean he totally lays down his rhetorical weapons and says, “I never respond to Mozart or Haydn as music.” I’m like, “what the fugue, man? It’s music, isn’t it?” Not to Hornby. It’s the equivalent of lighting a candle. It’s atmosphere. Next he’s talking about a “they” who diss pop music because it’s too simple, compared with the superior complexity of classical music (also: “They” have another defect in that “they often hate sports, too.” Oooh, that cuts. So much for disarmament.) I can't deny that those assholes are out there, but my experience is that classical musicians — the ones who actually play instruments — tend to have broad musical tastes.
Next, after proclaiming “I’m not an inverted snob” he demonstrates himself to be, in fact, an overt one: “I dislike it [classical music] because it sounds churchy, and because, to my ears at least, it can’t deal with the smaller feelings that constitute a day and a week and a life, and because there are no backing vocals or basslines or guitar solos, and because a lot of people who profess to like it actually don’t really like any music (or any culture) at all, and because I grew up listening to something else, and because it does not possess the ability to make me feel, and because I don’t need any music to sound any ‘better’ than it does already — a great, farting, squelching, quick-witted sax solo does the job for me.”
I could take Hornby to the mat on the positive influence that great, farting, squelching sax solos — quick-witted or not — have had on me, and yet at the same time I can say the same thing about a Bach cello suite. I don’t experience any qualitative difference. It’s all great music, and it feels good: complexity has nothing to do with it. As for classical music not having basslines and guitar solos, damn, basslines and instrumental solos practically describe the best of the classical subgenre Baroque music. It has pop's continuous basslines and lyrical, wailing instrumental solos (substitute oboes for guitars).
But such protests are in vain. Hornby has, sadly, consigned it all to the bonfire. Why has he done this? Why does he banish classical music from the world of really musical music? Because it doesn’t speak to him, because he didn’t grow up with it, and because his resultant ignorance of it, plus his stereotyped caricature of those who favor it, gives him all the justification he feels he needs.
Classical music has such a powerful, negative hold on Hornby’s musical imagination that his beef with it causes him to consider not following through on his strong desire to have Caravan played at his funeral. He loves the song. It is perfect for his funeral. But rather late in the performance he wants to use, there is “classical music.” Actually, there is not classical music. There is a string section that happens to be playing Van Morrison’s song Caravan, but Hornby is too blinded by prejudice to realize this. To him — because it is a string section — it represents something non-musical. A string section can mean only one thing: classical music, a noisy zombie that smells like pumpkin butterscotch. And Hornby can’t be entering eternity without hardening his visage against violins and cellos.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to imagine who it was that made him hate classical music so much. At least three times in the essay he goes very ad hominem on that “lot of people who profess to like it” — classical music — but who probably, he says, don’t actually like music at all. I’m imagining some kind of intellectual bullying in his tender adolescence, something that left real scars, something that demands payback, but his target(s) is/are unreachable because they — years ago — consigned him to an inferior plane, and there’s no getting out. Only death can free him — or will he just be compounding his failed aesthetic, adding surrender to insult, by making “concessions” because his funeral football-goal-hymn has a string section? This poor man is actually living in musical purgatory, trying and trying to find some escape, to no avail.
There’s a novel there, and (spoiler alert!) here’s how it ends: Hornby books an interview with Keith Richards, or Steve Winwood, or any of The Zombies, all of whom were boy-choristers before their voices changed, and who thus had substantial experience with music of the “churchy” variety, and who (no doubt) harbor some affection for an item or two among all that old stuff. Hornby asks him/them to change his mind about classical music — because he/they’ve seen both sides and maybe there’s a bridge. One of them (I like to think it’s Richards) says, “Y’know, for me there’s a very simple test for music. All I ask of music is that it sounds good.” Then Hornby wakes up — the interview was a dream — realizing that he himself wrote those words in an essay about a Van Morrison song, and, feeling free for the first time ever, he remembers that in the dream Richards (or whoever) recommended a song to him in which Xerxes sings about the simple pleasure of sitting in the shade of a plane tree -- the kind of "smaller feelings that constitute a day and a week and a life." The song is by Handel, it is in Italian, and it is sung by an adult male soprano, but Richards said that’s all part of the appeal: never-mind-the-string-section-it’s-the-Sex-Pistols. So Hornby finds it on YouTube, runs it through the hi-fi, and somehow it doesn’t smell like pumpkin butterscotch.
It doesn’t smell like anything. Because it's fucking *music*, Nick.
Oh, and about the lute: enjoy the cartoon!
