Music Snobs and Midlife Crisis

I hate music snobs. Those people that proclaim their love for some random obscure band nobody else has heard of until the band becomes well known and suddenly they are overrated and overexposed. I never understood how these people find those underground bands. Do they just scour record stores looking for interesting cover art and hope for the best when they pop the disc into their cd player? (god, can you even do that anymore?)  Either way, I hate the pretension of music snobs. I also can’t stand people who call themselves art lovers. Or rather, people who feel they have the right to interpret art; novels, poetry, movies, music, etc, and impose whatever the hell meaning they want on things and if you don’t agree with them you are too stupid to get it and should stop listening to music all together. Maybe this comes from sitting in too many classes with women who insisted on reading everything through a feminist lens and assuming that Shakespeare was gay because he put men in dresses.   Obviously, art has many layers and meanings. But, sometimes a poem about a flower is just that.

I thought about all this while reading Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, which centers a good amount of time and energy on Duncan. Music snob, pretentious scholar and all around buffoon, Duncan almost made me hate this book.  But then it dawned on me that the mark of a good book, which I think Juliet, Naked is, is that it makes you actually care about the characters. Even if that caring is expressed in wanting to throw the book (or in my case, Kindle, which would cause way more damage) across the room every time they come on stage.

I really loved High Fidelity, and thought About a Boy was a great movie so reading more Nick Hornby was high on my “to read” list. In Juliet, Naked he manages middle age existential crisis with a mix of humor, melancholy, and touch of the absurd. Duncan, his girlfriend Annie and recluse has been rock star Tucker Crowe are mixed in a bizarre love triangle while all asking themselves some variation of, “what the hell did I do with the last 20 years of my life?”

It did get a little “poor me” for my taste in parts.  In the grand scheme of the world, how much sympathy can you really have for a women who’s major problem is suddenly realizing after 15 years she is not sure if she likes her partner much. Or for a fading musician too scared by success to make another record. Or talk to any of his children.

But overall, Juliet, Naked lived up to the gloomy British expectation I had before starting. The dialogue felt like watching a smart edgy indie film with it’s quick pace and sarcastic wit. And Hornby’s prose is sprinkled with little bits of gold, perfect little quotable chunks that sum up life’s big ideas in playful brilliance. I hope I don’t come off as a book snob when I say that anyone who does not get this book should stop reading all together.