These are questions I was not asking thirty years ago, when Blues Traveler released their seminal "Four" album. I was too young to be thinking of haughty concepts, which means at least I had an excuse for things going over my head. The rest of the audience who came to love "Run Around" and "Hook" without realizing what John Popper was actually saying have less means to defend themselves.
"Four" made its impact as an album with four-chord pop songs that were just unusual enough to catch people's attention, but conventional enough not to scare them away. Take away the harmonica, and put in a more 'beautiful' voice, and the hits feel like they would have always been hits. A pop diva could have made "Look Around" into a massive power ballad, and if you don't think Meat Loaf could have performed a song about a clown having dalliances and illegitimate children all over his touring route, I might have a bone to pick with you.
Underneath the surface, the two big hits were Manchurian Candidates; bitter expressions of artistic dissatisfaction wrapped up in the trappings of pop music to con the people into hearing a berating of how silly and stupid they were. It worked, albeit too well. The public did not pick up on the message that "Hook" was calling them shallow listeners who wouldn't recognize meaning even if they had stared at the words tattooed on their body for their entire lives. Pop music was not always known for depth or meaning, but as much of that fell on an audience with no discernment as it did on artists who didn't care about art.
Popper admits in these songs that he's giving us the run-around, spinning words and stories that use a lot of language to say very little. Is there a narrative behind the verses of "Run Around"? Is it just word association that is a more formalized version of the scat he would include on one song per album? In the end, that doesn't really matter, because the message comes through the form of the music by itself.
"Hook" is a variation on Pachelbel's canon, the most cliched musical form known to man. On top of that, Popper flat-out told us that nothing matters except for a catchy hook in a song, because that's all we will ever pay attention to. His lyrics make clear they don't matter at all, so long as he sings with the expected amount of emotion put through in the performance. Pop music is a performance, and the audience not seeing which side of the curtain they're on is one of those rare moments when we are included in the comedy, as the butt of the joke.
This is all well-known by now, so why do I bother to repeat it? What is most interesting about the pop pandering of "Four" is how well it worked. You can still turn on the radio and hear those songs, people will still remember them and sing along, and the message is as relevant now as it was back then. The audience remains oblivious, despite the truth being publicized time and again. It's purely the fault of the audience when they don't know "Born In The USA" is not a patriotic anthem, and it's also their fault when they don't realize "Hook" is musically pissing on their ignorance.
When such a message becomes an invisible part of pop culture, it brings to mind questions about the very nature of art, and whether it is a small fragment of the population that is attuned to understand it. I was recently watching a documentary about Duchamp's "Fountain", the sculpture in which an upside-down urinal became a piece of art. Like "Four", it was a bit of subversion that was challenging an audience to ask questions about the art they were consuming. Also like "Four", the point was largely missed, only to have the misunderstanding become a part of our culture. It is both the greatest feat and the greatest artistic failure to have an enduring work that lives outside of context.
Thirty years later, the legacy of "Four" remains tied to the unexpected chart success Blues Traveler never had before or would again. It was a moment in time that coincided with the end of an era. The record came out at the end of Kurt Cobain's life, and much like how his abstract poetry was turned into the defining language of a generation, we were an audience who assumed meaning existed when it didn't, who were happy to float on surface level without ever asking how far we would sink if the boat capsized.
The irony of all of this is that "Four" became a self-defeating prophecy. Because that simpleton audience ate up what they did not understand, Popper would try to recreate the success by chasing after the pop fans who loved him when he hated them. Once he needed them, they were disinterested in his genuine efforts to write hit singles. The lesson, which "Hook" predicted, was that the perception of authenticity is the most important aspect. That song had it, because Popper was fully invested in his kiss-off to the people who hadn't bought the band's first three records. He was not as authentic a voice of pop hit-making, and those songs lacked exactly what he knew they needed to make the desired impact. The lesson he was teaching us got turned around, and he wasn't able to see that he was now the one misunderstanding how the relationship between artist and audience needed to work.
My own relationship to the record has changed, has deepened, over the years. I was one of those surface-level fans in 1994, but time has turned me into the bitter and jaded sort Popper was when he wrote these songs. In essence, we have traded places. I suppose that means "Four" is really 'my' album at this point, as few have been as foundational in my life. The past may have predicted the future, unknowingly. I like that kind of happenstance.
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