Those words were spoken by the character Rob Gordon in the movie "High Fidelity", which celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this week. In those intervening years, I'm not sure there has been a better interpretation of just what it means to be a music fan than the scenes set in Rob's record shop.
Being a music fan is not merely listening to music and enjoying it, but rather an exercise in discovering yourself through the voice of others, and trying to use those songs to communicate your character to others in ways words do not allow. I have written before about the limitations of language when it comes to discussing complexities such as our emotions and sensory experiences. For those of us who are not entirely what would be called 'normal' in those regards, the failure of words becomes all the more apparent.
Sometimes, the best way we can comment on the way we're feeling is to point to a song that evokes that feeling, and then hoping other people have the same reaction to it that we do. It is no more assured a system than crafting metaphors of intense honesty, but it opens new doors that we might not be able to unlock on our own. That is why we obsess over music, why we craft lists of our favorites in countless categories. By doing so, we are diving into the depths of who we are as people, and trying our best to share ourselves with the people we are wanting to do so with.
"High Fidelity" is a romantic comedy by structure, but I have always seen it more as a movie about friendship, and the relationship we have with music. Rob's journey through his top five break-ups is the catalyst of the narrative, but it is the less important aspect of the movie for me. If I'm being honest, which is sort of the point here, the reason for that is clear. If I was to write my own version of the movie about my own life, I would be unable to do so, as my list would exist solely in my own head. That doesn't necessarily mean they were fantasies, but they were connections whose meaning was mine alone, and confined to my mind.
In that light, it is the scenes set at the record shop which become the focal point of the movie. They might not tell a story in the traditional sense, but they are scenes of life in the way many live it; searching for things only tortured artists can understand, arguing when no one else understands what we are thinking and feeling, gate-keeping to prevent people we know would be wrong for us from getting too close.
For some people, music is the great love of our lives. I'm not saying that is true for me, since love is one of those concepts I rarely claim to have even the slightest understanding of. What I'm trying to say is that music can be more important than people, because so many of them drift in and out of our lives, while the records we love are always going to be there for us. Is a night spent with someone new better than a night spent with a favorite old record? I can't say.
Circumstances likely have a lot to do with the answer to that question. What I can say is in my younger days, I certainly had better times spent listening to my favorite albums than I did being dragged out to bars. Records seldom disappointed the way that people did, and thinking back on them is still a better option than remembering certain episodes.
When the conversation in the shop turns to the top five side one/track ones, it is more than a question about some of their favorite songs. It is a question that gets to the heart of how we introduce ourselves, how we define what is most important for people to know about us. Barry jokes about picking Beethoven's fifth symphony, which is more than a joke about Rob's obvious taste. He is commenting that giving the answer everyone already knows and expects is akin to saying nothing. We don't learn about ourselves by following the expected path. It's when we dig in and share the pieces others might not know about is when genuine connections are made and deepened.
Watching the movie, there's an argument to be made that Rob didn't love Laura so much as he thought he loved her. What cannot be argued is that Rob loved music, because music was never going to find flaws in him and end things. Music would always be there, music could be counted on. Music would not complain if it ever found out about the top five lists the way people certainly would object to being itemized like a grocery list.
The other thread to the movie is that of living in the past. Rob spends the majority of the movie obsessed with his past, trying to figure out everything that went wrong, and led to him being in his predicament. That is a dangerous place to be, which I can speak of from experience. The past is dangerous not just because it doesn't exist anymore, but because it may not have existed as we now think it did. Our memories are faulty, our narratives unreliable, and how we remember our lives is not the actual story. Rob learns to look to the future, and live in the moment, but only when he's tortured himself with the past to the point of bleeding out.
My heart barely beats, so I have not drained my reservoir just yet. I'm talking about a movie from the past, because that is where my head still spends most of my time. I am still staring at blank spaces on my top five lists when it comes to people, but music lets me write to my heart's content.
I don't have to ask the question of whether pop music made me miserable, because I know it wasn't the cause. What may be more interesting to contemplate is why I love a movie that reminds me of my own failings. Perhaps it made me miserable...
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