suspect this was meant to be a compliment to both of us; when people tell you that you should be on a reality program, they’re basically saying you’re crazy enough to amuse total strangers. I was always flattered by this suggestion, and I used to fantasize about being cast on The Real World, imagining that it would make me famous. What I failed to realize is that being a former member of The Real World is the worst kind of fame. There is no financial upside; it offers no artistic credibility or mainstream adoration or easy sex. Basically, the only reward is that people will (a) point at you in public, and (b) ask you about absolutely nothing else until the day you die, when your participation in a cable television program becomes the lead item in your obituary. You will be the kind of person who suddenly gets recognized at places like Burger King, but you will still be the kind of person who eats at places like Burger King.
Once you’ve been on TV, nothing else matters. If Flora from Miami wrote the twenty-first-century version of Anna Karenina, she’d still be known as the loud-mouthed bitch who fell through the bathroom window. Almost a dozen ex–Real World ers have pursued careers in music, all with a jump-start from MTV. None have succeeded; their combined album sales would be dwarfed by Arrested Development’s live album. Eric Neis and Puck managed to stay in the spotlight for a few extra milliseconds, but they both went bankrupt. It appears that the highest residual success one can achieve from a Real World stint is that of being asked to compete in a Real World/Road Rules challenge All these people are forever doomed to the one-dimensional qualities that made them famous nobodies. The idea that they could do anything else seems impossible.
This is why I could never be on The Real World, no matter how much I love watching it. I could never filter every experience through my singular, self-conscious individuality. Yet part of me fears this will happen anyway; I fear that The Real World’s unipersonal approach will become so central to American life that I’ll need a singular persona just to make conversation with whatever media-saturated robot I end up marrying. Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable. I guess my only hope is to find myself an Alabama Julie, whose wonderfully one-dimensional naivete will be impressed by the unpretentious way I vomit out the window.
When I initially heard CBS was creating the quasi-Orwellian reality program Big Brother, I was wildly enthusiastic. It sounded like a better version of The Real World, because the premise seemed to guarantee emotional confliction: Not only were they going to force total strangers to live together, but these poor chumps wouldn’t even be allowed to leave the room. I imagined it would be like jamming Puck and Pedro and Amaya and that drunk Hawaiian girl into Anne Frank’s annex and forcing them to emote at gunpoint. This would be perfect television.
However, Big Brother was a failed experiment, and I know why: They don’t use music. I never knew what was going on. During key moments on The Real World, we are always instructed how to feel; if two people are playing chess to Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” I know their relationship is doomed; if they’re playing along with Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road,” I know they are mending fences and exploring a new level of companionship. But on Big Brother, there is never a musical subtext; in this particular instance, we’d merely see two hollow stoics moving rooks and knights, wholly devoid of sentiment.
Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless. I once spent an evening chatting about the complexity of modern relationships with a male acquaintance, his ex-girlfriend, and her roommate. When I went to bed that night, I thought our conversation had been wonderful. Twelve hours later, I was informed that the ex- girlfriend spent the entire evening “in a rage,” apparently because the other male in our foursome had been “brooding and surly,” creating a tension that subsequently made the ex-girlfriend’s roommate “completely uncomfortable” with the nature of our dialogue. I never noticed any of this. I never have any idea how other people feel; they always appear fine to me. But if somebody had pointedly played Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” that night, I’m sure I could have constructed some empathy.
4 Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink 0:42
Several months before nineteen unsmiling people from the Middle East woke up early on a Tuesday in order to commit suicide by flying planes into tall New York office buildings, I sent out a mass e-mail to several acquaintances that focused on the concept of patriotism. At the time, “patriotism” seemed like a quaint, baffling concept; it was almost like asking people to express their feelings on the art of blacksmithing. But sometimes I like to ask people what they think about blacksmithing, too.
So ANYWAY, here was the content of my e-mail: I gave everyone two potential options for a hypothetical blind date and asked them to pick who they’d prefer. The only things they knew about the first candidate was that he or she was attractive and successful. The only things they knew about the second candidate was that he or she was attractive, successful, and “extremely patriotic.” No other details were provided or could be ascertained.
Just about everyone immediately responded by selecting the first individual. They viewed patriotism as a downside. I wasn’t too surprised; in fact, I was mostly just amused by how everyone seemed to think extremely patriotic people weren’t just undateable, but totally fucking insane. One of them wrote that the quality of “patriotism” was on par with “regularly listening to Cat Stevens” and “loves Robin Williams movies.” Comparisons were made to Ted Nugent and Patrick Henry. And one especially snide fellow sent back a mass message to the entire e-mail group, essentially claiming that any woman who loved America didn’t deserve to date him, not because he hated his country but because patriotic people weren’t smart.
That last response outraged one of my friends, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer who had been the only individual in the entire group who claimed to prefer the extremely patriotic candidate to the alternative. He sent me one of the most sincerely aggravated epistles I’ve ever received, and I still recall a segment of his electronic diatribe that was painfully accurate: “You know how historians call people who came of age during World War II ‘the greatest generation’? No one will ever say that about us,” he wrote. “We’ll be ‘the cool generation.’ That’s all we’re good at, and that’s all you and your friends seem to aspire to.”
What’s kind of ironic about this statement is that I think my lawyer friend was trying to make me reevaluate the state of my life, but it mostly just made me think about Billy Joel. Nobody would ever claim that Billy Joel is cool in the conventional sense, particularly if they’re the kind of person who actively worries about what coolness is supposed to mean. Billy Joel is also not cool in the kitschy, campy, “he’s so uncool he’s cool” sense, which also happens to be the most tired designation in popular culture. He has no intrinsic coolness, and he has no extrinsic coolness. If cool was a color, it would be black—and Billy Joel would be sort of burnt orange.
Yet Billy Joel is great. And he’s not great because he’s uncool, nor is he great because he “doesn’t worry about being cool” (because I think he kind of does). No, he’s great in the same the way that your dead grandfather is great. Because unlike 99 percent of pop artists, there is absolutely no relationship between Joel’s greatness and Joel’s coolness (or lack thereof), just as there’s no relationship between the “greatness” of serving in World War II and the “coolness” of serving in World War II. What he does as an artist wouldn’t be better if he was significantly cooler, and it’s not worse because he isn’t. And that’s sort of amazing when one considers that he’s supposedly a rock star.
For just about everybody else in the idiom of rock, being cool is pretty much the whole job description. It’s difficult to think of rock artists who are great without being cool, since that’s precisely why we need them to exist. There have been countless bands in rock history—T. Rex, Jane’s Addiction, the White Stripes, et al.—who I will always classify as “great,” even though they’re really just spine-crushingly “cool.” What they are is more important than what they do. And this is not a
