Life Is Short, Listen to Pop Music

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Dua Lipa

“You’re not wrong Walter, you’re just an asshole.” — The Dude (The Big Lebowski, 1998)

Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia is the best pure pop album of this young decade. The singles are endlessly listenable, and the twin towers of top-40 radio, “Levitating” and “Don’t Start Now”, are perfect. Given that we’re less than four years into the Hindsights (the 2020s!), I’m not sure that’s a quintuple flame-emoji take. For me, the true eyebrow-raiser is that I’m mentioning pop music at all.

Since the Sony Discman days, pop music wasn’t just something I didn’t do, but a machine I actively raged against. Instead, I heaped gobs of praise on Burial’s Untrue, told everyone within earshot that Earl Sweatshirt is the most underrated MC of the past decade, lapped up all the Natalia Lafourcade that never quite made it to the United States, and dragged every last one of you to see JJ Grey and Mofro in concert.

All along the way, I berated simpleton fans of the N*SYNC and the Spice Girls and railed against ringtone rap. No take was too hot; no cow too sacred. I was that asshole.

But the point of this essay isn’t even to unload a mea culpa no one wanted, no one asked for, and no one will notice. It’s to teach you younguns a (much, much) more significant lesson. So let’s go, my sugarboos. If you’re feeling like you need a little bit of company, you met me at the perfect time.

Future Nostalgia

I went to high school in Upstate New York during the late-90s. Objectively, I used to listen to some of the worst music ever to grace mainstream airwaves. These were bad choices at a time of my life chock full of other bad choices. [Put it this way: I was at Woodstock ‘99.]

Thing is, when a song from that era triggers a nostalgia wave, it’s never the big dumb aggro-metal I was listening to at the time. It’s the Britney and Aaliyah and boy bands that chewed up the TRL charts. That’s what played at the school dance, the woods party, the county fair, or while I was working at The Gap. Sometimes, it’s the Portishead that soundtracked that really, really cool chick’s bedroom.

That’s what music does. When we remember it and belatedly fall back in love, it’s usually something to which we’ve attached a strong positive memory. We don’t affix nostalgia to quality; we affix it to the embers of both comfort and adrenaline.

That’s how Brian McKnight can show up in a Chili’s ad in 2023, rip through an adorably capitalist reinterpretation of his 1999 smash-hit “Back at One”, and trigger glee as he counts from one to three, singing his ass off about chicken crispers:

Did I wear out that CD as a high schooler? Absolutely not. Still, McKnight and I hail from the same hometown, his song was my homecoming dance anthem, I used to serve at a Chili’s, and now I make ads. Check. Check. Check. Check. Don’t @ me; this video is pure art. You’re dead inside if you’re between 34 and 44 and this did nothing for you.

In Defense of Good Enough

In his 2022 book The Good-Enough Life, author Avram Alpert proposes the pursuit of “good enough” as an alternative to unchecked ambition and “greatness thinking”. In a review of the book, Lily Meyer writes in The Atlantic:

His arguments for holding ourselves not to the monolithic standard of greatness but to the seemingly looser metrics of goodness and enoughness are, paradoxical though this may seem, guides toward a more determined way of inhabiting the world.

The net-net: The odds of you becoming the next LeBron James, Taylor Swift, or Quinta Brunson are pretty much zero, so the less weight you place on aiming for that level, the more likely you are to be satisfied you’ll be in life and, paradoxically, live better. Alpert argues that striving for big changes or improvements — whether they be at the personal or political level — is as self-indulgent as it is futile.

There’s merit to this doctrine. The middle part of the bell curve is thicccc for a reason, and that’s because most of us are pretty ordinary overall, despite our best efforts (or even our worst). Most of your heroes are flawed, most terrible things have at least some utility, and very little art or achievement was done without some problematic aspect in the process or in the person who took the credit. If life is nothing but an endless series of letdowns that render us all cynical, gloomy, and jaded, then what’s the actual point of fighting for it? Sometimes it’s okay to let people enjoy things.

I think about the most popular posts on Facebook or Instagram, and they’re all fairly cut-rate pics of women who felt cute and might delete later, or kids who were cute but will turn into spoiled brats years later, and wedding and engagement photos from two young adults who have a coinflip’s chance of divorcing after their kids become spoiled brats. This is all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, but people love it and love gassing folks up about it. Sorry, but your carbon-capture patent just ain’t moving the needle compared to tee-ball practice or Brock and Kayleigh’s first dance.

Yes, the Wedding Industrial Complex is patriarchal usury and every heterosexual white girl’s wedding feels like a carbon copy of the other, and every toast feels like people riffing off the same teleprompter, and the food’s never well-seasoned, and the groomsmen are always too drunk and stupid and for fuck’s sake enough Uptown Funk. But, like, what else are you going to do? Bitch about it? No. So enjoy the open bar, go back for seconds at the buffet, and dance your ass off to The Wobble. Have a great time; you don’t get to do all this shit again once your old or dead.

Dance Through Your Lamentations

The sooner you can accept that frustration and limitation are inescapable, helpful, and sometimes even beautiful, the sooner you can free yourself to take successful dead aim at what’s well within your range. That’s good advice when compared to constantly chasing greatness, perfection, or absolute moral unimpeachability.

After all, what’s the point of restrictive diets if we forbid ourselves from pizza and cookies? Are we earth-polluting, animal-genocidal assholes for enjoying a juicy and perfectly seasoned steak occasionally? Is it really that crucial that we call the cops on the mother who let their six-year-old sit in the car unattended while she ran into Whole Foods to grab some eggs and a snack from the salad bar?

I really can’t definitively say yes to all that. I consider myself pretty sensitive and discerning, but some time not long ago I realized I wasn’t enjoying a fucking thing and needed to give myself (and the world) a goddamned break.

Criticism exists for a reason, and it’s important we unearth flaws and moral shortcomings, but our own standards of excellence don’t have to be so goddamned high that they can’t be cleared and nothing can be enjoyed. This is life; after all, and if our only aim is to make it perfectly safe for all people to end up miserable and dissatisfied, well … you’re going to miss an awful lot of perfectly danceable pop music.

I want to tell you it’s okay to just enjoy okay — even liberating. In general, life will be much better for you if you just enjoy what’s in front of you instead of constantly discarding it for being available whilst searching for unreachable stars. You’ll win more hands of Blackjack than not by just standing on 17.

Now, perhaps it’s rich to hear someone like me tell you to lower your standards, so I’ll defer to the heavily abridged words of W.E.B. Du Bois, who said this very well indeed:

There has come to us … a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world … if we had, to be sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard work, the inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, all that — but, nevertheless … a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life.

I think once you come to the complex truth of The Good-Enough Life, that no one and nothing can be perfect or perfectly agreeable, and that “there is a dynamic joy of discovering, again and again,” that those imperfect things and people can be good to you, and that you can be good enough for them and for yourself, you can finally appreciate how difficult and rare that stasis actually is.

That “good enough” equilibrium requires diligent, consistent, sustainable effort, grace, compassion, and ease. You need to be able to do is calibrate your standards while holding multiple complex truths in your head at once. Reductively, those two base truths are: “(1.) This thing kinda sucks, but (2.) there’s something redeeming and even a touch enjoyable within.” Hell, I think that’s true about most of life.

There’s a lot you’re going to want to do — don’t ever let that preclude you from doing enough. Life’s too short: Listen to pop music, enjoy and grow your family and friend circles, and evaluate experiences as they’re presented to you. Some people will tell you the things you enjoy or want are dumb or evil, but as long as you’re not dumb and evil, then that’s broadly about as good as you can expect out of yourself and should demand out of others.

Pop music might not be anyone’s idea of the avant-garde, and Dua Lipa is not yet Solange. But she’s good enough and that music kind of bangs, especially at weddings — and I’ve warmed up to those, too. Maybe the marriage lasts; maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you spent too much on a blood diamond; maybe you didn’t. Either way, I doubt I’ll ever forget your night — bring on the Uptown Funk and the dry-ass chicken, and let’s try to enjoy this big dumb world while we can.

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