"Real World"
Matchbox Twenty
from Yourself or Someone like You
1996
I haven't seen Barbie yet (maybe I will have seen it by the time you are reading this—I'm excited!), but I'm familiar with some of it already through some of the Summer Song Challenge choices that my peers made over the course of that blog project. Mainly familiar with the music, obviously, due to the circumstances. I now know that there's a scene where the Kens sing Matchbox Twenty's "Push" to the Barbies. I would normally consider this a spoiler, but the integrity of Song Challenge was prioritized over the fidelity of my future film-watching experiences.
This blog post isn't about Barbie, but it is about the filmmaker choosing that particular song for the film. As Maeve pointed out, apparently some of the younger cast didn't even realize that this wasn't an original song. But to those in my and Maeve's and Greta Gerwig's generation, "Push" was oppressively ubiquitous in our youth. Even if you didn't know the name of the song and didn't know who performed it, you could sing along. Which I assume is part of the joke of it being chosen for a scene in a new movie—here is this song you know way too well, but in a completely new context.
I've been listening to Yourself or Someone like You a decent amount since "Push" showed up in SSC. It's got "3AM" and "Real World" on there too, and all three of them were instantly familiar to me, having grown up with a family minivan that was constantly tuned into pop radio and rock radio (with Matchbox Twenty making the crossover). It's so hard to step back and consider these songs in a vacuum, because context is everything here. The question of "is it a good song?" ceases to mean anything, because we heard it so much anyway, regardless of quality or lack thereof.
Trying my best, I can zoom out and say that these songs and the album surrounding them are all... fine. Not great, not terrible, just comfortably languid in that wide swath in between. It's good enough to listen to and enjoy, but not good enough to say that I'm seeking this out for any reason other than a nostalgia exercise.
Here's the fear when it comes to this kind of stuff: that there is going to be confusion between nostalgia and real, true quality. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's going to happen to me and people my age more and more as we get older. The reason why it's accelerating is that our peers are starting to reach the point where they are becoming the tastemakers. Greta Gerwig, once upon a time, was just a teenager with a dream and a radio that played nothing but Rob Thomas' parodically gruff voice. But "Push" was so omnipresent that it made a mark on her, emotionally. And now she's choosing a centerpiece song for a billion-dollar movie, and chooses this song that was popular and just fine, and now there is a new generation who is hearing the Kens singing "Push" and confusing it for a good song.
But it's not that good! I'm not saying Greta Gerwig is being malicious about this. Not at all. But I do think that this natural process of artists growing up and giving more weight to previous and mediocre works through their own art is ultimately detrimental, and something that we need to be aware of, and occasionally take a stand against. Like, let's not all fucking pretend now that Matchbox Twenty were some amazing band. They are a generic totem to mid-level alt-rock, and for some reason a few of their songs were grounded into our brains at a too-impressionable age. That's all.
Puke on Your Birthday is going to officially name this phenomenon. We're going to call it 20/Twenty Vision. The name is in honor of the band that originally got me to examine this phenomenon, and is a reference to the fact that they were originally called Matchbox 20, but then in 2000 they jokingly-but-seriously put out a press release regarding the name change to "Matchbox Twenty." 20/Twenty Vision first and foremost applies to this band, who had big hits as Matchbox 20, but still exist as Matchbox Twenty, and live on through the collective Stockholm Syndrome of a nostalgic generation of adults.
I saw 20/Twenty Vision at work a couple weeks ago, after the tragic death of Smash Mouth's Steve Harwell. Smash Mouth was certainly culturally relevant and unfortunately universally known to those of us with young ears in the 1990s, but let's not fucking pretend for a goddamn second that any Smash Mouth song is a great song—not even the Shrek bullshit, you fucking meme-dorks. And yet, under obituaries, I saw people sincerely providing real-time reevaluations of Smash Mouth's body of work, shit like "this man who passed away actually made some fantastic music." No! Not at all! Time to go to the eye doctor, because you have 20/Twenty Vision.
I'm not asking anyone to be curmudgeonly about the use of old, middling pop music in art, and I'm certainly not asking anyone to tamper their nostalgia for this bullshit (god knows I'd be the biggest hypocrite on earth if I asked you to do that). I'm just making a case for a little self-awareness when it comes to this kind of shit. Critical reappraisals aren't warranted in every case. Let's celebrate the collective joy/misery that bands like Matchbox Twenty brought us when we were eight years old, but let's be cognizant of the reasons we are still listening. It has nothing to do with quality. Let's not pretend otherwise.
This blog post isn't about Barbie, but it is about the filmmaker choosing that particular song for the film. As Maeve pointed out, apparently some of the younger cast didn't even realize that this wasn't an original song. But to those in my and Maeve's and Greta Gerwig's generation, "Push" was oppressively ubiquitous in our youth. Even if you didn't know the name of the song and didn't know who performed it, you could sing along. Which I assume is part of the joke of it being chosen for a scene in a new movie—here is this song you know way too well, but in a completely new context.
I've been listening to Yourself or Someone like You a decent amount since "Push" showed up in SSC. It's got "3AM" and "Real World" on there too, and all three of them were instantly familiar to me, having grown up with a family minivan that was constantly tuned into pop radio and rock radio (with Matchbox Twenty making the crossover). It's so hard to step back and consider these songs in a vacuum, because context is everything here. The question of "is it a good song?" ceases to mean anything, because we heard it so much anyway, regardless of quality or lack thereof.
Trying my best, I can zoom out and say that these songs and the album surrounding them are all... fine. Not great, not terrible, just comfortably languid in that wide swath in between. It's good enough to listen to and enjoy, but not good enough to say that I'm seeking this out for any reason other than a nostalgia exercise.
Here's the fear when it comes to this kind of stuff: that there is going to be confusion between nostalgia and real, true quality. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's going to happen to me and people my age more and more as we get older. The reason why it's accelerating is that our peers are starting to reach the point where they are becoming the tastemakers. Greta Gerwig, once upon a time, was just a teenager with a dream and a radio that played nothing but Rob Thomas' parodically gruff voice. But "Push" was so omnipresent that it made a mark on her, emotionally. And now she's choosing a centerpiece song for a billion-dollar movie, and chooses this song that was popular and just fine, and now there is a new generation who is hearing the Kens singing "Push" and confusing it for a good song.
But it's not that good! I'm not saying Greta Gerwig is being malicious about this. Not at all. But I do think that this natural process of artists growing up and giving more weight to previous and mediocre works through their own art is ultimately detrimental, and something that we need to be aware of, and occasionally take a stand against. Like, let's not all fucking pretend now that Matchbox Twenty were some amazing band. They are a generic totem to mid-level alt-rock, and for some reason a few of their songs were grounded into our brains at a too-impressionable age. That's all.
Puke on Your Birthday is going to officially name this phenomenon. We're going to call it 20/Twenty Vision. The name is in honor of the band that originally got me to examine this phenomenon, and is a reference to the fact that they were originally called Matchbox 20, but then in 2000 they jokingly-but-seriously put out a press release regarding the name change to "Matchbox Twenty." 20/Twenty Vision first and foremost applies to this band, who had big hits as Matchbox 20, but still exist as Matchbox Twenty, and live on through the collective Stockholm Syndrome of a nostalgic generation of adults.
I saw 20/Twenty Vision at work a couple weeks ago, after the tragic death of Smash Mouth's Steve Harwell. Smash Mouth was certainly culturally relevant and unfortunately universally known to those of us with young ears in the 1990s, but let's not fucking pretend for a goddamn second that any Smash Mouth song is a great song—not even the Shrek bullshit, you fucking meme-dorks. And yet, under obituaries, I saw people sincerely providing real-time reevaluations of Smash Mouth's body of work, shit like "this man who passed away actually made some fantastic music." No! Not at all! Time to go to the eye doctor, because you have 20/Twenty Vision.
I'm not asking anyone to be curmudgeonly about the use of old, middling pop music in art, and I'm certainly not asking anyone to tamper their nostalgia for this bullshit (god knows I'd be the biggest hypocrite on earth if I asked you to do that). I'm just making a case for a little self-awareness when it comes to this kind of shit. Critical reappraisals aren't warranted in every case. Let's celebrate the collective joy/misery that bands like Matchbox Twenty brought us when we were eight years old, but let's be cognizant of the reasons we are still listening. It has nothing to do with quality. Let's not pretend otherwise.
1 comment:
I wrote about this elsewhere but I just saw Rob Thomas play with the NSO at the Kennedy Center - his voice is still really good, and the man knows how to write a song (assuming he wrote the Matchbox 20 songs, I'm not looking it up). Yes, nostalgia and ubiquity are reasons we like certain songs, and normally I'd agree with you that Matchbox 20 isn't good, but seeing him changed my mind. They ARE good, actually. Even the Rob Thomas songs that I don't know grab me. They're cheesy, and a little bit annoying, but they have a certain quality in them, and while I don't think they'd be big hits today, that says more about music today than anything about how good Matchbox 20's music is.
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