In Praise of Trash

by Sara McCartney

In my freshman year of high school, a friend queuing up a playlist asked me what my favorite Bowie song was. Nowadays, that’s a no brainer. “Life on Mars,” the surrealist ballad with the gorgeous melody and the surrealist imagery. I mean it, but, as an added bonus, the choice makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about and am not just picking pretty tracks off
a commemorative best-of. But back then, I was. And I answered, “Blue Jean.”

Sorry, what? Yes, the atrociously poptastic number off of Tonight, the cheesier, sell-out-ier follow-up to the cheesy sell-out Let’s Dance. A token single from the post-’83 years oft included in best-ofs, like the one in my dad’s car. A catchy, meaningless pop song that happened to be stuck in my head that week—just trash. But now I know better.

Any artist with a long career has produced songs of varied quality, it’s true. And knowing which albums or tracks
are objectively better is part of being a fan. Loaded might have the classic “Sweet Jane,” but anyone who calls it their favorite Velvet Underground album may need to be reminded of the lack of founding members not named Lou Reed. The Radiohead listener whose favorite Radiohead song is “Creep” has pre- sumably listened to exactly one Radiohead song. Queen fans know that A Night at the Opera is better than, say, Jazz, no matter how good a song “Fat Bottomed Girls” makes for karaoke night, and the Beatles connoisseur is apt to praise Abbey Road before Help. “Good” starts
to seem a lot like “cool,” as determined by the generations of Pitchforkian tastemakers who came before us. It’s rather like the way some faceless curator judges fine art by deciding what to put in the museum.

For a while, I concurred with these wise reviewers. I didn’t have the first inkling of a conception of what defines quality in music. I am not technically trained beyond the obligatory childhood piano lessons. Others can tell you about the complexity of the string parts, the pitch of the singer, the originality of the bassline. I can tell you how a song makes me feel, why that one line resonates, or that rise in pitch makes my eyes wet. So I like “Life on Mars” because, like many a mousy-haired listener, it made me feel like here was a song just for me.

This makes it tough to justify my tastes and make me eager to run to a review or two before I decide whether my new favorite song is legitimately the Best Thing Ever or merely a Guilty Pleasure. Hurrah for the guilty pleasure and hurrah for irony! How else is the discern- ing hipster supposed to justify their love for Blue Öyster Cult, Blue Suede, and, yes, even “Blue Jean.” Ironically, with tongue firmly in cheek. To tell the truth, I like the Best Things and the Guiltys pretty much the same; it all comes down to what it socially acceptable to love without restraint.

Take for example one of my very favorite Lou Reed albums, the originally titled Lou Reed. His first solo after leaving the Velvet Underground (the Best Band Ever), the self-titled record is, to put it kindly, a hot mess—just trash. Made mostly of unreleased Velvet tracks, remixed with catchy backbeats and crooning backing vocals, the album bounces about with nothing in particular to say. It’s feverish lyrics make for useful entry into a game applicable to most of Reed’s ’70s output: “how high was he?” It is not very well recorded. But damn if I can’t stop listening to it. Imbued to the core with that precious primal rock and roll that shakes even the Velvet’s weirdest shit, it’s music for dancing, not thinking. Somewhere at the core is something human and universal. The hero of “I Can’t Stand It” turns his music up to drown out the pain. When Reed launches into the jaunty “Lisa Says” chorus—“those good times just seem to pass me by”—I feel him. The unbridled joy of “Wild Child,” the haunting confusion of “Ocean,” I love it all. But an inferior album it has been deemed, so a guilty pleasure it shall be.

But no, I don’t feel bad. I don’t know how good the guitar part is, I can’t tell how much the producer fucked up. I am not equipped to evaluate any piece of music based on any technical skill, and to be perfectly honest, technical skill doesn’t seem so relevant anyway. Music, perhaps more than any sort of art, seeks merely to affect the listener. And all my so-called guilty pleasures are pleasures because they make me feel good; they make me feel happy or brave or they make me feel like dancing.

And that’s nothing to be guilty about. You know what they say about trash and treasure.