Run Fox Run

So this is how it happens. You’re minding your own business, having a decaf latte at the neighborhood Starbucks while your kid sucks down a Horizon vanilla milk, and incidentally you know Starbucks isn’t Peets or Coffee Bean or a mom and pop place and you’re over it, and you start singing along to the music they’re playing. I mean, the music is better than you’d think at Starbucks lately, but today it’s exceptional, it’s The Smiths, and it’s taking you back in that way music has of utterly transporting you. And you go up to the counter for another napkin (the kid, remember?) and that’s when you see the CD they’re hawking. This time it’s not Dylan or Springsteen or poor sad Antigone Rising who must’ve thought somehow that they weren’t selling out, that any publicity was good publicity…it’s something called “Senses Working Overtime.” And you think, man, that was a *great* song, I didn’t even like XTC but hey. And the CD’s in your hands and it’s got Talking Heads and The Cure and the aforementioned Smiths and XTC and Elvis (Costello, why, is there another one?), and you think, Oh, God. My youth is here in packaged-and-marketed demographically-matched shrink-wrapped packaging. At Starbucks.

So basically it’s over for you. It was bad enough when Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah started showing up on every cheesy TV show for a Very Special montage, and those impudent tweens thought they knew what ska was because of that band from Anaheim. For that matter, it was pretty much over when Mandy Moore covered XTC and Joni Mitchell on one album. But this is worse.

You’re not one of those music snobs who needs your favorite bands to be obscure and all your CDs to be imports. You know those guys, and you are not those guys. But somewhere between that one bootleg tape that’s circulating through the dorm, and CDs getting sold in Starbucks, THAT’s how popular you want your music to be. Neither extreme is quite right.

The worst part of it is, there’s a cute little chalkboard next to the CD display and some 18-year-old barista has written, “If you grew up in the ’80s, this is your soundtrack.” And that’s just not true. You know what it was like to be one of the four kids in school who went to the Dead Milkmen show and traded Camper van Beethoven CDs, and you remember the popular kids rolling their eyes at the morose Mr. Morrissey as you and the other outcasts were leaning against the brick school wall with a tape player.

If it’s really going to be cool now to have experienced my childhood, I expect there to be a run on pastel plastic eyeglass frames, Edith Hamilton’s _Mythology_, and exceptionally dorky clothing. For Toby’s sake, I’m just thankful Starbucks didn’t include an Oingo Boingo song.

So after coming face to face with my age and the cruel whims of mass marketing co-opting my past, a generational rite of passage, I embraced my new identity and went to a terrific birthday party for Leda’s good friend Jamie. He turned 2 today in riotous style. Check out the album. Below, Leda and Jack show how tremendously cool they are — not Gordon Gano cool, perhaps, but awfully cool.