 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
Wednesday, April 26, 2000
Cat and I are sitting in a tiny theater, waiting for the show to start. Music is playing quietly over the sound system. The tune is familiar, but the arrangement -- wait a minute: It's "Black Hole Sun," but not as performed by alternative-metal band Soundgarden. It sounds slow, langorous ... cheesy. A man and a woman, a very mature man and woman, are singing.
"Holy cow!" I say urgently. "Listen to that! Do you know what it is?" Of course she doesn't. I am brilliant. I have made an amazing discovery. Cat makes a listening face, and I wait for her to make out the tune and be flabbergasted.
"Well, yeah," she says brightly. "It's Steve and, what's the woman's name? Eydie? Or whatever."
Steve and Eydie! Apparently still alive! Doing "Black Hole Sun" with a piano as if they're in the lounge of a Holiday Inn in Tampa! This is unbelievably surreal!
Cat looks incredulous. "You've never heard this? It's from this whole album of lounge-style versions of ... I can't believe you didn't know about this."
Cat is 27 and she is looking at me with a "duh" face that instantly puts a blue rinse through my hair.
"Um, no. I had no idea." I am now wearing my bifocals on a cord around my neck. "It's actually a very pretty song, in terms of the, you know, chord progressions." Get out of my yard, missy.
"Yeah. Xxxxx Xxxxxxx is so underappreciated, really." She has dropped a name I don't recognize, presumably the creative genius behind Soundgarden, or "Black Hole Sun," or the lounge album. I have no idea whom she's talking about. But I knew Steve and Eydie.
"Huh," I say.
I can't pretend this comes as a total surprise. I have long since stopped reading the top-songs charts in the Weekend Mag because I don't recognize any of the titles. Or artists, except for the kiddie acts, which you can only escape by sealing yourself into an ice cave in Siberia.
Is it me? Is it Pittsburgh? I mean, this is not the hippest town. When I moved out here from Connecticut in 1994, I noticed all the radio stations kept playing Jackson Browne's version of "Stay" and that tedious George Thorogood song that goes on and on about not having the rent yet for the landlady. And I was baffled because they were old songs, songs you never heard anymore in Connecticut, and here they were being played and played as if they were burning up the Billboard charts.
So would I be hipper elsewhere? Would I be more aware of what is going on? Or is it me? Even as a kid, I was never particularly cutting-edge. But 10 years ago, I felt at least that I was in touch with pop-culture trends, even if I dismissed some as childish. Dismissing things because you've outgrown them or deplore them is one thing -- but not even knowing? Missing them entirely?
I seem to be at yet another awkward age. Your 30s are a time of transition, between the trendiness of your 20s and the domestication of your 40s. When you're young, you tend to know what's hip, even if you choose not to participate. And when you're older, you're oblivious (and cede cool to your kids) and you don't even care. But in between, there's a scary process of losing touch and agonizing about it. I've never been so ignorant, and in another 10 years I won't care at all, but right now -- boy, it's disturbing.
I miss fads now at an alarming rate. I missed swing. I missed juice bars, and spinning, and Jenga. I even missed "WHASSAAAAAAAAAAAP," though I can't bring myself to feel too bad about that one.
I miss all the hip-hop slang, though I have the sense to know that if it's found its way to me, it's probably long past its "sell by" date and is no longer safe to use.
Maybe it's not just my age. Maybe it's the influence of other people I work with, many of whom are parents; it is widely known that nothing renders you painfully, spectacularly unhip faster and more thoroughly than parenthood. Sometimes it's a struggle to resist being assimilated. I have to go out and drink chai.
And I have to poke fun at my elders, just to keep the inevitable at bay. "Now now," they scold me, "you'll be old someday too, you know." And I used to think to myself, "Sure -- and I'll be dead, too, someday, but I can't imagine what that would be like either."
At least dead is still difficult to imagine.
Samantha Bennett can be reached by e-mail a sbennett@post-gazette.com