Bubble Gum Everything

On appetites as a cornerstone of culture

Photo courtesy of Márcio Silva

One time, probably when I was about 11, I heard Britney Spears described as “bubble gum pop.” The definition being a flavorful and titillating but ultimately ephemeral form of music. You chew on it like piece after piece of sugary bubble gum — as soon as you’ve properly overplayed the newest single, you’re ready for the next one. In fact you need the next one, because this one is no longer satisfying. The novelty has worn off, the flavor is gone.

And it’s hard to argue that this was wrong: sure, everybody knows who Britney Spears is (or was, as she’s no longer that person), but how many of her songs are even enjoyable to today’s ear? Probably about three. Out of a hundred and twenty. And that’s probably only because of nostalgia and the fact that they contain a quintessential ‘90s-ness musically.

To some extent, that’s the nature of pop music. It’s made to be ephemeral; it’s made to be enjoyed for about a year until the label can shove the artist back into the studio to put out another pack of gum.

But pop music doesn’t have to be like that, at all. It can be lasting and timeless and culturally essential, like the music of:

• Whitney Houston

• Madonna

• Céline Dion

• Michael Jackson

• George Michael

• Huey Lewis

• Mariah Carey

• Elton John

• Prince

• Patsy Cline

• Phil Collins

The difference is, these artists didn’t just put out sound bites; they actually had something to say, something with context, a story. Even Madonna’s “Vogue”, which seems pretty superficial by its dance and pose oriented lyrics and theme, is an utterly perfect piece of music. It captures a very particular cultural fixture (modeling for the camera) so flawlessly in voice, rhythm and sound that no other piece of music could ever compete with it as “the song that makes you think of the catwalk.” The song that makes you think of high fashion and the ‘90s It-Girl scene.

And no superficial pop song will ever move grown men to goosebumps and tears the way Céline Dion’s “The Power of Love” did. The way it still does.

Britney Spears’s breakout hit, on the other hand, was a song (and video) whose entire purpose was to make you sexualize a teenage girl.

When I think of a modern version of a bubble gum pop song, I think of Selena Gomez’s “Love You Like a Love Song.” It’s just so damn punchy. So belligerently catchy. The lyrics are meant to be intellectual shocks, they’re meant to be so stupidly clever that they just get stuck in your head.

Now obviously you could say this means, “well then somebody did their job.” The song stuck in your head like a virus, and that is after all the point of pop music. And yes, that is in fact someone’s job. But can we say that person created great art? No. We can say they created a great product. Anybody who’s being honest with himself knows the difference.

Even the music on that track is silly; it’s got this wahw-wahw heavy distorted bass like you’re in the bathroom at a techno club washing up to go back out to the dance floor. It’s this sort of brutal, unearned coolness. It’s just so obnoxiously clever. It’s so un-subtle, so in-your-face with its soaking-wet novelty.

I think this is the primary reason people have always loved to hate Nickelback: they’re just too in-your-face Rock Band. Their lyrics rhyme perfectly and contain all the right subject matter for a Rock Song™. Their guitar riffs are heavy and hard without being musically interesting. (Another band that suffers from this problem is Three Days Grace. Three Days Grace made the musical equivalent of sugar cubes.)

Nickelback makes the kind of music an AI would make; the kind of music a kid would make for his frat buddies. They make the kind of music you feel cool singing out loud at a party, because it’s got the vibe of something that “feels cool to sing.” But ask any number of rock bands who their influences are, artistically, and I’ll bet zero will say “Nickelback.” Because most of their music isn’t art, it isn’t culture — it’s a product. It’s a sensory punch that tells you nothing about where or when it was made, or even who made it. It’s music-as-an-exercise-in-cleverness.

And maybe that’s part of the problem, or a self-recursive symptom of it. Go back through that list of all-time great pop artists. You’d be hard-pressed to find one of their songs about which the first thing you think is “clever.” Because that’s not what great music is. Lyrics can be clever, but not entire productions. That’s when you lose the form of music as “art.”

If I’m sounding like a snob right now, well… just know that my goal isn’t to cure us of a need for simple pop music. Pop music that punches you is fine as part of a balanced diet. My focus here is the balanced diet part. The nutritional part.

My goal, the goal of all of my work, is to preserve what is great about culture when people take things seriously. Music deserves to be taken seriously; it’s the single most important sensory experience in all of human life. I’d like to preserve the idea of our children growing up in something other than a banal sensory-overloaded environment full of ultimately meaningless stimuli. An environment where they hear everything and feel nothing.

Here’s a great place to start: I think if you’re a parent, you should have Beethoven and Debussy on in the background of the home sometimes. Simply because kids deserve to be exposed to Beethoven and Debussy. Kids deserve to be exposed to music as a thing that requires patience and delivers tenfold on its promises. We no longer have to sit around all week waiting to be told stories by the village elders on a Saturday night, but we can at least be more patient with our music. Because that’s almost the same thing.

Dating apps suffer from this same kind of pointlessness. For most people, dating apps are an exercise in chewing on new profiles for a few seconds, picturing very quickly and superficially a life or a date with this person, if you're a man then picturing all the filthy things you'd like to do to this person’s body, and then moving on to the next profile.

And for many people, when you finally match with someone, the first ten minutes of conversation are exponentially more exciting than the remainder of that hour. The first hour is exponentially more exciting than the remainder of the first day. And by day two or three, you've pretty much lost your infatuation, your patience, or your short-term visions of a life or sex session with that person. The flavor of the endeavor fades quickly and you lose interest — because the stakes are so low. You’re not even looking at the person, you’re not even present with them. As Eurydice said recently,

The major product provided by a dating app is the illusion of participating in dating at all - some time swiping through faces, and congratulations, you are “dating”, you Tried, you do not need to do anything scarier or riskier or less fun than this.

Dating apps let you chew on hopes, dreams, relationships, and human attractions as pieces of gum. Not only are most people accomplishing nothing on these apps, but they're riding sensory and emotional roller coasters to do it. It's like paying an admission fee to get your ass kicked.

And worse yet, you're so busy with the nothing you're doing on dating sites that you're opportunity-costing yourself all the real dates you could be going on by getting out of the house and fucking talking to people. By trying to build something real, with real stakes and real lust and real longing. And body language and eye contact.

This is why Violet Beauregarde and other gum-chewers are told not to spoil their dinner with gum. It sounds ridiculous, but you actually can. Because the same sensory equipment that wants food is being satisfied by something that is not food. “Don't spoil your dinner” isn't about fullness, it's about appetite.

And if young men close the dating app and switch to Instagram, the entire app is nothing but bubble gum. There is almost nothing of cultural value or intelligent substance on the entire app. To quote Shane Melaugh, “Constant low grade sexually stimulating media stunts a man’s development process.”

When young men are viciously assaulted with flavorful-but-meaningless quasi-porn on the internet (women with enormous asses, women in sports bras, women with huge fake lips and theatrically cutesy/youthful personalities), it keeps them from developing affection and lust for real women around them. Because those women — those aren’t real. Those are cartoons. A real woman is someone you spend time with in your life and you come to love her quirks and her humor and the way she dresses. Her body isn’t amazing, it’s not cartoonish — but you love the way it moves. You love the way she moves. Loving a real woman takes an appetite that the internet could never satisfy.

The best way to get a man to settle down and become a provider and a real man, after all, is to let him feel enough things for one woman for long enough that he'll trade his own independence just to be with her. If he’s constantly chewing on hopes and dreams and cartoonishly sexy women, he will never feel that way about any real woman in his life.

Our big problem right now is not just an overdose of dopamine. It’s a lack of real appetites for things that actually matter. I once heard discipline described as choosing what you want most over what you want now. To survive in today’s short-term world, you have to be willing to turn away from what you want now even though it’s everywhere. You have to find things you want more than sugar.

Another place I’ve noticed a sort of novelty-and-punchiness obsession is in the phrases people use online. Substack, Twitter, anywhere you look, people are bandwagoning the same phrases over and over as if they’ve stopped learning to think of new ones or find alternate ways to say things. Every day, I (and others like me) find posts on the internet that begin with:

• “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but…”

• “Can we please normalize [x totally obvious thing]”

• “I am once again asking…”

• “This hits different”

• “Unpopular opinion:”

• “Can we please talk about…”

• “Tell me without telling me that you’re…”

• “Imagine being the kind of person who…”

Or, from the previous decade:

• “I can’t adult right now”

• “Nobody told me that…”

• “I can’t even”

• When someone would post some Jane Austen quote or some classroom-wall motivational idea and then start a new line and type “Read that again.” (This one made me particularly angry.)

… And other totally uninteresting but nonetheless attention-hijacking and emotionally charged phrases. Phrases that literally insist upon themselves.

People begin using these phrases because they like how punchy, how clever, how outright obnoxious they sound. Although they probably don’t realize that last part. They think they’re just participating in current culture; they think they’re just doing what it takes to be heard. In the worst cases, they actually think they’re being unique by speaking this way. Which is sort of like when 3,000 girls line up behind barricades to tell Britney Spears they’re her biggest fan.

The problem is, when you speak precisely the same way as everyone else (that is, as other trend-followers), you’re doing the opposite to yourself: you’re not going to be taken seriously by anyone whose opinion actually matters. Only a person who is okay with being talked down to, or spoken to with tricks, would be lured in by such cheap novelty. Such trendy phrases whose sole purpose is to grab the low-hanging fruit of attention.

And guess whose attention is low-hanging fruit? People who are easily drawn in by controversy. In other words, idiots. People without self-respect, or who haven’t been properly trained in the art of navigating the internet. Which means that if you use bubble gum phrases on the internet, you’re going to draw in precisely the crowd that you should be avoiding. Precisely the people you don’t want to surround yourself with.

Besides, if you’re 30 years old and still using trendy lingo, I mean… what are you doing. Just start speaking like your parents and get it over with.

And this whole thing has infected the writing itself too, the landscape of essays and blogs. Spending so much of my week on Substack engaging with other writers, I have noticed a very salient trend. Many people’s essays (if you can even call them that, which in some cases you shouldn’t) have little in the way of a goal other than “it’ll feel good to publish this.” People want to give their take on something. People want to participate in whatever The Thing is at the moment, with no regard for whether their essay will be useful or even readable 10 years from now or a week from now.

Let’s take a detour and then come back to that point.

Something I’ve always looked for in rock music (or pop-rock-metal-alternative music generally) is a certain indirectness. A certain mystique. People often ask me why I don’t like certain love songs, or don’t like certain popular rock songs. And I’ve tried my best to put it into words by saying “there’s just nothing here for me to participate in. There’s no mystique. This song doesn’t do anything for me. Not intellectually, not emotionally, and not melodically. It’s just too easy.”

Needless to say, this confuses people. They don’t even look at me like I’m a snob; they look at me like I’m a lunatic. Like I’m pitiable for overthinking the very point of music.

But I cannot take a song seriously when it comes right out and says exactly what it means. When someone comes right out and says “I love you” in those exact words. When someone professes their love idly, instead of describing it or helping me live in it. It leaves nothing to the imagination. It uses no imagery. It doesn’t give you as the listener anything to do, other than suck all the sugar out of it.

Look at Paul Simon: one of the most beloved and well-known musicians to ever live. And most of the time, nobody had any idea what he was singing about. If his songs had been more lyrically direct, I’ll bet you one pack of gum that he wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. Because his music would have bored people. It would have been too obvious.

And that’s what I don’t like about writers who are just so active with their opinions. They don’t really even take the time to think about the long-term ramifications or context of what they’re saying. They just react. They just opine. They just can’t help themselves from publishing the latest “controversial opinion” or “hot take” or “rebuttal” or “contra” or “why is no one talking about [perfectly obvious angle that many people are in fact talking about]” blog post.

They just can’t help shoving their opinions outward, in the most direct and impatient way possible. I find it dull and tasteless, I find it totally without artistic inspiration. It’s the pop music of online writing. It doesn’t develop anything, it doesn’t teach anything, it’s just an exercise in self-important and lazy oversharing.

Beneath nonfiction, there’s journalism. Beneath journalism, there’s takes.

Don’t get me wrong, some of these people are quite popular. Some of them are just that good at forming opinions on current Things quickly. Some of them deserve a big following. It’s just that most of them, in my opinion, don’t. Faucets of opinions, blogs of nothing but “takes,” hold almost no long-term cultural value. It just feels good to have an opinion about everything, and to give that opinion to an audience that’s bored and wants some controversy cookies in its inbox.

If I was doing something that I felt had no chance of holding long-term cultural value, or having no real impact on its audience, I would be embarrassed. I would stop doing it. It’s like doing a half-assed job of mowing the lawn, and then turning around and realizing your lines aren’t even straight. The yard doesn’t even look good. It’s like, my god, I spent an hour and a half of my life on that?

It’s especially silly since writers don’t even get rich from such cheap novelty. Most of us still have full-time jobs. Writers don’t even sell out; they just publish bad writing.

So much of our cultural landscape these days is just based on the most egregious and juvenile sensory pleasures. That doesn’t mean everybody is participating, but that does mean that’s what the landscape is like. Our music, our essays, our TV and movies, the absolute landfill of our social media feeds, just about everything. It almost feels like the more popular something is, the less it’s bound to stand the test of time. (As an example, I do not think Taylor Swift’s music is going to last in our long-term musical appetites. It’s in-your-face, it’s un-subtle, and it contains no cultural artifacts other than repetitive milquetoast heartbreak. That’s not interesting.)

I wish more people wrote like Bob Seger. Some of his songs tried a little too hard to be artistic, but at least they weren’t so damn obvious. They contained imagery. They contained raw desire. They contained a rich, tearful nostalgia for childhood and the lustful wonderings of teenagers on summer nights. And they conveyed it in lyrics that sounded wise, like an old man teaching his grandson how to write a song and tell a story.

There’s a reason that John Mellencamp, Bob Seger, Tom Petty, and the Beach Boys are among the all-time greatest American rock acts (or music acts anywhere, of any genre). It’s because they managed to capture actual culture, actual American dreams, in their music.

I would never say that people shouldn’t have any pop in their life, or should never chew any gum. I wouldn’t be quite so much of a Puritan. What I do believe is that we have to carefully watch our diets. We have to make room for real appetites sometimes. The real depth of emotion that comes with difficult reading. The real lust of watching someone you like, the way they speak and the way they move, and not expecting it to instantly turn into sex. The way a Beethoven piece unfolds slowly before you and takes you somewhere if you’ll just wait for it.

Hunger is where life is lived. Satisfaction is only meant to be a temporary feeling, a reward for having had hunger in the first place. But hunger is where you’re supposed to live, for almost the entirety of the time you’re alive.

And the hunger for a great culture is what drives us to create one in the first place. A writer writes the book he wants to read. When you’re too distracted by what tastes good for four minutes at a time, you’re never going to want great culture badly enough to consume it. Let alone create it.

Drink some water or maybe don’t.

JR

“You see, when everything is climax, when there is no such thing as a rising or falling action in your drama, then no moment can truly be a special moment.” - Freddie deBoer