English Version | Popular, but not quite

Being popular can be good, but as long as you don't overdo it. When it comes to music, especially in the 90s, the more popular it was in the mainstream, the less beloved it was by who was popular in high school. It’s a complex issue, that can’t be explained without a fair bit of effort that requires looking back on my privileged teen years.

Let's talk about a very specific song by a very particular band from the United States of America, from the glorious mid-90s. There is a passage in the videoclip of that song in which a young high school football player passes by his teammate (the quarterback, of course, the most handsome, the king of the school, the “audaz conquistador das raparigas” [in English, the audacious conqueror of girls], as Vasco Santana sang in Fado do Estudante), and winks at him in a friendly and confident manner, despite his subaltern status. The other (the splendid example of what a popular boy in high school is) smiles back, as if to say "I'm not sure who you are, but hello to you too." The plot is complex, it has many layers, and it is worth watching the full videoclip to understand the story and find its meaning. Still, I will try to summarize the essence of this passage: the subaltern had just been under the stands of the stadium, where the football team was training, with the cheerleader who was the girlfriend of the popular quarterback. They were making out, as they used to say in the 90s. What a big bastard, that young man who winked at the quarterback. What a false friend, this semi-known of the popular boy.

The videoclip is of a song aptly titled Popular (it's in English, you can't read popular in Portuguese), by an US band called Nada Surf (you can read it in Portuguese, nobody knows for sure how to pronounce Nada; Surf is more or less unanimous and sounds the same, here as in America). The reference to the youthful jargon of the romantic acts of the 1990s was not random: Nada Surf were - they still exist, but I speak in the past because that's how they actually were back then - an indie rock band at a time when the cultivation of logic and lo-fi aesthetics in the American alternative music scene often resulted in prosperity. Why? Because being indie and being lo-fi was cool. And being cool generated enormous popularity. The cool bands, the ones that the popular kids liked, forewent the stardom, the perks, and the hit charts. Being unpopular was super popular in those days. I believe it was the fault of people like Kurt Cobain and company, who suddenly swapped the glitter and glitz of the 80s for ripped jeans and normal wool coats. Then they turned that normality into sophisticated style and pressed the distortion pedal to avoid selling too many records - except that, in some cases, it went wrong, and they sold millions, but all absolutely unwillingly and against their will (theirs, the record companies and, above all, a niche audience that adored them - although it was a niche, let's say, overwhelmingly major). 

Nada Surf's creation is practically a treatise of references and metanarratives. The song, which is called Popular, mocks precisely, and as one can easily guess, the typical popular schoolboys. However, its success - it may not have been an enormous success, but it was successful enough to have crossed the Atlantic on the back of MTVs, VIVAs and VH1s which, at the time, all had the audacity to actually broadcast music videos - came about largely thanks to having been liked by the groups of those same popular schoolboys; who, in turn, made a big deal about liking what was not mainstream, because mainstream was, as we know, for the mediocre people, without educated taste and without style, who listen to and wear and use what the masses without distinct character use as if they were a herd or a flock - all figuratively speaking. As these groups of prickly, conceited teenagers are, in essence, those who end up determining tastes, fads and trends in their respective schools (and, perhaps, henceforth in the lives of some of their inevitable admirers who can't resist a popular face - that trait prevails among much of the non-school population, by the way), bands like Nada Surf would eventually find their success, being led to experience, however fleetingly, the bitter taste of popularity - and, as often, the horrors associated with making money.

I don't know much about the popularity ratings of music these days. From what I observe, it seems extremely acceptable to like Taylor Swift, for example - in my high school days, I'd get the dump stamp. This doesn't mean I don't listen to stuff from now, completely contemporary. I don’t live in the past, I didn’t get stuck in the nostalgic nineties. I just don't have the tools I used to have when I was in high school and surrounded by popular kids with good taste. One example: a few years ago, I fell completely in love with Hozier's debut album (Hozier, 2014). Even today I believe it to be a major work of current popular music. Then I made the mistake of going to see him live. What a disappointment. Without style and with a charisma below doubtful, it was not enough to fill the Coliseu dos Recreios. Worse, the people who paid for a ticket may have been anything but popular in high school. It was a parade of occasional music fans and admirers of the ordinary, those who fall in love with an artist because one day they heard on the radio a catchy single that they can hum along in the car while taking the kids to school - often replacing the actual lyrics with phonetic reinterpretations like "take me t-shirt, my search trip like I fall and I try forty night" (real version of the chorus from Hozier's Take Me to Church: "Take me to church / I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies"). All this to say that, without the reference of the cool kids and what they like, people become so disoriented and without references that they risk liking songs simply for the quality they may have, and without using any other criteria. In other words, you risk liking what shouldn't be liked.

The reader may think I am being ironic. I am not. The world of pop, music and especially the allegedly alternative music feeds itself from much more than just music. The popularity of this or that may come down to the musical and lyrical quality of a group or an artist's compositions, but that is certainly not where it starts. The popular force of pop is born long, long before the music itself. No wonder boy bands work, for example. And it's no wonder that what is arguably the most famous punk band of all time was formed as a boy band - I'm talking about the Sex Pistols. Being popular in music is not exactly like being popular in high school. For an artist to be liked and admired by the popular kids in high school, there has to be something unpopular about him, there has to be an ingredient in him that definitely distances him from the uneducated taste of the masses and therefore makes him appealing to the tastes of those who see themselves as the rightful owners of good taste. There is a myth that says that tastes are not debatable, but if there is one thing that is debatable, it is precisely taste. If there are no arguments against facts, there is no shortage of arguments against tastes. 

All this talk may seem confusing. It is not easy to explain that in the 1990s, for a band to be popular it had to be unpopular, with a few exceptions. For example, it was legitimate to like Radiohead from their first album. And everyone knew (who doesn't know Creep, from the album Pablo Honey?) and liked Radiohead, from the greatest experts in the latest novelties and weirdness discovered on soundtracks with the Atlantic Records label (for example, The Crow, from 1994) or Milan Records (among others, Escape From L.A., 1996), to the biggest musical fools, those capable of buying a Celine Dion’s best of album and other such barbarities. And like Radiohead, there was Pearl Jam, or even Nirvana, although both bands lived off the benefits of being from Seattle and public judgment precisely because they were from Seattle. Selling millions of records and having worldwide success, to the point of playing in gigantic festivals like Reading, in England or Hollywood Rock, in Brazil, has its cost: as widespread popularity increases, popularity with those who hold the patent on good taste, i.e. the popular kids at school, decreases. Obviously Nirvana were good, but who would dare to say such a thing in public? It would be too obvious and mundane for people with relevant and personalized taste, so the band became a non-issue. They existed (while they existed and for a while after they no longer existed) and that was it, but what mattered were those bands that most people ignored and whose mere notion of their existence, even if it was just a single, granted us the status of "guy who knows music." 

One such band was Nada Surf, as we saw at the beginning. Being true to themselves, these managed to stay on the extraordinary threshold that allowed them to forever be a cult band, to have some success, to make some money and never to lose the appreciation of those who decide what is good and bad. Other bands, some even with relative success rates far higher than Nada Surf's, like the Eels or even the Pixies, handled fame and success in an extraordinarily popular way without needing to be unpopular. Others never became popular enough - Sebadoh, Pavement, The Flaming Lips - to the point where they lost their popularity. And then there's the greatest of them all, Sonic Youth, who have spanned generations, sold millions, but moderately (never too many millions, no heresy), kept a modest, nonchalant attitude towards the system and the industry, in a cool, blasé pose that still is relevant today. Boy, these guys are THE popular of the popular. If all the pop music - lato sensu, with all the rock alternatives and their variants included - in the world were an US high school, Sonic Youth would be the blond quarterback dating the cheerleading captain, making up a couple that will be crowned prom king and queen respectively.

On the opposite side, there are those who, after an emergence exuberantly popular out of respect for unpopularity have had the misfortune to become too generic and popular with those who don't have the elevated taste. That in itself, as we have seen in the cases of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, would be no sin. Now, when because of widespread initial success, these bands direct their next albums precisely at that dubious taste of the tasteless people is a huge mistake. Without much thought, two glaring examples come to mind: Green Day and The Offspring. Nowadays, they're aged bands, struggling to come to terms with their age, trying to retain the ability to charm young audiences with low standards, but both made great records - that is, before they became overly popular. I still remember (me and two other friends) ordering a US edition of Dookie (Green Day, 1994) at a time when even the radio stations here didn't know what When I Come Around was. What a roaring, almost perfect record. Obviously and unsurprisingly, it fell into the generic and unprepared taste of the masses. Of course, then the band tried to replicate the formulas, over and over again, until we reached that point where we said "hey, you guys are old enough to have some sense, knock it off." It wasn't much different with The Offspring. When Smash (1994) came out, there few who knew them. The single Self Esteem won over some radio stations and a lot of teenagers, but the band didn't immediately lose their ideal status as popular with those who were popular. The problem was when, one or two albums later - I think it was with Americana (1998) that they blew it - they tried to reach out to the masses using the usual technique: take the formula that worked, shake it up, shuffle it around, remix it and serve the usual inanity in a seemingly new form. They've sold millions of albums and lost thousands of fans - those weird, stubborn, elitist fans, like me. Fans of things that are popular, but strictly enough, not a bit too much, to not lose popularity.

Translated from the original on The [Un]Popular Issue, published July 2023.Full stories and credits on the print issue.