Misguided Missionaries From the Church of Dylansis (And Other Rock Religions)

Roadkill Along the Turnpike to Obsession

There’s a stage I go through during the gestation pe­riod of a new musical in­fatuation where I’m aware that it’s pointless to resist my need to hear song X at a particular moment and yet I’ll find myself resisting anyhow. “I am not going to listen to it again today,” I’ll say to myself. “Not this guy.” Spineless bargaining soon follows: “OK, I’m going to listen to the song again today and we both know it. And if that’s true—and it is—then I may as well listen to it right now. Just let me finish this paragraph first.” And then before any work is even attempted, I’ll fire up the song and begin to rock out. All of this takes less than two minutes.

Internal struggles like these, and I’ve had hundreds of them through the years, have nothing to do with improving my productivity, which in turn might increase my income, boost my self-esteem, and finally garner me the vague ac­colades my mother told my first-grade teacher I was destined to receive. (“Multiplication? Already?” she asked Mrs. Horton in 1976, when informed of my flash-card prowess. “He’s headed for great things.”) Sadly, they help only to combat burnout. Listen too often, too fast, to a song you’ve recently discovered and it will not go the distance for you. Very soon, maybe within a week or a month, you’ll play the track and notice its flaws: Singer’s voice too whiny. Guitarist not bringing it. Lyric no longer possible to condone (e.g., Interpol: “Her love’s a pony”). And so it will fail to deliver the emotional payoff you’ve come to ex­pect. When this cancer sets in, you’ll never enjoy the song ­properly again—and by properly I mean with a geeky exuberance that can cause your mysterious, ­Haitian-born upstairs neighbor to bang repeatedly on his floorboards with what you hope is a mop or a broom and not something that has made you the target of a voodoo curse. Years later, when you hear song X on the radio or at a party, you’ll converse politely with it in your head, but, as with that ­ex-girlfriend you once assumed you’d marry but later had to leave around the time she got overly invested in swing dancing, you know there’s no going back.

Discarded musical infatuations are roadkill along the turnpike to ob­session, and every obsessive’s toll road is littered with unsightly carcasses. Tears for Fears, INXS, Duran Duran, Journey, Falco, Information Society—these were just some of the acts I once regarded with an un­healthy measure of affection but whose songs often cause my face to burn when they confront me...