How to Piss Off a Hippie

People who love music sometimes identify a little too closely with the musicians/songs they love, to the point that any criticism of those musicians/songs becomes, in the music lover’s mind, a personal attack. That’s true even if the music lover himself had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the music, which is usually the case.

Actually, that’s always the case. If somebody tells Bono, “Everything U2 has done since The Unforgettable Fire is crap,” Bono isn’t going to waste an ounce of energy worrying about that stranger’s opinion. He would be like, “Whatever, dude,” and go off to start a new fashion foundation for the hungry or something. But say the same thing to Obsessive U2 Fan and he will question your motives, insult your taste, ask how many times you were dropped on the head as an infant, and prepare a determined counterattack designed to prove that you are a complete idiot. Because, you see, if you’re not, then guess who the idiot is?

Full disclosure: Yes, I have been guilty of this bizarre behavior, too. But this post isn’t about my idiocy, it’s about the shortcomings of others.

One time when I was living in Philadelphia, I was sitting at a bar next to a gentleman who happened to be very personally invested in the music of Bob Dylan. I was able to detect this because his superpower was obviously the ability to make Bob Dylan the subject of the conversation, no matter what the opening gambit was. (My superpower is the ability to avoid fistfights by talking my way out of them, but that’s a topic for another time.) Anyway, his superpower was beginning to annoy the hell out of me, so I tried this: “Man, Bob Dylan is so overrated. I’m a better songwriter than Bob Dylan.”

Predictably, that flustered the man, who no doubt had endured many criticisms of Dylan’s lack of vocal range, his uneven creative output, his easily mocked persona, etc. Mr. Dylan Fan probably had some great counterarguments to all of those things, but they were just as probably boring.

Of course my claim (to be a better songwriter than Bob Dylan) was ridiculous. I may as well have claimed to be a better dictator than Stalin, except that I have actually written some songs, and I have yet to try out dictating. Anyway, a wilier opponent would have put the burden on me to defend such a ridiculous claim. Instead, he could only sputter incredulously about Dylan’s place as the greatest songwriter of all time and blah blah blah.

So I gave him a task: I borrowed a pen from the bartender, grabbed some bar napkins, and told him to write down ten lines from Bob Dylan songs that he considered great. This had the unforeseen benefit of making him shut up for a long time while he considered which of the thousands of lines from Bob Dylan songs would most decisively expose my idiocy for all the world to ridicule.

What he did not know was that it made no difference at all which lines he selected and carefully wrote down on the bar napkins, because I had already prepared my responses:
1) “That’s crap.”
2) “Juvenile.”
3) “Completely derivative.”
4) “This doesn’t even rhyme.”
5) “I guess this one’s OK, except Abba expressed it much better.”
And so on. Winner of the argument? ME!

The ironic part is, the situation was setting up perfectly to give me a chance to use my superpower, except I had forgotten that I was arguing with a hippie. Ah, I wasn’t in the mood to almost fight or barely avoid a severe beating anyway.

[tags] Bob Dylan, Songwriting, U2 [/tags]