Hello opinionators,

Look, if some demonic spirit is forcing barrel jeans back into style, I’m reading the trend as a reason to head back to my own young adulthood  — for my evening streaming movie viewings, at least. It was a mumblier era, a time of floppy hair and wrinkled bedsheets, the height of the Gen X rom-com. Those films — Say Anything, Singles, Reality Bites, Chasing Amy — reflect both the thrifted aesthetic of my slacker generation and its deep insecurities about gender roles, unavoidable adulthood and what constitutes attractive male facial hair.

I first watched all of them while newly and happily partnered with my then-future husband, but still felt in my bones the conflict that defined them — the drive toward stability and security clashing with the conviction that, in an increasingly precarious world, the freedom to pursue one’s passions matters more than the manufactured ideal of a white picket fence. Usually, it was the male lead who chased said passions, while his female love interest stood for abandoning the Peter Pan lifestyle and getting real. There were exceptions — Winona Ryder embodied them. But boys would be boys in those days.

The apotheosis of this storyline came in 2000 with Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity, an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel of that name, the definitive satire of the obsessive indie music snob. I decided to stream High Fidelity for the first time in decades the other night, in part just for a laugh, but mostly because I’ve been thinking as usual about music writing and other forms of building community around shared tastes in amplified sound. I wanted to see if Frears and Hornby’s portrait of a vinyl-hugging manchild held up in the age of streaming and influencer entrepreneurship.

Watching again, I saw the movie I’d loved when it premiered, but also a couple of others embedded within it that I hadn’t previously noticed. One was about that manboy, who was not quite as charming as I’d remembered him. John Cusack’s portrayal of record store owner and hapless lover Rob Gordon is far more aggressive than I’d first thought. His high-volume monologues and comic pratfalls are nearly Nic Cage-level in their cartoonishness; at one point, he does a near-flip while jumping onto his bed. This was a deliberate move against type, or really a case of taking a type to extremes. The volatile brunette Liz to Ethan Hawke’s more vulnerable Marilyn, Cusack was indie rock Gen X’s masculine ideal. (His two hits framed the era, in fact, with Say Anything’s Lloyd Dobler holding that boombox aloft in 1989 and Rob snapping on his headphones as the next century dawned.) 

I’d remembered Cusack’s performance as sardonic but appealing. More distanced from my youthful crush on him, I could see what this Redditor also saw: that he was, in some ways, exorcising his status as a Gen X leading man by exposing the layer of borderline misogynist rage beneath his wittiness and cool. It makes sense that Stephen Frears would bring this out in Cusack — their previous collaboration was the blackly comic noir The Grifters, in which he plays a wolfish con man whose baby face conceals his murderous amorality. 

Given Rob’s arguably abusive ways, as I rewatched High Fidelity I started to wonder why his true love Laura (played with a charming sarcastic streak of her own by Danish actor Iben Hjejle) would ever go back to him. My question was answered by the other aspect of the film that revealed itself to me on second viewing. Everyone knows that it’s about the obsessiveness of record collectors and their scorn for ordinary music lovers with boring taste. I recalled that those much-maligned normies were either women or shopping for women, buying them late-period Stevie Wonder singles (“It’s for my daughter,” says the self-described “middle-aged square guy” trying to persuade a hostile Jack Black, as the volatile gatekeeper-cum-clerk Barry, to sell him “I Just Called To Say I Love You”) or inappropriately tolerating their love for sappy singer-songwriters. That’s how High Fidelity resonates, I think, for much of Gen X: as a much-needed critique of toxic masculinity in an era when old norms were changing, but new forms of being an asshole had emerged. This reading, though, ignores the shadow narrative that runs throughout the film, always teetering on the edge of possibility: the story of Rob talking about music, not to his record-store buddies, but to the women he loves.

This story surfaces several times as he recalls his lifetime of failed relationships, contradicting the dominant theme of talking about music as a way of establishing hierarchies that exclude and even wound outsiders. While recounting his top five heartbreaks, inveterate listmaker Rob dwells on number three, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s prodigiously sexy Charlie. The first words out of that cool girl’s mouth, pulled from Rob’s memories, are an argument about the grandiosity of KISS bass man Gene Simmons: “Have you ever seen him less than 300 feet tall? No, and you won’t, will you?” Rob is so turned on by her confidence that, for once, he remains speechless. Later, he meets another self-possessed woman, the musician Marie (played by Lisa Bonet), and the two engage in a mutual seduction that’s all about sharing and debating favorite songs, albums, movies and books. 

Most importantly, though at first she appears to be a boring lawyer who’s erased her own punkish past, Rob’s piecing together of his timeline with Laura eventually reveals that she’s the one for him because she, too, loves to argue about whether Art Garfunkel’s name can be uttered in the same sentence as Marvin Gaye’s. (“They both make pop records,” says Laura, neatly inventing poptimism.) Reunited, Laura and Rob celebrate their connection by shopping for records at a flea market; a deleted scene shows Rob sharing yet another list with Laura over Chinese take-out and her providing a kind but stern edit. The only thing that might derail this couple is Rob’s desire to keep talking to other women about pop music — it’s his flirtation with the music writer Caroline, played by Natasha Gregson Wagner, that almost sets him back in his attempt to be a better man.

This High Fidelity, the one in which men and women talk together about music, is not about snobbishness, or male toxicity; it’s about joy. Rob calls himself a “professional appreciator,” and that role only ever amplifies his good qualities, whether he’s DJing, starting a record label because he sees the talent in the punk teens who pilfer from his record bins, or weaving together a coherent life story by using those convenient if sometimes irritating “best” lists. Sweet junior clerk Dick (Todd Louiso, looking so much like Ian McKaye) also finds love by taking a woman’s interest in music seriously — his brief scene discussing pop-punk with Sara Gilbert’s Anaugh is a ray of sunshine in the midst of Rob’s emotional thunderstorm. I only wish Frears and co-screenwriter Cusack had given Black’s Barry a chance to effuse about Marvin Gaye with Joan Cusack’s Liz after his bravura performance of “Let’s Get It On” at the movie’s end. 

Talking about music is worth celebrating. Gen X definitely thinks so. A surprising number of 1990s classics center on generative conversation — not only most of the rom-coms mentioned above but Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Before Sunrise and Kevin Smith’s breakthrough Clerks, to name a few. Turn down the combative machismo of a character like Barry and what emerges is a highly creative way of being based in enthusiasm, curiosity and the desire to connect. That’s why High Fidelity is a comedy, in the end — because all the talk leads its characters to engage with each other and create real bonds. The 2020 remake of High Fidelity as a series starring Bonet’s daughter Zoë Kravitz as a somewhat more introspective, gender-flipped Rob plays up this camaraderie through scenes that tend to be gentler than in the sharp-edged Frears version.

As this video essay eloquently argues, the series shifts the tone of its characters’ music love from snobbery to geekdom — from clannish and hierarchical to effusive, with a stronger desire to convert. (A great example is this scene featuring the show’s Dick replacement Simon, who utterly loses himself in his praise for disco pioneer Sylvester while on a date.) I think this was an inevitable shift caused by the streaming era’s new ways of loving music. In an economy based on the exchange of physical commodities — a famous deleted scene from the film, later remade in the series, has Rob refusing to buy a man’s rare vinyl from his scorned wife, who purposefully and vastly undervalues it — exclusion makes sense. Worth is commodified. In the streaming era this gets tricker. Even though it’s still set in a record store, the High Fidelity series speaks the language of a geek, whose main goal is not to own something others can't, but to acquire and disseminate knowledge. This is also the nature of public talk about music today, surfacing in TikToks, podcasts and video essays. 

It’s time that I reveal why I returned to High Fidelity this week. The film factors into the first episode of a new audio series that I’m co-hosting with my colleague Daoud Tyler-Ameen, available right now in NPR Music’s All Songs Considered podcast feed. That’s right, we’ve been polishing our music talk, having deep conversations and friendly disagreements about particular songs that we’ve long enjoyed. The first song we approach is Stevie Wonder’s 1972 romantic opus “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever),” the final song Rob plays in the movie, signaling that he’s working to better understand Laura’s poptimistic point of view. 

I’m excited to be part of a new project focusing on music history, my favorite subject; more than that, I’m just thrilled to be able to talk about music in a formal way on a regular basis. Although the endless stream of think pieces fretting about the state of cultural criticism often equate arts writing with the more conversational forms now dominating social media, I think of these two pursuits as connected but different in important ways. Writing, when it’s good, is a deep dive: You’re alone while you’re doing it, and you need to remain in control and swim smoothly through the deep water of your own thoughts. Music talk is more like hanging out in an inner tube and floating down the river. 

Talking about music, I often find myself making leaps I wouldn’t necessarily allow myself at my computer. An insight about a dance beat might inspire an anecdote about blissing out at a rave in the early 2000s, and that might lead into a side convo about Steve Coogan’s drugs-dusted turn in 24 Hour Party People. Back to High Fidelity: For all of their bluster, both Cusack and Black captured the feeling of synapses firing within the chaotic choreography of their performances. That’s what I love about talking about music: It can take you anywhere. I think that’s why people enjoy listening to others do it on the many conversational podcasts in the music space right now. At its best, it feels so free.

I hope you’ll join me and Daoud on our conversational adventures. [Editor’s note: You can find info on how to subscribe at the bottom of this newsletter.] We’ve had a ton of fun selecting songs that make us ask questions — about history, about taste, about musicianship and about our own experiences as lifelong hyperactive listeners. When I was a kid I worked in a record store; it was more like the bigger, chaotic shop in that other Gen X classic Empire Records than the cozy enclave Rob runs in High Fidelity. Creating this show, though, has brought me back to those times when a good afternoon was defined by hanging out with one of my coworkers in some corner of the store. I sopped up information about Cannonball Adderley from our jazz guy Sandy and sparred about the best tracks on the new Eurythmics album with my fellow post-punkers Johnny and Joanne. Talking our heads off, we did sometimes ignore the customers. But just as often we’d start a conversation with someone who asked about our reggae imports or a hard-to-find reissue of Nick Drake’s Bryter Later. That’s how we found our people, and also started realizing exactly what kinds of people we wanted to be. 

The definitive line in High Fidelity, spoken by Rob as an unimpeachable pronouncement, has long been received as a reason to condemn that beloved music blowhard: “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” I understand that when it comes to behavior, up to and including cheating on your girlfriend or scorning her everyday underwear, elevating taste over ethics is highly problematic. In Hornby’s book it leads to Rob and his clerks coming up with the terrible idea of creating a questionnaire about pop-cultural preferences for potential mates, a nightmarish foreshadowing of a 21st century nerd’s life on a dating app. But when a great conversation about music really gets rolling, a deeper understanding can be shared. What music did your family enjoy together? What songs do you turn to when you’re sad? What kind of performance sends you toward catharsis, versus the kind that makes you feel left out? In everyday life, I think, we don’t ask each other enough questions. Music is one way to open the door.

***
Editor’s note, continued: Here’s the fine print about Ann and Daoud’s new podcast series. The first episode, about “I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)” is available to everyone in the All Songs Considered feed wherever you listen to podcasts. Upcoming episodes will be just for NPR Music+ supporters. Yep, we're giving way a sample, like Rob did in High Fidelity when he played The Beta Band on the shop's stereo. 

NPR Music+ is a way to support NPR and public radio. When you join, you’ll get access to every episode in this new series, and you’ll get to hear every episode of All Songs Considered and Alt.Latino sponsor-free. Sign up at plus.npr.org/nprmusic.

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