High Fidelity: Love is a Mixed Tape
I'm too slack to write a book review today. So instead, here are some (but not all) of my favourite quotes from High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, which I adored and read after falling in love with the film years and years ago.
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands -literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.
Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That's OK; he's a songwriter, after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot - how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway. That's what happened to me; that's what happens to most people.
It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realised.
See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I'm looking for someone, and before I know it I've found her. I fell in love with Rosie... after I fell in love with a Cowboy Junkies song: I played it and played it and played it, and it made me dreamy, and I needed someone to dream about, and I found her, and... well, there was trouble.
They're evangelical about what they have, as if I've come up from London to arrest them for being monogamous. I haven't, but they're right in thinking that it's a crime where I come from: it's against the law because we're all sinners and romantics, sometimes simultaneously, and marriage, with its cliches and its steady low-watt glow, is as unwelcome to us as garlic is to a vampire.
Taken from Wikipedia, here's a compilation of some of the lists that Rob Fleming (the book's protagonist) passionately delivers in the book:
High Fidelity Lists - Rob Fleming's P. O. V.
Floor-fillers at The Groucho
Five Best Side One Track Ones
Reading High Fidelity has made me pine for my record collection and player which are currently gathering dust in my parents' house in Perth.
Mood: pavlova and sneakers with polka dots on them
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands -literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.
Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That's OK; he's a songwriter, after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot - how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway. That's what happened to me; that's what happens to most people.
It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realised.
See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I'm looking for someone, and before I know it I've found her. I fell in love with Rosie... after I fell in love with a Cowboy Junkies song: I played it and played it and played it, and it made me dreamy, and I needed someone to dream about, and I found her, and... well, there was trouble.
They're evangelical about what they have, as if I've come up from London to arrest them for being monogamous. I haven't, but they're right in thinking that it's a crime where I come from: it's against the law because we're all sinners and romantics, sometimes simultaneously, and marriage, with its cliches and its steady low-watt glow, is as unwelcome to us as garlic is to a vampire.
Taken from Wikipedia, here's a compilation of some of the lists that Rob Fleming (the book's protagonist) passionately delivers in the book:
High Fidelity Lists - Rob Fleming's P. O. V.
Favourite Records (singles)
- "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye
- "The House That Jack Built" by Aretha Franklin
- "Back in the USA" by Chuck Berry
- "(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais" by The Clash
- "Tired of Being Alone" by Al Green
Floor-fillers at The Groucho
- "It's a Good Feeling" by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles
- "No Blow No Show" by Bobby Bland
- "Mr. Big Stuff" by Jean Knight
- "The Love You Save" by The Jackson Five
- "The Ghetto" by Donny Hathaway
Top Five Films
Five Best Side One Track Ones
- "Janie Jones", The Clash, by The Clash
- "Thunder Road", Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen
- "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Nevermind, by Nirvana
- "Let's Get It On", Let's Get It On, by Marvin Gaye
- "Return of the Grievous Angel", Grievous Angel, by Gram Parsons
Reading High Fidelity has made me pine for my record collection and player which are currently gathering dust in my parents' house in Perth.
Mood: pavlova and sneakers with polka dots on them
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