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April 12, 2000 | People who care about pop music, and I am one of them, like to discuss songs as liberators, as catalysts, as jokes or friends. But what of the term background music? Just as often, probably more often, listeners use music as a kind of stopgap. I like to think of fandom as a way of being in the world, but so often it's a way of avoiding the world, a barrier, a wall. Witness the witty scene in the new charmer "High Fidelity." In that film version of Nick Hornby's novel, John Cusack's Rob, a record-store owner, holes up after his girlfriend's left him and tries to put it out of his mind by reorganizing his record collection "autobiographically." He sits among his stacks of albums as if in a fort. Ellis writes deftly about people who shouldn't be doing what they're doing, and one way they live with themselves is by shutting off the silence that is the examined life's requisite. You cannot examine your life too closely if you've got "Walking on Sunshine" full blast on your Walkman, as serial killer Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale) does in the new screen adaptation of Ellis' "American Psycho." I always thought good people needed good music to make a good life, but do the bad-to-worse characters of Ellis' imagination need music to drown out the sound of their own consciences?
Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday.
Another novelist, Richard Price, seems to think so. In "Freedomland," Brenda Martin, a character inspired by the Susan Smith case, is suspected of killing her young son. When this damaged woman doesn't have soul CDs screaming out of her boombox, she's wearing a Discman and hearing them on headphones. "She was listening to something now, staring straight ahead and moving her lips to the lyrics," Price writes. "Lorenzo [the detective assigned to her case] could hear 'Feel Like Breaking up Somebody's Home' coming through her phones, minute and metallic. He didn't hold the music against her, figuring that the phones were there to keep her brains from leaking out her ears." Is that what Katrina and the Waves are doing for "American Psycho's" Bateman? Keeping his brains from leaking out his ears? In another scene in the film, Bateman's in a limo with his Walkman on, his girlfriend beside him. "I'm trying to listen to the new Robert Palmer tape," he says, "but Evelyn keeps buzzing in my ear." The book, to my mind Ellis' funniest, is loaded with instances of music getting in the way. For example, Bateman, talking to an acquaintance at a club, narrates, "Luckily, the long version of 'New Sensation' by INXS drowns out his voice." Or, at the same club -- and this is in the movie also -- "Pump Up the Volume" (a title that might be the secret theme of the Ellis oeuvre) covers up the words Bateman's sneering at the bartender: "You are a fucking ugly bitch I want to stab to death and play around with your blood." He says this while smiling. In the novel, some of the most hilarious bits are the periodic chapters in which Bateman delivers veritable "Trouser Press" entries on his favorite musicians. He loves Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins and Whitney Houston. There were times in the '80s I heard their records and thought you'd have to be crazy to like them. Psychotic, actually. What genius that a stuck-up, insane, murderous yuppie would call Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" "one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity." Of course! "The Greatest Love of All," lest we forget, posits that the greatest kind of the grandest emotion is not romantic true love or the love of a parent for a child but "learning to love yourself." It is probably the most solipsistic pop tune ever written, and that's why Bateman likes it. As he says, "Since it's impossible in the world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It's an important message, crucial really, and it's beautifully stated on this album."
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