Fuck It, Let's Get Soft

About a month ago, I wrote a little bit about my experience with Ichiko Aoba's Luminescent Creatures, a resoundingly lovely album whose edgeless sound initially set me back a bit. On first listen, I found myself putting distance between myself and the music, mainly because it's so damn pretty; it was only after I recalibrated and forced myself to meet the album where it is that I was able to unlock a level of true appreciation for it.

As I wrote in my post, that reaction made me think, and I've kept on thinking over the weeks that have followed. If you've followed my writing over the years — especially if you were an OG Jefitoblog reader in the aughts — you know I speak fluent soft rock, but you also know I've tended to write about it through a lens smeared with varying degrees of snark. I appreciate a strong melody, I'm generally not in the mood to listen to people screaming, and I grew up in the '80s, so I'm always going to have a certain amount of appreciation for a synthy ballad or sleek, middle-of-the-road rocker. On the other hand, I'm perfectly aware of how corny a lot of that stuff is, and why so many of those songs are commonly regarded as guilty pleasures.

On the other other hand, I kind of don't agree with the concept of guilty pleasures in general. And what if some of — or hell, maybe even a lot of — the music we've dismissed as corny is deserving of a more thoughtful assessment? What if it's been the victim of our broader tendency to find fault with the purely pretty, its value overlooked in our willingness to agree that non-ironic enjoyment of this stuff is a sign of some sort of character flaw?

I'm still sort of hashing out what I'm trying to get at with all this, so please forgive my fumbles along the way. But basically, I think I'm starting from the generally accepted assumption that an act like, say, Air Supply has contributed less to the culture than, say, Nirvana. To argue that this is not the case feels laughably lame, and honestly, I'm not sure I'll ever be in a place where I want to make that argument — but I suppose I am in a place where I want to take the time to at least listen closely enough to try and approach it in an honest and thoughtful way. To spend time with records that were crafted to soothe, to swoon, to indulge not just emotion but sentiment — the stuff we recoil from in public, but still manage to make quadruple platinum whenever the latest generation's Josh Groban comes along.

This little project requires honesty, so I should pause here to note that it would be dishonest to try and pretend that the urge to do this has nothing to do with the state of the world. Millions and millions of us have spent the last ten years in varying degrees of collective trauma, and it's getting harder to convince ourselves that we aren't heading toward some sort of epoch-defining breaking point, all because selfish, hate-filled maniacs hold the levers of power, and most of the people standing at the guardrails are content to look the other way. At times like these, it can feel almost disrespectful to continue business as usual. To be perfectly honest (again), a lot of recent days have left me without the will to write in a lighthearted way about pop culture. I suspect they may have similarly sapped you of the will to read about it.

The one damn thing I keep being drawn back to is this idea that we're in a moment where earnest musical displays of unguarded emotion are worth engaging with. Maybe even important to engage with. That maybe we are where we are partly because generations of people (coughmostlydudescough) were taught to recoil rather than engage, and maybe in the midst of a decade-plus of collective trauma, it'll feel good to pause and offer a little respect to some nakedly emotional — or at least unapologetically pretty — records that were never really respected even when they were popular.

I realize it's starting to sound like I'm only talking about soft rock here, but that isn't the case. I'm talking about the soft and the square across generations, from Burl Ives and Andy Williams to Anne Murray and Barry Manilow to Spyro Gyra and the Rippingtons. All these records that sold millions of copies even though no one* will admit to loving them; records that filled hearts and shaped listening habits before being punted into the scornpile forevermore. And also the records that occupy the same spot on the sound continuum, but have somehow been granted critical clemency, like the Carpenters or America.

I'm sure we'll also end up talking about Christopher Cross at some point, probably including the time he advised me to triumph over the Y2K bug by converting my assets to gold and burying it in my yard.

Like all the best boondoggles, this has no real roadmap, just a vague but nagging feeling that the right direction is thataway. What follows will definitely be indulgent, but I hope it's indulgent in a manner that goes some small way toward mitigating the rank and venal meanness of this moment. And if I fall short in that respect, then at least you'll get a few chuckles out of it as I attempt to seriously engage with music that often felt like its loftiest goal was to sound nice in the background while something else was going on. And after all, these days, that goal feels lofty enough.

*No one except Jason Hare