2021 started with me attempting to date again — I had convinced a somewhat reticent beau to invite me over for coffee on Christmas morning, and we sat on his patio with lattes and homemade by him Danish doughnuts, which sent me skipping through the edelweiss into the new year. I hosted a little New Year’s zoom party, which already seems quaint. I had turned 60 and was having the surreal experience of essentially learning to date for the first time. It was all very chaste, mostly because of COVID. I felt like a 15 year old 60 year old, and my adolescent taste in music seemed to come bobbing to the surface.
In my early teens we were living in Italy, and my favorite band was
I Pooh, who traded in super-melodic high-drama orchestral chamber pop that tended to soar into syrupy falsettos of emotion. Their signature song, “Nascerò con te,” was about having sex for the first time, and the ecstatic refrain was “I will be born, one minute from now, with you.”
I still love them today. But by the time I got to college I knew what cool was and “I might like you better if we slept together” was more my speed.
When Erasure got popular in the mid-80s I noticed how they hit my pleasure centers, but that didn’t jibe at all with my alt-underground self-image.
Over time, pop music at least as a concept became cool again, although contemporary pop remained suspect, and top 40 music strayed from my personal archetype: the sugar-frosted, earworming hits of the 60s by the likes of the Supremes or the Beach Boys.
Like was “Bodak Yellow” pop?
Not to worry, 2021 produced plenty of incredible non-charting, retro imaginary smash hits.
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