My Brilliant Career
M. has a theory that everyone has a “best decade” or even “best year,” this being the time when everything about you was at its peak: physically, in your strength and health and in your appearance; mentally, in the clarity of your thought, or at any rate how you perceived it, and in the scope of your knowledge (although that, too, is equally and for the same reasons fallacious); and so on, through all the aspects and permutations of what makes up our lives from day to day and decade to decade. There’s a photo of M.’s dad from the 1970’s, and he’s handsome, debonair, clearly satisfied with every element of his life, however much that may not even have been remotely true.

The theory doesn’t play out too well when you look at it in detail, but it’s a pleasant enough exercise. In a similar meme, The Counsellor is looking back at 1978, musically, anyway, and promises a report. That’s a pretty good year to pick, but I’d say 1980, myself. That was the year I was far enough away from everything that had shaped me previously to break out from my influences into areas that at least felt more personally definitional. Musically, that was discovering X (the L.A. version, and the other L.A. punk bands, as different from NYC as from London, that difference, and each scene’s distinctions being revelatory themselves), the Gang of Four (who never surpassed their first two-and-a-half albums), the Psychedelic Furs (who only had the one good record, and it was really just versions of the same three songs, a clear example of getting a recording contract a little too soon, which was happening to a lot of bands then), and (God help me) U2 (I mean, “The Edge”; c’mon, really). I listened to Jim Carroll’s “Catholic Boy” and developed my Robert Fripp appreciation, and I found Fela Kuti’s afrobeat. Over about the next ten years or so, I got so eclectic, nobody could talk to me about anything, and it took at least that much time before I could get out from under the weight of all that Husker Du and Mission of Burma and start moving into more than pop music inventiveness.

By 1990-1995, I’d been a long time growing up, and there was more to come, as there is yet, but there’s more to life than music, even if it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun or so interesting without it, so I have to abandon the idea of the “perfect year,” once or future, hoping instead to manage to stay ahead of intellectual entropy, if only just.