I thought once again about that time when I attended a concert by Matthew Sweet. What would I write to him, if I could write him a fan mail?
I would tell him how I picked up on his music when I was a teenager in Singapore, 29 years ago, after his music made the rounds. I would advice him to go watch the movie “Shirkers”, just to get a feel of what Singapore was like in 1992. I was probably sold on a bill of goods: indie music, punkish, DIY spirit, alternative, sticking it to the man. The irony was that it was a fantasy world where most of the misfits would fit in, one that was vast, one that tolerated people who were different. One where the music was always cooler, better.
The Singapore I lived in was not a harsh place, in retrospect. Bullying was almost non-existent. But people expected you to behave in a certain way, and it was always a better place for those who were goody two shoes, more yes-man, didn’t stick out so much and draw attention to themselves. People were rewarded for not drawing too much attention to themselves.
I wanted something different. The lyrics of “Girlfriend” spoke of some higher melodrama. Some kind of perfection that you strove for, like Icarus going for the sun. The object of my affection would probably not look like Tuesday Weld: she’d probably be some nice Asian girl. But it would be some crazy, treacherous emotional territory, and in the emotional language of indie music, I, the protagonist, would somehow be found wanting in some awkward way. I would say something wrong, I wore braces, I was too good at mathematics and science. I never managed to look at a girl in the eye during those days.
Matthew Sweet dreamt of grand romantic visions. They were almost always chaste. Princesses like Winona Ryder (pre-shoplifting incident). Madonna. Tuesday Weld. They were beautiful, they had soulful eyes you could get lost in, luminous skin. What mattered most was that you just wanted to give your heart to them, let your emotions run wild in some kind of crazy adventure. Give in to the first crazy taste of puppy love. In a way that was my education in what romantic love was like. (But I can now see that it’s a pretty crappy way to approach things.)
The music was pretty marvellous. In a way, this album was one reason why I never believed that rock music from the 60s and 70s was inherently superior to the 90s. And yet, in another way, given that this album was such a homage to the music of the 60s, imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. The songwriting was already pretty strong, but somehow he managed to get legendary guitarists like Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd to play on the album. So what we had was, on top of all the power pop, those two guitarists lent a Television-style avant garde edge to the proceedings. “Girlfriend” was also the reason why – 10 years later, another band would take the indie world by storm and claim to be another disciple of Television’s “Marquee Moon”. But I don’t think that “Is This It” by the Strokes was in any way the equal of Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend”.
In fact, now, I’m starting to realise that I actually wasn’t in love with America. In fact, I was more in love with the promise of freedom, how I thought it was an escape from the drudgery and the mental suffocation of growing up on a small island, where my teenage self judged people for being overly narrow and conformist.
And yet I listed to the album as a Singaporean. I have memories of a school excursion, the bus driving down a foresty stretch of road called Lornie road, and the light was filtered in through the trees. And it felt like some magical garden of Eden where the “Girlfriend” was like some kind of Eve I had just gotten to know.
And there was a school trip to the UK, I don’t know under what auspices it was organised, except maybe some of the teachers missed the place and wanted the students to enjoy that place. It was crazy and wonderful. Say what you want about the UK, being able to vacation there in the 1990s was like being in some kind of a paradise. I listened to “Girlfriend” on that trip, and I’ll still remember the rolling English countryside and the Roman ruins.
I talked about “Girlfriend” with the cool, indie music loving, gay friend of mine. It seemed like a secret code to share, in some secret magical universe only a few of us knew about. And today, what I regret is how that seemed to be a wall that I built against the world I lived in. How I walled myself into some kind of an escapist fantasy.
There was a girl in school that I had a crush on. I may have been stalking her or not, just kept a respectable distance. Never made a move. She never acknowledged anything, even though I made the mistake of blurting it out once. I suppose there’s something about indie music that attracts a lot of emotionally damaged people.
In a way, there wasn’t anything inherently special about “Girlfriend”. It just happened to come along at a time when I was just willing to find a piece of music to love. To be sure, it was worthy of that love. For example, if I were five years younger, that album that I grew to love might have been the Neutral Milk Hotel. But today I can’t listen to “Aeroplane Over the Sea” with anything but mild annoyance.
If anything, “Altered Beast” was even more compelling. It was equally incredible that Matthew Sweet could follow up a small masterpiece with something just as good. It was recognisably the same person who made “Girlfriend”. But it was a few years after that grand melodrama and heartbreak. And this time, instead of modelling his music after “Revolver” era psychedelic Beatles, his music sounded more like Fleetwood Mac. If “Girlfriend” was the shattering of teenage dreams, then “Altered Beast” was the dark aftermath, the elegy for a more hopeful time. If “Girlfriend” was a gunshot wound, “Altered Beast” was the scar tissue. “Girlfriend” was a future stymied, and “Altered Beast” was a retrospective, a contemplation of past dreams, and it was also a person who settled for a more emotionally placid future. If “Girlfriend” was about a romantic disaster, “Altered Beast” was about picking up the pieces. It would be about the wounds that healed, and wounds that didn’t heal. “Girlfriend” was about dreaming of a sweet future that would be denied to him thereafter, and “Altered Beast” would be about waxing romantic about an adolescence that’s fading away into the horizon.
There is a sequence of songs on the B side of “Altered Beast” that’s not always remarked upon. On their own, they seem pretty unremarkable, but in context, they sound like some grand extended bookend to the one-two punch of “Girlfriend” and “Altered Beast”. “Falling”. “Evergreen”. “What Do You Know”. Farewell. Farewell to this immaturity, this craziness of feverish, adolescent fantasies. “Girlfriend” was supposed to be named, “Nothing Lasts”. Be stoic. Accept a more placid reality. Pick things up and move on.
The crazy thing about this is that the emotional landscape that was traversed is actually not communicable. It wasn’t even communicable to your future self. I have memories of what these albums inspired in them. In many ways the moments that I lived through, while listening to this music, were some of the highlights of my life. But I couldn’t feel that way again. It wasn’t a shared experience. There’s no way I could ever go up to another human being and say, “that was what it was like”. There’s no way I could embrace this crazy circular piece of aluminium embedded in plastic, and say, “you understand me!” It would be beyond ridiculous.
Now, Matthew Sweet’s place as one of the finest songwriters of the 90s is secure, but anybody could tell that “Girlfriend” and “Altered Beast” took a lot out of him, and most of what he had to say, he said on those two albums. “100% Fun”, “Blue Sky on Mars” and (1999 album) were high-quality neo-Big Star indie pop albums, but they just aren’t on my desert island list. It just seemed that the fire had consumed him whole and we were left with the ashes.
Another way I could put it: if you were creating classical music or jazz, you could keep on producing wonderful stuff. If the name of the game were to produce intricate and intellectually stimulating stuff, you could put out 20 great albums. But people don’t really have enough stamina to make emotional heartbreak music more than a few times in their lives. You could only last for a few albums before you had nothing left to give. And strangely enough, it was around this time when Matthew Sweet seemed to age very very quickly. Around the time of “Girlfriend”, he had handsome matinee idol looks. And 10 years on from that, he suddenly morphed into an obese, haggard old geezer, as though it were being revealed that being a pop star was something that would never happen.
A few years later, I made my move on the second girl I had a crush on. Essentially I started off writing her fan mail. And we had a long-distance relationship, because at that point in time I was overseas in college. Guess what? It followed the crazy, tragic script that was mapped out by “Girlfriend”. My obsession was half-unrequited. It was misery a lot of the time. It followed the “foolish boyfriend falls in love with a fantasy instead of a real human being” pattern. It was like “500 Days of Summer”. Then it was over, and I decided to get to know her as a person, as a friend. And guess what? She wasn’t even a worthy friend. I was foolish enough to have trained my target on the wrong person! But at least it was liberating to know that she wasn’t “the one that got away”.
I was a bit complacent and standoffish after that. I thought that my opportunity would come again, but it didn’t. Maybe I flamed out, just like Matthew Sweet did. Maybe I was no longer capable of loving as ferociously as I did when I first burst out of the blocks. Maybe I was not mature enough for anything more than puppy love. No matter what the reason, I knew that if you’re in a marriage, or a sufficiently long term relationship, you don’t really want to be modelling your expectations on those notions of romantic love.
Many many moons later, I did get a chance to see him in concert. I’m a person who’s under no illusions that live music is in any way superior. Maybe the atmosphere of being in a gladiatorial arena would get to you, but otherwise it’s just a guy going through most of his hits. I was in Solana Beach, a wealthy beach town north of San Diego. I don’t think I related to the guys around me. These fans were in their 40s and 50s, understandably, and maybe not the younger breed of Americans who saw Asians as normal people. They would have been surprised to see me turn up. What struck me was that as a teenager, I saw a welcoming pair of arms I’d have flocked to. But now I’m in a room full of strangers. I enjoyed the concert. It was remarkable that more than half of his set came from the two famous albums. (And maybe a handful from 100% Fun album, I don’t know that one too well.) I had to go to gigs when I was living in Southern California, if only to get in touch with the 90s bands whose music I enjoyed while in my teens. But if I were honest, it was a little bleak for me, not having shared this music with other people very much. And as much as I revile Morrissey these days, I’m still reminded of his lines:
There’s a club, if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry and you want to die
Well I didn’t cry or want to die, but I suppose that listening to that music was such a thrill the first time around that anything else was bound to be somewhat disappointing in comparison.
Music Composition 