John Cougar Melancholy

I was fortunate to catch an interview with John Mellencamp on NPR this morning. I'm still a fan of his, having begun listening to his music in the early 80's or so. I enjoyed his songs about loneliness and areas of society (both the corners and the wide-open spaces) brimming with inequity, as well as lighter, more hopeful fare.

I've heard him on the "Bob and Tom Show" syndicated radio program and found him to be surprisingly funny. The NPR interview and his writing on his website revealed him to be surprisingly articulate as well. With all this surprise, you'd think I expected him to be some dull, grunting moron; certainly not. His sense humor was just so well-developed, his written observations and concerns very deep and clearly-expressed. Maybe it's the format of his music that scrambled my expectations: a three-minute song is a very different from an hour-long interview.

Anyway... I digress, but then, that's what this damned blog is for, isn't it?

The point I'm trying to thrash towards is that I haven't bought a Mellencamp album in years, maybe decades. I want to, and it may be largely because of the history and nostalgia I share with an artist whose music I started enjoying during my adolescence. Maybe that's enough.

However, I stopped buying albums because they stopped being any fun for me. For several albums up to that point, the songs had become drearier and sadder, and fewer of them on each album even tried to have hope or humor. The number for the Suicide Hotline should have been printed on each album cover. Specifically, the last music of his that I bought was a CD single of "Key West Intermezzo/I Saw You First." It was a longing work about a girl he saw but didn't approach, or something - it's been years. So, for one thing, I don't know what the fuck an "intermezzo" is, and for me the song was another masochistic wallow in depression.

I also saw what I thought was a strange rise in a techno-pop beat which really threw me. It just wasn't what I thought of when I thought of John Mellencamp. On the other hand, he's always had a rebellious and independent streak, and so I figured: "If this is what he's putting out, it must be what he wants to do," as opposed to something a corporate goon had forced him to do. I figured the artist was moving and growing away from me as a fan, and so I let it go at that.

Has it gotten any different? Is he still banging out despondent tunes with synthesized percussion that alienates me as a listener? I don't know. Judging a book by its cover, I see that his discography since has been largely black-and-white works of a down-looking John M. The NPR interview proclaims: "...Mellencamp is in the midst of a folksy, pessimistic streak on his new album." It doesn't give me a lot of hope.

Has he forgotten the hopeful half of "It's A Lonely Ol' Night?" where a black hole of desperate loneliness is balanced with the prospect of sharing that lonely ol' night with another forlorn soul in the cold emptiness? What about the tragic pointlessness of "Rumble Seat," and how it turns around and declares:

"Tomorrow is a new day
Gonna make these dreams come true
I'm gonna believe in myself
I'll tell you what Im gonna do
I'm gonna stop puttin myself down
I'm gonna turn my life around"

I haven't heard the kind of gritty optimism and insouciant rebellion John had sung in a helluva long while. I miss it a lot. I'll check out some samples on his website, and see if our tastes have adopted closer parallels. I hope so.