Fuck Fleetwood Mac

It's not that there's anything wrong with them. It's not that their music sucks. Is it a little bland? A little boring? Yeah. I mean, if that's what heartbreak sounds like to you, then I envy you your porcelain life. But my big beef with Fleetwood Mac is their status (along with the Eagles, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, et. al.) in the underground. A friend and I were eating breakfast in the local vegetarian joint yesterday morning, when our server--a kind cool young person covered in tattoos--yelped with joy when Fleetwood Mac came on. "Oh, I'm so glad I get to listen to Rhiannon this morning." And yeah, I get that most contemporary songwriters, mainstream or underground, aren't capable of utilizing the minor verse to major chorus shift that the Mac does so effectively in that song (even though it's really easy). But if you're a young person who gets excited about hearing Fleetwood Mac, that just tells me you didn't start listening to music, or the radio, until your senior year in high school. I assume you were raised by christians, or possibly a cult, because Fleetwood Mac has been inescapable on the radio--as have all the other 70's schlock--for the past 40 years.

Again, this isn't anything against F. Mac. Here. I'll post a song I like, one that never gets played on the radio.

It's something you listen to. Me, I listened to it a lot when I was 10 (I went through my Eagles phase when I was 8). That wasn't because I was super cool. It was because I heard it on the radio and liked it. But after hearing it again (and again, and again), it got kind of boring. I wanted to hear more stuff, stuff that made me feel as captivated and stunned as when I first heard Hotel California, a song that, as an eight year old contained vast quantities of mystery and drama. When I last heard it, also yesterday during my vegetarian breakfast, let's just say that it contained significantly less mystery or drama. I told my friend just to concentrate on the kinda sorta cool bassline and we'd get through it together.

I blame Best Coast. I blame Poptimism Inc. The only thing more obnoxious than people singing the praises of the same exact thing that everyone else is singing the praises of is the way they pat themselves on the back, as if somehow their championing of F. Mac, or Beyonce, makes them interesting. It takes serious ideological pretzel contortions to think you're a badass for liking the most popular music ever recorded, but that's your 21st century music critic for you. What's the point in championing the counterculture, the more challenging, the marginalized when all distinctions between types of music are arbitrary. You like the thing that's popular then more people are going to read what you wrote. Eyeballs are power, and, much like music, all eyeballs are exactly the same.

I can accept this desperate scrambling by critics for relevance, and the attendant (small, dwindling, insubstantial) paycheck that comes with that relevance. But imagine being a cool guy in your early 20s with aspirations to being an artist, in a public space where you could play anything you want, you have pretty much the entire recorded history of music at your fingertips, you can signify your aesthetic stance for all the artistic influencers in town, and you put on Fleetwood fucking Mac. That's a hell of a statement. It's a statement that you're boring.

Today, I walked into the local outpost of a regional convenience store chain to grab some soda water and some Takis (product placement alert!). You know what their piped-in corporate-approved speakers were playing? Fucking It's My Life by Talk Talk. And this is something that has happened to me again and again over the last few years. If you want to hear The Cure you go to McDonald's. If you want to hear Pearl Jam Pandora, you go to the local independent coffee shop. And you can fucking forget about hearing anything more obscure than any of those artists I just mentioned. If I heard the Go-Betweens (who were also pretty good at that minor/major thing F. Mac did) in public, or fuck it, if I heard The Bastards of Fate, my legs would probably fall off from shock (I am a cultural critic; I am not a doctor).

I've been listening to F. Mac for three decades now, but I've been listening to the Go-Betweens for nearly two. I've never gotten tired of them the way I got tired of the Mac. I'm going to post a song that could have been, in its musical style, a Mac song. It was never a hit. I have never heard it on the radio. I have never heard it in public unless I was the one playing it (at the same coffee shop that rocks Pearl Jam Pandora, back in the day). It still stops my breath. I wonder what the guy in the restaurant would think of it.

Both this song and Rhiannon are about ghosts, or people who are both inhabiting the "spectral" realm. F. Mac's song is about a Celtic (or Welsh, I forget) witch. The G. Betweens song is about G. McLennan's dead father. It has never failed to move me. There's a performance I want you to watch. I find it stunning. I want to share it with you. It has 22,000 views. The Youtube video for Rhiannon--just the song with a picture of the album, mind you--has 38,000,000. There is more in this musical heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your Fleetwood Mac people.