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Hell Yeah, I’m Going to Liverpool
Remembering pop snobbery
Here are some fun lines via David Hepworth and his essay collection, Nothing Is Real (Penguin 2018):
“I’m not one of those people here to tell you that this [pop music] is the new classical music. I don’t believe that. As soon as people start talking about pop music as though it’s Stravinsky they immediately take away half of what I like about it: they take away the personality, the pretension, the absurdity, the constant battle between career and ego and art (with a small ‘a’). As soon as you approach pop music with a furrowed brow, it flees” (68).
He then quotes Pope John Paul II who said that “of all the unimportant things, football is the most important,” which Hepworth likens to the way he feels about pop music.
I couldn’t agree more, though depending on the season, I’d have difficulty choosing between American football and pop music. Still, I’d likely choose music because it gets me through darker times, some of which are caused by American football (those poor Buffalo Bills).
In his collection, Hepworth spends much time discussing the Beatles, how for him, their music, which first came to him when he was fifteen, “was the best music of all” (30), a notion he admits everyone feels about the music of their fifteenth year. Hepworth, though…