“When you’re strange. Faces come out in the rain. When you’re strange. No one remembers your name.” –The Doors.
When you’re strange, they will compare you to strange, when you’re strange. Don’t make them look ugly when you feel strange. Don’t make them seem wicked when you feel alone and unwanted. It won’t even things out when you’re feeling down and unloved and strange.
When I first learned of the documentary being made on the Mael brothers in Sparks called Sparks Brothers, I figured the comparisons to Queen would be inevitable and constant, as they have presumably throughout Sparks’ career. Thankfully, I was wrong on the quantity of comparisons in the documentary, but I was right about the quality.
When faced with the inevitable comparison questions, most artists follow the time-tested, thoroughly vetted art of embracing comparisons and distancing themselves from it at the same time. After watching comparisons of the unconventional for decades, we’ve seen professionals approach this in two ways. They either embrace it or distance themselves from it, and we’ve even heard some manage to tight wire both, “Thank you for comparing us to them. They achieved what we can only dream of achieving, but I honestly don’t see the comparison. We’re so different in so many ways.” The worst strategy I’ve seen, and that which Sparks employed, albeit subtly, is to bash the other strange artists. The other ones might lose, but you will not win by doing so.
The Sparks Brothers documentary is a mildly entertaining, overlong discussion of a modern band who started in the 70’s. I’ve now listened to the entire catalog of Sparks, and while I admire the band for their weird, strange, and just plain different efforts, they are not Queen. To someone who appreciates any efforts made at being unconventional and just plain different, in the art-rock milieu, I think they had enough songs to create a quality greatest hits album, but I don’t think their greatest hits would’ve qualified for Queen’s greatest hits volume II.
The Sparks Brothers documentary also tells the tale of a band who refused to play by the rules. Yet, when you’re strange and experimental in nature, you’re going to drop some duds. The problem with that, of course, is that when a listener chooses to click on one of your songs, and it’s one of the duds, that sample unfortunately marks your entire catalog in their mind. In his review of the documentary, comedian and social critic Adam Carolla concluded his review by saying, “No one listens to Sparks.” Some find the experimental nature of Sparks frustrating, because they come so close to making great songs. Some find it weird for the sake of being weird, but others find it inspirational, and that’s the reason some of us listen to Sparks. Sparks have some great singles, but no great albums, and they are not a great band. We do like them for who they are however.
Any band who stretches beyond the borders of weird, strange, and just plain different to structured outlandishness will eventually and inevitably be compared to Queen. Any time a band, or musician, attempts to redefine genres, engage in genre-breaking material, or corrupts and disrupts traditional structures in music, the Queen comparisons are inevitable. Queen might not be the weirdest band of all time, and they might not have been the first outlandish band, but they set a standard by which we compare all unconventional acts.
Comparisons are a way of life in any artistic endeavor. Every artist, and aspiring artist, should prepare for real, perceived, or imagined comparisons. They should prepare for the terms copied, derivative, or an unfair characterization of them as a poor man’s (list artist’s name here). The worst thing an artist can do is subtly diminish and outright bash the other artist. Doing so should be left to Bigfoot enthusiasts, UFO experts, and other conspiracy-theory minded milieus.
If you’re ever so bored, and you can’t find anything else to watch, the shorts on these subjects can be mildly entertaining at times. It’s almost inevitable, in these shows, that an interviewer will ask one of the experts in their field to augment or refute the theories of another expert. This second expert will inevitably attempt to establish his bona fides by diminishing the first expert and any others who claim expertise in their field. Those of us who know nothing of these fields know that we are supposed to pick one of these experts to follow. I am a bad example, because I don’t believe any of them, and I never will until they provide unquestionable and clear video, a dead body, or something else that I would be a stubborn fool not to consider a fact. The only thing I hear from the second expert is some jealousy that the interviewer would dare to lend some credibility to the first. I only hear the second expert attempt to gain some credibility on the back of the first. I also don’t hear anything the second one says after bashing the first. In this universe, where I have no knowledge, I end up dismissing everyone, and no one wins.
The Mael brothers did not take the occasion of the Sparks Brothers documentary to bash Queen, as I wrote. The brothers didn’t say anything about Queen, one way or another, but I have to assume that they had some say on the final cut. If that’s true, they allowed a no-name producer to diminish Queen.
“If I was producing that song,” the producer said in reference to a Sparks’ song, “I’d like put a beat on it or something, and be like oh my God, this is amazing. Everyone’s going to feel so sad about this, and we’re going to sneak it into them, and then Sparks would’ve be like, let Queen do that.” The idea that the Sparks’ Mael brothers didn’t say this might make it okay to some, but they allowed the director to keep it in, thus breaking a cardinal rule of weird art.
Outside of creating the best piece of art they possibly can, the goal of every artist is to make some sort of connection relative to the artist. Queen, David Bowie, and many others proved that this can be accomplished in unconventional ways that align with their interpretation and personality. We can assume that this producer wanted to add a beat to make a better connection to a wider audience. I understand the whole “sell-out” complaint, but some of the best weird bands learned how to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. I also understand that the artist doesn’t want to compromise on their artistic vision, but to suggest that Queen was more open to compromising themselves than Sparks tells me that they wanted this quote left in to help Sparks explain why Queen proved more popular than them. It doesn’t. It does nothing but slam on Queen, and it accomplishes nothing for Sparks in my humble opinion.
My advice for anyone being compared to a seminal artist who made an impact that is difficult to defeat is to embrace the comparison. As I wrote, thank the interviewer for the comparison and attempt to distance yourself at the same time. If, however, you find the comparisons exhausting, you say something along the lines of, “Any time an artist attempts to do something out of the ordinary they are compared to Queen. If you listen to our music and Queen’s, you won’t find any comparisons, other than we’re both unconventional. Queen did their thing, and we did ours. All the power to them, but I don’t honestly see the comparison.” Doing otherwise makes you come off sounding like an insecure UFO or Bigfoot expert who knows facts are hard to come by in their field, and the only thing left are competing theories. Those experts slam on each other all the time about intangibles such as findings and theories, and they attempt to establish their bona fides by saying none of the other experts know what they’re talking about except them. In my opinion, it’s a no-win situation.
If I never heard of Queen, and I didn’t establish my own connection to them, I might’ve dismissed them as a result of this producer’s shot, but I wouldn’t have tilted that vat of credibility back on Sparks. My question, if I were in the Sparks’ camp editing this film, is what are you hoping to accomplish by leaving this in? I would’ve dismissed them as petty, jealous types who want to taint Queen’s credibility to bolster theirs. I know Sparks music, and I know Queen’s, and I judge them to be separate and distinct entities. If I didn’t, neither parties would receive more acclaim, clicks, or anything else from me as a result of one party bashing the other.
“He’s just so weird,” my mom said when David Bowie took the stage on a 1970s, variety show called The Midnight Special. Before the marketing teams learned how fascinating weird could be to us, being weird was not a good thing. We strove to avoid the weird, so no one would call us weird. I didn’t want my mom to think I was weird, I didn’t want my friends to think that, and I didn’t want to be seduced into thinking I could be weird if I watched him, so I shut it off. We writers love to rewrite our past to suggest that we were so hip that we were bucking the system at eleven-years-old, so we can fortify our artistic bona fides. I wasn’t. I was a normal eleven-year-old who wanted to learn how to be more normal, so other kids would like me, and my primary conduit to absolute normalcy was my mom. So, when Bowie walk out onto the stage, I was floored by his appearance. My mom must’ve sensed how confused I was, so she quickly told me to turn the channel. I asked why, she said, “He’s just so weird,” and I turned the channel.
David Bowie was weird, there’s no point trying to argue, minimize, or qualify it. He even admitted as much, telling TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek to, “Stay Strange.” Thanks to artists like David Bowie, we’re all a little weirder, stranger, and everything outside the mainframe. The typical narrative might depict me in front of that TV, experiencing an epiphany, with a “That’s me, mama,” explosion of excitement that she never could quell. It might just be me, but I needed to establish a solid foundation of normal before I could start exploring the weird, strange and just plain different avenues of my otherwise immature and fragile psyche. So, before we continue, let me send out a shout out to my mom for all the effort she put into giving me the most normal upbringing she could before I could explore the other side with more maturity.
David Bowie feared he was a weird person at a very young age. He believed that he was susceptible to the schizophrenia that haunted his half-brother, Terry Burns. We can only guess that before he embraced the fears of falling prey to that mental disorder that haunted his mother’s side of the family Bowie sought the comfort of normalcy. This duality, as anyone who has worked their way through Bowie’s catalog can attest, would affect his artistic output.
“I’m not so sure how much of it is madness,” Bowie would ruminate to Yentob. “There’s an awful lot of emotional and spiritual mutilation that goes on in my family.”
He was “too weird” for my people. He was even too weird for me when I was too young to fight that two-word condemnation. My mom told me he was “too weird”, and even if I had the moxie to fight everyone else, I couldn’t fight her. I was too young to know how different I was, and even I if did, I wouldn’t acknowledge it, because I didn’t want to be weird. I wanted to have friends, and when my friends told me something was not only weird, but “too weird,” I backed away, into them, and their more comfortable groups.
High brow, low brow, or no brow?
David Bowie shocked in an era that didn’t want to be shocked. Shock value was not commodity in Bowie’s peak years. The New York Dolls were shocking people in New York, Marc Bolan was doing it to England, and Alice Cooper and KISS were putting it to the United States, but shocking people was not yet part of an artist’s marketing package. Those guys tapped into a tongue-in-cheek definition of the weird, but it was all a part of their schtick. There was something unnerving about Bowie’s strain of strange that made it feel a bit more organic. When we saw it, we could tell he wasn’t having a laugh. It was a part of him, the alien part, and perhaps the schizophrenia part.
Watch the shows of David Bowie on YouTube, circa 1972, and try to put yourself in that audience. It’s hard to do now, now that we’re so accustomed to performers playing around in the more customary borders of shock value now, but in 1972 Bowie had people actively avoiding him and his alien nature.
Even after I made it past my mom’s “too weird” block, I still wasn’t attracted to him artistically. I thought he sang songs to make tons of money, become a rock and roll star, and then become a celebrity. All the power to those who do that, but it wasn’t for me.I thought he was the artistic equivalent of a beautiful person who is fun to look at, but doesn’t have much more to them. My attraction to his music is a love story, and to sum up that story, it wasn’t love at first sight. It took him a long time to win me over, but I have been in a relationship with David Bowie’s music for about 30 years now.
I already knew most of his hits by the time I discovered Bowie, so I wasn’t blown away by those songs. The genius of his deep cuts did not blow me away either, in the manner the Beatles’ deep cuts did. I don’t know how anyone else characterizes Bowie’s genius, but it wasn’t immediate for me. His subtle artistic creativity required repeated listens, until I found myself working through his constructs when I wasn’t listening to the music.
I now liken listening to Bowie to sliding a foot into a great pair of socks. I’ve never met anyone who was absolutely blown away by a pair of socks. Slipping into a great shirt, and finding a pair of pants that fit just right can be mind blowing, but I never went nuts over a pair of socks, not when I slipped them on for the first time anyway. There are some socks that fit so well that when we put them on, they just feel like us, and we begin wearing them every day. When I began seriously listening to Bowie on a daily basis, I found philosophical artistry that fit me like a great pair of socks. Art is relative of course, and I’m sure some identify with Elvis Costello in the same ways, but I’ve heard numerous people recognize Costello for who he was in the music world for decades. Up until about the last ten years, very very few listed Bowie in their elite artists’ discussions. It didn’t affect what I thought of him, but I couldn’t understand it. The only answer I could come up with was that he was just “too weird”.
***
I appreciated Bowie’s reincarnation on MTV from afar, as a kid, but the Let’s Dance, China Girl songs seemed more like period pieces in the Madonna/Whitney Houston mold. Pop stars buy great songs from great songwriters, I thought, but a weird, music freak seeking deep, multi-faceted artists doesn’t dive deep into the catalog of pop stars like David Bowie. We wait until the radio stations play their singles. I thought David Bowie was just another good-looking pop star who bought great songs that were probably written by someone else. It was important to me, even back then, that an artist write their own music, because, to my mind, that was the difference between a star and an artist. I thought Bowie was just another 80s pop star who had a 70s catalog that I had no real interest in exploring, until an unusually perceptive friend of mine, named Dan, dropped this line on me.
“This crazy, weird musical path you’re on all points to one man, David Bowie,” Dan said.
“David Bowie?” I asked with disdain. “The Let’s Dance, China Girl guy?” I couldn’t believe Dan, the guy who had a long history of introducing me to deep, powerful music, was now saying I should be listening to an 80s pop artist. I’d been on the other end of his “if you like those guys, you’ll love these guys” suggestion so many times that I always gave his recommendations a shot. Over the years, Dan proved to be one of the few people I’d ever met who knew more about music than I did, but he didn’t know “my music”. He introduced me to Miles Davis, King Crimson, and Frank Zappa in the past, and while I liked and respected those incredible artists, they didn’t reach me on that other, “my music” level.
“I’m telling you,” he added, “Bowie is T. Rex, Hanoi Rocks, and Roxy Music, and that music is Bowie in a way that you won’t understand until you hear this.” He handed me a copy of a Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (AKA Ziggy) compact disc. I’m not going to rewrite this section either and suggest that that compact disc glowed or that there was a sound equivalent to Heaven’s Gate opening when he handed it to me, but that is how I now remember it. “This is David Bowie 101, and when you start loving the alien, I’ll introduce you to other elements of the alternate universe he created.”
I thought Ziggy was a quality album when I first heard it, but I couldn’t get passed the pop artist and “too weird” hang ups I had with Bowie. Those hang ups led me to think the single Ziggy Stardust was so immediate that it might be too immediate. After repeated spins, I started zeroing in on the other songs on the album, and I started dissecting them in the “parts are greater than the whole” mindset. Soul Love was the first song that nabbed me, and I put that song on repeat numerous times. At the end of that week, I forgot to return the disc to my friend. The music on Ziggy Stardust became “mine” in so many ways that I forgot the actual, physical disc was not. When he reminded me that I forgot to return his disc, I did and went out and bought one of my own.
I was already a Ziggy freak by the time Dan suggested I listen toHunky Dory and Diamond Dogs. I was hesitant, thinking Bowie might be a one-album wonder. After a couple weeks, I was hooked on everything Bowie. The “too weird” notions I had of Bowie began to fall away, and I stopped borrowing the discs from my incredibly perceptive friend. I bought them. I did something different with my Bowie-obsession than I did with every other artist to whom I became obsessed. I bought a Bowie album, and I inhaled it. I lived each album, until I knew just about every lyric and every beat of those albums. I thought there was something different to know, feel and experience on each album that I never had before with any other artist. Each album was so different that I could see what everyone was saying when they said he was too weird, but by this time, I recognized that I was a little too weird too, and I began to think David Bowie was singing about me. I listened to each album as an art enthusiast might when examining a painting, slowly ingesting every little nuance until they discovered what it meant to the artist.
When my excitement to buy another album overrode my good sense, I moved onto the next album, only to discover I wasn’t as done with the previous one as I thought I was. Bowie, I realized, was one of the very few musicians who could have one foot planted in the pop world and another in the world of art. My peers told me the man was weird, “too weird”, and I listened. Soon after taking a deep dive, I regretted how much I missed by refusing to listen to him for so long. There are very few artists that affect me so much that I regret not listening to them sooner. I thought of all the years I wasted listening other artists when I could’ve been listening to Hunky Dory, Alladin Sane, and Diamond Dogs. I thought he could’ve changed my world just a little bit sooner back then, and I know that sounds silly, but the effect of his music on me was that profound.
When I finally made it past the obsession, I had with what some now call the Five Years chunk of his catalog (Man Who Sold the World through Diamond Dogs), I graduated to his Berlin Trilogy; Low, Lodger, and Scary Monsters. We listen to music, albums, and artists for a variety of reasons, and I’ve had so many obsessions that I don’t have enough fingers or toes to count them, but there was something different about my obsession with David Bowie. We could label his music in all the pedantic ways, deep, meaningful, and spiritual, but that “not just weird, but too weird” characterization that influenced my refusal to listen to Bowie became the primary reason I listened to him in my adult years.
Whereas most singers sang about love, sex, drugs, and rocking out, Bowie sang about estrangement, an alien nature, and various other themes we deem “too weird”. In places where an artist might go over the top, and be weird for the sake of being weird, Bowie displayed restraint. In places where an artist should shows restraint, Bowie went over the top. He could write a song that that would live on in the history of FM radio (Space Oddity, Changes, and Heroes), and on the same album he would leave a deep cut to cure our longing for great, weird, and offbeat music that only aficionados love (Alternative Candidate, It’s no Game (part 1), and Lady Grinning Soul). Bowie was the consummate artist who found a way to reach me as few artists could. Most music aficionados don’t intend to downplay the effects of hits, but most quality artists have some hits in their catalog. The difference between Bowie and most quality artists is that he spent as much time perfecting his deep cuts as he did his hits. He had a conventional side and an artistic side, as most of us do, but unlike the rest of us, David Bowie managed to cultivate his normal side, coupled with the “emotional and spiritual feelings of estrangement” from his mom’s side, and this duality led him to craft some excellent pop songs and some brilliant, “too weird” deep cuts.
I started listening to David Bowie obsessively about 30 years ago, and I bought his new releases on the date of their release. I enjoy a majority of them, but Bowie captured magic in a bottle during the Five Years albums and the Berlin Trilogy. Hours…, Reality, and Blackstar were my favorite late Bowie albums, but they couldn’t compare to the great eight.
Years before his death, David Bowie experienced something of a rebirth. All of a sudden, and seemingly out of nowhere, I began hearing his peers begin listing him as one of their primary influences. I heard one or two artists do this before, but not to this degree, and I was paying attention. Fans began listing Bowie just a bit outside the greatest artists of his era. They called him revolutionary, a pioneer, and all that stuff we’re accustomed to hearing now, but save for a few artists here and there, I didn’t hear the adoration society crown him in a way he richly deserved for most of my life. I’ve often wondered why, and how, this happened.
If an artist moves into the pulse of the zeitgeist after decades of being on the outer rim, we can usually pinpoint when and where this happened. The artist probably had that one song, movie, or another momentous event that put them over the top. Unless you consider Nirvana’s acoustic cover of The Man who Sold the World that momentous event, it did not happen with Bowie for most of his career. Some of the albums in the “back nine” (or in Bowie’s case the back eight– Outside to Blackstar) of his career were good, but they weren’t so great that they should’ve moved the needle on a retrospective analysis of his career. Before I get to the primary reason I think Bowie moved from just another artist putting out music to a cultural touchstone in the zeitgeist, there were years after 1980’s Scary Monsters and before 1995’s Outside when Bowie got lost in the artistic wilderness. Having said that, I don’t think Bowie moved to us as much as we moved to him in a cultural appreciation of everything he accomplished throughout his glorious career. I think we, as a culture, became more weird, or at least we embraced the weird far more in 2002 (roughly) than we did in 1972. As I wrote, I was already a Bowie fanatic by the time Heathen came out, but others were suddenly calling Heathen his best Bowie disc since Scary Monsters. I liked, and still like Heathen, but I didn’t think it was as good as Hours…. and I didn’t understand how everyone missed what I consider the Great Eight albums from Man who Sold the World and Scary Monsters.
If you’re one who remains on the sideline for whatever reason, I suggest that you cast that cloak aside for as long as it takes to make an individual assessment of his material. My bet is that he reaches you on a level you’ve never considered before. Music, like every other art form, is so relative that his artistry might not appeal to you on the level he did me, but if you’re anything like me, you now know, as my friend Dan predicted it would for me, my definition of “my music” all goes back to Bowie.
Other than providing me an excellent entry point to David Bowie, with Ziggy, Dan was notoriously poor at providing me an entry point to the artists he loved. To introduced me to Frank Zappa, for example, but he loaned me an advanced Zappa album that he loved as someone who had been listening to Zappa for decades. I eventually grew to love that album, but it took me a while. I needed to start at a better entry point to appreciate what Zappa did throughout his career. With that in mind, I thought about an entry point to David Bowie. I would compile the albums Hunky Dory and Ziggy into a playlist, and I would cut the songs Eight Line Poem and It Ain’t Easy (personal preference). Best of Bowie is another great place to start to learn the more normal side, as most people prefer normal pop songs, or hits, as a point of entry, and if you’re not familiar with those songs, it’s an excellent starting point. For those who know those the hits so well that they seek deep cuts, or songs beyond the hits, I’ve compiled a list of those songs that have made it onto so many of my Bowie playlists. Some of them were marginal hits in their era, but I still consider them so deep and meaningful that I had to include them.
1) Alternative Candidate (It’s no longer on Spotify for some reason. It’s on YouTube though.)
2) It’s no Game (Part 1)
3) Lady Grinning Soul
4) Sound and Vision
5) Kooks
6) African Night Flight
7) Soul Love
8) Dodo (This song is also not on Spotify. Here’s the YouTube capture.)
Dan Elwes was a weirdo, we all were, but so was Stanford Days. We were all coming up with so many weird jokes, stories, and ideas that most of them got lost in the noise. Dan topped us all one day. He came up with an idea was so preposterous and absurd that some of us thought he might be brilliant, in a twisted, that-will-never-work, but what kind of mind comes up with such an idea, way. The reactions were varied, but the one thing we all agreed on was that no normal mind could think up such an idea. Then someone added that an abnormal mind wouldn’t come up with that idea either. “Seriously,” he said. “They might think it, but they’d never say it. They’d be afraid that the rest of us might know how abnormal they are.”
Weird-Americans have come a long way in the past couple decades. If a weirdo said something weird in the past, it could be a death sentence for them in some social circles. People would give them “that” look that would dismiss them from all future conversations. Thanks, in part, to the comedic stylings of weirdos like, Andy Kaufman, Peter Sellers, Chris Elliot, and David Letterman being weird is now more accepted. Those who used to dismiss weirdos as outcasts began to see them as creative provocateurs, but even the weirdest weirdos know that there is a difference between weird and strange and the just plain different.
Weirdos spent their high school years trying to put all of the unusual ideas, fantasies, and eccentricities of their youth behind them. We wanted people to laugh with us, not at us. We wanted them to take us serious, so they would like us. When we failed, we realized that we could only conceal who we were for so long. When we came together as adults, working for a company on the ideal shift for outcasts, the overnight shift, it didn’t take long for us to find each other and bond. Our time together didn’t last long, but we enjoyed it so much that we still talk about it.
We were a tight-knit group of the ostracized rejects who never fit into groups well, until Stanford Days joined us. When we first met him, we thought he probably should’ve signed up for the day shift. He was so normal there was no reason to notice him. He read books from the best-seller list, and his idea of good music was limited to what sold well. “You think your music is better than mine? I’ll have you know that this particular star,” he said mentioning the star’s name, “sold millions more copies with their last album than your favorite band has sold in total.” He quoted Lord of the Rings and Star Trek. He used math and science to make sense of the world. Yet, he didn’t fit in with the mathematical crowd, because he was too weird. He didn’t fit in with us, because he was not weird enough.He was an uncomfortable man, uncomfortable in his own skin, and it didn’t take a keen observer to see that he sought normalcy to quiet whatever vortex he had swirling around in his head.
The more we learned about Stanford Days, on those overnights, the more we thought the story was about him. Yet, he was a guy who was there, nothing more and nothing less than there. His path to being there ended when the management decided to shift our seating arrangement, and he ended up sitting next to Dan Elwes.
Dan was the complete opposite of Stanford Days. Dan was the type a Stanford Days often loathes, because everything seems to come so easy to them. Dan loved to laugh, but everybody loves to laugh. Dan laughed so hard, so often, that some thought he might be simple-minded. Dan also wasn’t afraid to let his freak flag fly. He was everything Stanford wasn’t. Dan enjoyed being a freak and a weirdo in a way few do and he used to say different, weird, and strange things to pique our interest in a way that left us thinking he might be the story.
As anyone who has ever been in a corporate office, with no walls, knows your desk neighbor can become one of your best friends for as long as that particular seating arrangement exists, and when management put Dan next to Stanford, he took a shine to the man. Dan Elwes had an influence on all of us, but his most profound influence was Stanford, and Stanford found himself a member of our clique, thanks to Dan.
We had no problem with Stanford, but he didn’t seem to be a good fit for our clique. He was so normal that we suspected he studied the habits and mannerisms of the normal to convince others that there was nothing weird, strange, or just plain different about him, and we figured he probably would’ve succeeded if he didn’t get all caught up in our cliques effort to outweird one another.
Thinking back on the normal world, Stanford Days built for himself, it had to be a dilemma for the man when he started seeing us let our freak flags fly. He probably always wanted to do it, but he spent most of his life concealing that desire. We don’t know how much thought he put into it, if any, but he began saying things to fit in with our clique’s attempts to outweird one another, and he won, and he silenced the room. The things he began saying were so weird that they didn’t fit even fit in with the weirdest people you’ve ever met. When Stanford finally let his guard down, it put what Hank Hill would call “extra stress on a structure that wasn’t up to code in the first place.”
We thought we were abnormal weirdos, but we were just having fun being unusually provocative. Stanford introduced us to the difference between the weird and the strange. To put this into a visual display, think of a dartboard with absolute normalcy being the center, bullseye of that dartboard. Stanford’s eccentricities informed us that with all the effort we put into being weird, we were actually a lot closer to the triple point layer than we knew. Dan Elwes was probably closer to the double score area, and Stanford defined for us what off the board meant.
The goal of true weirdos, who we might classify as strange and just plain different is to convince their observers that they hit the bullseye, the arbitrary and relative definition of absolute normal. When they make it over one of the borders, preventing them from progressing, we assume that they continue to have strange thoughts, but they learn not to say them. The fear of public perception keeps them desperately clinging to whatever progress they make, and they do whatever they have to do to maintain their hard-fought place on the dartboard.
To progress over a border, people like Stanford Days watch normal people, and they impersonate them. As any skilled impersonator will tell us, quality impersonation requires hitting bullet points of familiarity in your presentation, so that your audience knows the target of your impersonation. If an impersonator is imitating Johnny Carson, for example, they say things that Johnny said most often. Similarly, an abnormal person seeking to imitate a normal person focuses their presentation on the habits and mannerisms of the normal that we all know well. It’s not hard to do, of course, but the level of difficulty required in maintaining a consistent presentation corresponds with their placement on that dartboard. Some slip up, and others turn ultra-normal.
Those vying for the ultra-normal can reveal their effort in a variety of ways, but when we loaned Stanford Days some of our music, he revealed himself in cinematic fashion. It might be a fault-ridden form of measurement, but Stanford accidentally informed us that music could be used as a barometer of sanity.
We all listened to Top 40 radio in our youth, but most of us grew out of it. As we matured, our tastes in music followed. We might have become obsessed with Heavy Metal at one point in our lives, and we might’ve switch to Jazz, Punk and Classical at various points, until we worked through just about every genre of music at one time or another. Most of us stop, at some point, and listen to one genre for the rest of our lives, but some of us love music so much that we spider web outward. The weird clique, in our office, went through all of these phases and arrived at the most unusual, weirdest, and just plain different music you’ve probably ever heard.
When Dan brought Stanford Days into our clique, we thought Stanford was a like-minded music aficionado who was always on the lookout for something deliciously different. Our clique was anything but exclusive. We welcomed anyone and everyone to love our adventurous music as much as we did. We mostly loaned our music to people in our clique, but some of the times, some music excited us so much that we loaned it to outsiders. Most of them said they didn’t get it and they politely said it was just too weird for them. They often littered their rejections with humor, “You must be an odd duck if you like that.” The music we loaned them was not what we considered on the outer fringes of that particular dartboard, we reserved that stuff for the insiders. We loaned them what we considered weird music 101, just to gauge their reaction. Our MO was to stair step them to our most difficult favorites. When Stanford Days entrenched himself in our clique, we didn’t think stair stepping would be necessary. We thought he was ready for the weirdest music you’ve ever heard.
Stanford was outraged. He angrily rejected the music we loaned him, and he proceeded to tell everyone in the office to avoid listening to any of our music too. “It’s just so weird,” was the refrain of his condemnations, and his warnings to others. By going so overboard with his condemnations, Stanford accidentally revealed to us how tentative his hold on normalcy was.
“Why don’t you just say you don’t enjoy listening to our music, and that you don’t want to listen to it again?” we said. “Why do you have to make such a show of it?”
Stanford said something unmemorable and irrelevant in reply, but the gist of his answer was that he didn’t know the answer. We initially thought his display was all about his personal condemnation of us, but we learned that the show was the show. The goal of Stanford Days’ show was to inform the outside world how normal Stanford Days was by contrast. When he said the music was “just so weird” he wanted to declare to the world that that music was too weird for him, because he was just “too normal” to understand it. He never said such things, but his wild, angry display implied it. He wanted to use his hatred of our music as a platform to declare to that our music was exclusively for the abnormal, and he wanted no part of it.
We thought the unusual, so normal he was abnormal Stanford Days was the story. The more time we spent around Stanford and Dan Elwes, the more we realized that Dan Elwes was such an unusual thinker that no normal mind could come up with his unusual ideas, and no abnormal mind would either. As our mutual friend said, “[The abnormal] might think it, but they would never say it out loud. They’d be afraid that we might know how weird they are.” Most abnormal minds don’t want us to know how abnormal they are, and they don’t dare delve into their unusual thoughts either, because they don’t want to know how abnormal they are either. It takes a special mind to be so comfortable with their eccentricities that they embrace them, as Dan Elwes did just that when he heard our music. He didn’t reject it, as Stanford did, he tried to top it with his own brand of obnoxiously complicated and difficult music. We all knew that our music barometer was not a comprehensive indicator of the various levels of sanity, but Dan’s embrace of our music, and his subsequent recommendations prepared us for his personal embrace of the weird.
When I first learned of the documentary being made on the Mael brothers in Sparks called Sparks Brothers, I figured the comparisons to Queen would be inevitable and constant, as they have presumably throughout Sparks’ career. Thankfully, I was wrong on the quantity of comparisons in the documentary, but I was right about the quality. 
Rilaly 