happy birthday, jonathan

Though Jonathan Richman is about as simple as it gets, he makes people feel awfully confused. Cue the "He's so smarmy. He's just putting us on. He can't be for real."

As consequence of some strange cultural misstep, we tend to pin the label of "ironic" onto the least ironic of things. Our automatic reaction to that which seems too optimistic, too out of touch, too earnest (where earnest equals overzealous and ignorant) is to dismiss it, to mock it, to place it in the field of camp, even to relegate it to the study of "zany anthropology." Think of Tonetta, Pants on the Ground, ForeverKailyn, Friday, etc.

But what if, of the nearly seven billion people on this earth, one of them turned out to be a gentle soul who likes singing, being nice to people and not shitting all over everything that is sacred and good? I guess Richman's supposed niceness might seem a little incredulous and twee in light of these things:

He wrote and performed a song about being a little dinosaur, complete with matching dinosaur-dance, his favorite adjective is "little"( see I'm a Little Airplane, Hey There Little Insect, My Little Kookenhaken), he wrote a song dedicated to his own niceness ("My name is Jonathan, and I can't stand to see people with their feelings hurt"), he claimed that he would never intentionally play music loud enough to hurt a baby's ears, he turned teary-eyed at the thought of William Blake during a televised interview, some of his songs read like P.S.A.'s (the instructive, kid-friendly

tone of Stop This Car being a far cry from the snide, contemptuous whining of I'm Straight and its "Hippy Johnny").

But listen closely and you'll notice that Hippy Johnny shares
his name with Jonathan Richman, who can also be an asshole sometimes. He can be a really needy boyfriend (see Important in your Life), a total hard ass (see She's Gonna Respect Me), a nagging parent imploring us to wake up early on the weekend (see Morning of our Lives), an impolite eater (see I Eat With Gusto, Damn You Bet), even a home wrecker (see My Career As A Homewrecker).

He's also notoriously difficult to interview:

But at the end of the day, he's just a person. And even though there's nothing easier than picturing him scarfing down a cheese burger and milkshake with reckless abandon (something about him is so American, so rock n' roll), he's been vegan for longer than I've been alive.

Here's to sixty years of Jonathan Richman.


p.s.

I was somewhat reluctant to post this, first because it may only be a glorified fan letter and second because it is not "about" art in a straightforward sense. But when I think of my attitudes towards art, I see that they can largely be traced back to Jonathan Richman. His earnestness is key; I like artists who are committed, who mean what they say. I refrain from using the word "honest" here because that would mean venturing into tricky territory, but that is basically what I mean. I like art that is honest and serious, and like Jonathan, funny as well. Not funny in a pointed-finger-mocking kind of way, but funny in a different kind of way. I want humor that is generative rather than dismissive. It is only the latter kind of humor - and irony - that I so strongly dislike. I've come to learn that irony is made up of both seriousness and humour; in the worst kind of irony, this seriousness functions in as cynicism. The danger of this kind of irony is not that it's "mean" (though it is this as well), but that it's the easy way out. That this kind of irony is so popular, even amongst otherwise well-meaning individuals, may be testament to an easiness that disguises itself as the best and most natural way of looking at things. I hope Alain de Botton's suggestion that "cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards" is actually true, and that some of us might come to see this one day.

p.p.s.

See Brad Troemel's Why No Serious? A Case for Idealism in an Era of Constant Irony. I'm going to write about this one at a later date, promise.