Pretty much anything self described as quirky sucks

I always got the feeling that you hated the Shins in part because of the way in which they were used in Garden State, an admittedly lame film. But clearly not. You just hate them. You motherfucker.

This is a good example of why I usually - but not always - prefer a movie to have as little music as possible. But most directors just can’t help themselves, and most do not have the deft touch it requires to do it right.

Uff da.  And it looked so promising—i.e., actually funny—from the preview!

You know who the worst offenders are on the music-as-substitute-for-earned-emotion thing?  TV dramas.  Holy shit, have you ever seen Gray’s Anatomy?  Saw it for the first time last night.  What bullshit.

Hollywood turns all things to shit. Romantic comedies would be shit even if Hollywood didn’t expel them, however, so you should thank god that those movies aren’t even worse. When I hear a song I like associated with any movie, it is taken as just one more reason to avoid that movie.

TV dramas look more and more like Hollywood flicks, replete with shity acting propped up by visual legerdemain, quick-cuts, spam-cam (oooOOOooo, handheld cam adds veritas!), and whiny-bitch music cues. Since I tend to hate dramas, I simply laughed as others had to suffer through the trope. Now all genres are being contaminated, however.

Actually, if I’m going to sit through a movie that sucks, I’d rather hear some good music while I’m at it. I don’t worry about taint, if “Fortunate Son” can survive blue jean commercials or whatever it was, I think the Replacements can make it, too.

I like the Mats, and I like “Bastards of Young,” and I’m surprised to hear that a world exists where “Bastards of Young” is not only widely known but so predictable as to have become a cliché.

The general comment about musical taste substituting for emotion, sympathy, or identification between audience and characters or between characters is worthwhile, but this is kind of like the insufferable music snob calling the insufferable music snob insufferable.

Also, now I kind of hope that Judd Apatow and Michael Bay team up to make a movie about men’s rights, organized thematically around Devo songs. 

That’s beautiful, Flip!  We can have it in production within the quarter.  Is Seth Rogan available for filming in July?  Move it people, we got movie magic to make!

Well, I aims to amuse, but I think that was needlessly spiteful of me…

Anyway, my real point is that I don’t think there are that many people in the target audience for _Adventureland_ who’ll resent having had their beloved Replacements and Lou Reed songs tarnished.  Sure, maybe it’s a lazy way to evoke an era that’s, ulp, sadly becoming bygone.  It’s a bit Nick Hornby/Cameron Crowe.  I’m not worried about that.  Then again, at the time, I was a poseur at best, so I don’t have the same commitment to Keeping Culture Weird.

Also back in the day I was a depressed, overeducated, and reasonably privileged white boy, so I don’t have the same ideological objection to seeing stories about my people.  Again.  And again and again.  Represent!

P.S.  I don’t even mind Zach Braff. 
P.P.S.  He can be in the men’s-rights Devo movie.

Skip the movie, buy the soundtrack.  Where have I heard that before?

Oh yeah, practically everywhere.  If only the smart people behind movie soundtracks were in charge of the movies, things might improve.  Then again, some soundtracks are so good and some movies so bad, maybe the soundtrack people are the ones greenlighting films.

I’m still tempted to see it only because when I was in high school, I worked in the games department at Six Flags during that approximate time period, so I’m curious to see what those parts are like.  Sounds like I may be better off waiting for cable, though.

My innocence ended the day I watched the opening credits for ‘House’. That was my song.

To me, I thought that we weren’t supposed to feel sympathetic for the main character, at least not feel sympathetic for him during the times the girl runs away.
Instead, we where supposed to feel sorry for the fact that he is such an awkward, pretentious kid.

Then again, I’m drunk

“Anyway, my real point is that I don’t think there are that many people in the target audience for _Adventureland_ who’ll resent having had their beloved Replacements and Lou Reed songs tarnished. “
Yeah, I agree with this and I would say I am a big music snob, possibly much more insufferable then Amanda. I love Lou Reed, Big Star,  Husker Du and the Replacements but at this point it doesn’t really bother me to hear them out and about in mainstream pop culture, mostly because mainstream pop music is beyond intolerable these days. Like “Billie Jean” was awesome in retrospect as pop music and forgot about that godhead know as Prince in the 80s who managed to be both extremely popular and beyond utterly brilliant. But today we have American Idol and really bad commercialized hip-hop. So less of that and more good stuff sounds great to me, even if the consequence is lame people listening to some good music. There is still plenty of totally awesome obscure music that us music snobs can hoard for ourselves anyhow.
Anyway without the “cool older sibling” around, movies are possibly the only way for high school kids to find out about good music, esp. older good music.

You know who the worst offenders are on the music-as-substitute-for-earned-emotion thing?  TV dramas.  Holy shit, have you ever seen Gray’s Anatomy?  Saw it for the first time last night.  What bullshit.

Seriously? Seriously?! Seriously!

I love the show, even if it does keep hemorrhaging cast.  I don’t really mind the music because I don’t know any of it and can ignore it completely.  Any time a song I know is in a show, it throws me out of the moment and shifts my focus to the song.  “Hey, is that Mike Doughty?  It is!  I’d forgotten about him, now I have to get that song.  What did she just say?”

Directly on the subject of Grey’s Anatomy, I like that the relationships in the show take actual work, and that people who fell together for BS reasons break up or get divorced.  Nobody gets a fairy tale romance.  Also the show is told almost entirely from a female perspective, which is just awesome.

Anyway, my real point is that I don’t think there are that many people in the target audience for _Adventureland_ who’ll resent having had their beloved Replacements and Lou Reed songs tarnished.

No, of course not.  There’s also not many people in audiences who cared about any other foul things in this movie.  The audience didn’t notice that the selling point for the “good” girl was that she listened (and didn’t have opinions of her own—-how refreshing!) and that the “bad” girl was bad mostly because she had her own ideas about her own stuff and was happy to tell some two-bit punk to fuck off.  Most of the audience didn’t care that the narrative was the classic Nice Guy® narrative, or that our hero denounced double standards on men and women while employing them himself.  Most audience members didn’t care that, to steal a phrase from Auguste, they wrote this movie on a calculator.

In the larger scheme of things, most audience members don’t care about plot holes, shitty characterization, cliches, horrible violations of the agreement to suspend disbelief, or the various other ways movies can insult your intelligence.  Most audience members not only don’t care that most comedies put women into two categories: killjoys and fucktoys, because it confirms their own misogynist prejudices. 

I could go on, but don’t care to.  Most of the audience isn’t my concern.  I’m not here to validate lowest common denominator laziness.  I’m here to share a critical point of view.  This movie especially was irritating, because the level of detail, the supporting characters, the soundtrack, and even the cinematography said, “I am a movie for thinking people.”  FAIL.

To be fair, the MPDG romantic lead did have opinions of her own.  They were uniformly hateful, though.  The only thing she seemed to give a shit about was hurting her stepmother’s feelings, which made me hate her.  The angry adolescent thing is acceptable in an adolescent.  In a 21-year-old, it’s a turn-off of the worst sort.

On reading this, I’m willing to revise my opinion of Adventureland.  It’s really time I learned that you really can’t judge a film by it’s trailer.

Adventureland is not, as I assumed, a film about t-shirts with retro flocked iron-on letters.  It is a mixtape about t-shirts with retro flocked iron-on letters.

I like the quirky, but I dislike the commodification of the quirky.  So, yeah.

I haven’t seen the movie, pegged it as willfully lowbrow from the trailer, then was surprised to see it get a very complimentary review from _Salon_.  In terms of texture and taste, I really don’t mind wistful and pretentious, both of which qualities are always lacerated here (like _Garden State_, like The Decemberists [I think?]).  The plot I know nothing about and can’t comment upon.  Fine, let’s stipulate that it’s horrible aesthetically and ideologically.

It’s the “stop co-opting my music” ingredient that rankled me.  It’s not like The Replacements wouldn’t've been the soundtrack for angsty, depressive, clueless-about-women straight boys in 1987.  That’s, like, exactly Paul Westerberg.  It might “belong” to the people who made this movie at least as much as it belongs to you.

You know, a mixtape movie would have been okay with me. What made this movie painful for me is that there was a loving attention to detail—-boy, the clothes, the cars, the music, the ubiquitous pot-smoking, the willingness to shrug off petty criminal behavior—-though it’s a few years before my time, it’s still very Gen X, and had the potential to be a nostalgic trip for those of us who perhaps had the last generation before tightly scheduled extracurricular activities, the cheerful acceptance of responsibility, and the niceness of the younger generation.  (Nothing against ‘em—-I love kids today, who are indeed much sweeter and self-assured than we were, and I think that’s a good sign that certain parenting trends were indeed wise). Movies that intend to be just a snapshot of their times can be very good indeed—-think “Dazed and Confused”. 

But what this movie does is employ all these loveable elements in service of a horrible story involving boring or tedious characters.  Inexcusable.

Thanks for saving me the 10 bucks, Amanda, I kind of felt like we were back in Garden State/Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory.

But the real reason I’m commenting is to sing the praises of another blog, particularly this post:

http://tigerbeatdown.blogspot.com/2009/04/king-of-dorks-rapist-no-1-or-have-i.html

...which is some of the most hilarious angry feminist shit I have ever read. She has other good stuff too. Was linked at Shakesville.

“It’s the “stop co-opting my music” ingredient that rankled me. “
This. It reeks of the “X isn’t good anymore now that other people know about it” shit that plagues just about every form of media (I think music, anime, and video games are probably the worst).

See, I come from a totally different angle on this.  In my own life I use music to evoke particular emotions or to recall specific memories. That’s the point of music for me: to make me feel something.  This is why it not only does not bother me when music is used as a shorthand for complex emotions in movies (or now, TV dramas) but I actually enjoy it when the music selection is totally appropriate.  Replace the music with dialogue and often the scene (or scenes) become a) less effective or b) overwrought.

And I guess I am one of the lone people on this blog who liked Garden State.  But I’m okay with not having the “refinement” in my movie/music tastes of Amanda and others.

I’m not saying this from a music snob perspective.  It is equally rank when it’s done with 60s pop that everyone knows about—-using it to substitute for a decent story and characters.  Happy?  Or is there a way to use that to argue that my unwillingness to succumb to this stuff shows that I’m broken, not that the work is lazy?

I disagree strongly with that Tarantino rant from the get-go.  She doesn’t like rape onscreen.  Fine, as a survivor, I disagree.  But when she resorts to dishonesty to make her point, she loses me.  Tarantino doesn’t write his female characters any different than his male characters, and he’s in fact gotten so bored with men that he barely puts them in his movie anymore.  I mean, “Deathproof” had 9 major female characters and one dude (the villain), and “Kill Bill” the same ratio.  To say that these characters don’t have a personality is to be so invested in the idea that Tarantino—-being a man with an annoying, overbearing personality to the writer—-couldn’t possibly have written an interesting female character, so she will stubbornly all evidence to the contrary. 

In general, I’m wary of what anyone who approaches Tarantino without knowledge of the context he’s working in thinks, especially if they have an ax to grind and don’t really care.

It is equally rank when it’s done with 60s pop that everyone knows about—-using it to substitute for a decent story and characters.

Well, that’s really only part of what you said.  The rest is marked by sentiments like:

If you ever were to come over to my house to hang out, you are welcome to admire my concert posters and praise my record collection, and being the sap that I am, I will eat that shit up.

It just makes me worry that favorite songs of mine are now tainted by association with your piece of crap movie.

the people who are stupid enough to be distracted don’t know or love those songs in the first place.  So kindly fuck off and leave the music be.

It sounds like you’re annoyed about at least two things. 

First, that the people who made the movie took music you like and used it as a sign of authenticity/earnestness, and it’s a lame movie that substitutes music for emotion, or that uses music to create instant characterization.  Valid point; I’d have to see the movie to know if I agreed or not.

Second, that the people who made the movie took music you like and used it as a sign of authenticity/earnestness, and the fact that they would do such a thing to that music means they don’t really get it, and they don’t really deserve it.  But you do.  You love them the right way.  They’re your favorites, and they’re part of your collection, and this movie is intruding onto your territory.  That sense of ownership, honestly, bugs me—because, as you pointed out, this era of music is actually slightly before your time.  The writer/director of this movie could easily say that he was listening to the Mats and Husker and Lou Reed before you did, and so it belongs to him, and you’re just a latecomer to the scene.  IMHO it seems like a very well-chosen soundtrack for privileged white male angst in the late 1980s. 

_Validating_ privileged white male angst in movie form is a separate problem, and that part of your response to the movie—the main part, after all—feels totally cogent.  It’s viewing the use of the music as corruption or trespass that brought on my comment, but I get itchy anytime the Insufferable Music Snob stuff flares up, so take it for what it’s worth.

Also, I have a pet peeve against the idea that refusing to be moved emotionally (by things that are “maudlin,” or by cheap sentiment, defined as pretty much all sentiment) shows intelligence, strength, or taste, but I’ll ride that hobbyhorse another time.

So Adventureland is actually a period movie?  And it sucks?  How disappointing—I love retro teen movies done right, and yeah, Dazed & Confused is pretty much the gold standard for those.

I’m also glad at least one other person on the planet besides 2 or 3 of my movie nerd friends doesn’t hate Tarantino!

Flip, you’re overanalyzing it, and to make me seem as small as possible, which I don’t get.  I don’t like it when people substitute music for genuine characterization in a film.  I especially react negatively when it’s something I like—-be it 60s pop or 80s punk—-because it just reinforces how transparent it is when you have an emotion from the song, and you can feel the movie trying to associate itself with it.  It’s a cheap ploy.  And when I write about this, I’m not especially mindful that some people’s feelings are hurt just by reading someone say they like this music, because that alone makes them insecure.  I fail to see why anyone should be insecure because someone else is a fan of a certain kind of hipster music.  If you don’t like it, then there’s no reason to be worried, and if you like it, then there’s no reason to be insecure, because you can purchase exactly the same records and form your own associations and no one will stop you.

I just don’t get it, seriously, why every time I write about indie rock’s place in my life I get this URASNOB blowback.  I have a lot of blogs and Twitter feeds by people are are deeply into hip hop beyond anything I could even approach, and they are grade A Insufferable Music Snobs about a music I could never even speak about intelligently with them, and I don’t care.  Because my feeling is that if it mattered to me that much, because the only person stopping me from knowing that much about it is me.

And because I feel a sense of “ownership” over it doesn’t mean I don’t think anyone else does, either.  I don’t hold it against the director that he’s a giant Lou Reed fan.  I joked in the first sentence that this is something we have in common! But having put himself out as a fan, yes, I think he has a responsibility not to exploit this music.

If it makes it any clearer, I’m more angry about this than I am if, say, a Lou Reed song turned up in a jeans commercial.  At least the commercial is up front about what it’s trying to do.  This movie is putting itself out there like it’s the genuine article, but in reality, it’s just borrowing from the real thing to put up a front.

Obviously, the use of any music, no matter how I feel about it, in service of a good movie is A-OK.  If it works with the film instead of for the film, then yea!

To make this clear how much the references to myself were what you would call a device: If I were making a movie, I cannot for the life of me ever see greenlighting the use of “Pale Blue Eyes”.  It’s such a raw, powerful song that it’s impossible not to use it as a ham-fisted attempt to borrow that power.  It will overwhelm anything you do with it.  Perhaps not with people who don’t know the song, but people who have a relationship with that song will be jarred and not pleased with it.

In general, music that has a history with the audience needs to be considered very carefully.  Are you using it to substitute for characterization, tone, or plot?  Then go back and rewrite your script until it can work without the music.  If you do reference the music directly, does it say something meaningful about the characters or is it just there as a cheap ploy to get audience members to relate to two-dimensional characters?

An example of how to do this well: James Franco’s character on “Freaks and Geeks” gets into punk in a big way, but the use of songs by the Ramones and Black Flag were not there to make the audience feel something for a character they otherwise don’t care about.  You weren’t asked to substitute your feelings about the songs for what’s lacking onscreen.  The character related to the songs in his own, unique way, and so the songs were in service of that. 

In this movie, the songs were there so you’d be like, “These characters have good taste, ergo I relate to them.”  I’m not buying it.

So you’re saying you can’t stand the use of music as a shortcut for character development? Join the club We used to have meetings at the theatre, but I stopped going a while ago. Frankly I have a hard time dragging myself to the movies nowadays because (among many other reasons) of the way that directors now use music as a shortcut for character development.

I understand what you’re saying, Amanda. And I’m pretty much opposite of IMS—Nerdy Eclectic Music Lover, if there is such a thing.

I’m more angry about this than I am if, say, a Lou Reed song turned up in a jeans commercial.  At least the commercial is up front about what it’s trying to do.  This movie is putting itself out there like it’s the genuine article, but in reality, it’s just borrowing from the real thing to put up a front.

I guess I’d have to see the movie to know why it’s a front, i.e. inauthentic, i.e. exploitative.

It just reinforces how transparent it is when you have an emotion from the song, and you can feel the movie trying to associate itself with it.  It’s a cheap ploy.

I think that’s where I’m diverging.  I don’t see why this is a _cheap_ ploy, rather than just a regular ploy.  And, truth be told, it’s the kind of thing that can work pretty well on me.  To be Replacements-specific, I _like_ how _Say Anything_ uses “Within Your Reach” at the end.  It borrows for the movie emotions from the song.  It might be a shortcut, but I don’t think it’s a _cheap_ shortcut.

The “snob” point is a red herring, because the whole discussion isn’t about divergent tastes.  You and the writer/director have overlapping tastes.  Many of those overlap with mine.  But you’re upset at him for expressing that taste, that fandom, in the wrong way.  It’s kind of like pulling rank.

I’m sorry to go on like this.  I’m trying to make a point without being an ass, and sometimes I’m failing at that.  I guess I was just in a place where what you wrote pushed my buttons.  This sentiment vs. cheap sentiment thing is on my mind a lot!

I don’t quite understand how I can so often agree with somebody’s politics and disagree with their art judgment. The movie is worth seeing.

The movie is wrapped around a set of disappointments that James (Jesse Eisenberg) – a freshly minted grad getting ready for a summer of fun in Europe prior to a postgrad position in journalism - suffers.  But James’ Pop, a sneaky sort of alcoholic, has a job setback which – erk – sets James’ plans awry. James then takes a job operating carnival games at Adventureland.  As I spent more than a few Springs/Summers working a traveling carnival, I can say there were parts that were just silly. And others that just slapped me in the face with how real they were.

In any case, James meets a smart, strong women, Em, who works the carnival and appears interested in him. I will admit, it isn’t quite motivated why, but that seems largely true in real life as well. Of course, it turns out that James is a wee bit of a coward when it comes to women. Doesn’t seem so unusual to me. It certainly worked in the movie. But Em is different than she seems, which, of course, will cause issues.
 
So the movie is full of disappointment with life and with other people, dreams getting squashed, etc. Seems true to many lives to me. 

And the music really was good. Don’t know why that is a complaint for a movie that really seemed to be trying.  I coulda done with a little less Lou Reed, but that is pretty small potatoes.
In any case, this is a movie worth seeing once on the big screen. Not likely to become anybody’s favorite, but most movies won’t.

DN

But what this movie does is employ all these loveable elements in service of a horrible story involving boring or tedious characters.

This is kind of what I’m getting at when I mock it by saying “it’s a movie about flocked iron-on t-shirts”.  In recent years the “kinda sorta retro early-to-mid-80’s” aesthetic has been big in little romantic comedies for Teh Youth (especially the more sensitive/creative/interesting sectors of Teh Youth).  It’s something that probably started in Gen X, with things like Dazed and Confused and Ghostworld, but continued on in Napoleon Dynamite and Juno and a lot of other films like that. 

This film seems to take all the packaging of those, the t-shirts, the music, the cars, the facial hair, and apply it to a story and characters who are uninteresting and totally forgettable.  Hoping that the aesthetic as presented in the trailer will draw in that same audience.  Doesn’t matter if it’s actually any good or not, because the kiddies already paid their money, and at least some of them will be undiscerning enough to actually like it* and give it some kind of stupid “cult status” which will translate into DVD profits.

* Ask me how I know! But let’s not talk about my high school obsession with Empire Records, mmmkay?

Put me down as a vote for “Adventureland.” I loved it enough to venture to address some of Amanda’s criticisms:

The audience didn’t notice that the selling point for the “good” girl was that she listened (and didn’t have opinions of her own—-how refreshing!)

I have no idea where that came from. She had plenty of opinions when it was appropriate, for instance her dressing down of the co-worker who dumped her friend because he was Jewish. She kept quiet because she was struggling with a lot of internal conflicts which she couldn’t reveal right off the bat, the main one being her sleeping with a married co-worker.

Most of the audience didn’t care that the narrative was the classic Nice Guy® narrative…

You’re right, but not, I suspect, in the way you’re thinking. Jesse was indeed a classic Nice Guy as defined on this blog, meaning that he could be manipulative (ingratiating himself by supplying the others with pot) and even vindictive (chasing after another girl, revealing Em’s affair). The difference is, he was shocked and chastened by his own actions, and grew to realize that loving someone means being willing to forgive them because, inevitably, they will have to forgive you.

...the “bad” girl was bad mostly because she had her own ideas about her own stuff and was happy to tell some two-bit punk to fuck off.

If by “her own stuff” you mean her sexuality, yes, she reveled in being a sex bomb. But the point of the Lisa character was that appearances can be deceiving, and that Jesse eventually realizes he was wrong to see her as nothing but a sex bomb.

...our hero denounced double standards on men and women while employing them himself.

Again, I see that as one of the movie’s strong points. You can intellectually recognize and denounce double standards, then fall prey to temptation when the chance coms to employ them in your favor. Jesse’s recognition of that bad moral choice formed the character’s moral growth.

As for the music issue, I leave that to people who know more about pop than I do, which is about 80% of humanity.

Oops. I should have said James in the post above. Jesse is the name of the actor who plays him.

“Also, I have a pet peeve against the idea that refusing to be moved emotionally (by things that are “maudlin,” or by cheap sentiment, defined as pretty much all sentiment) shows intelligence, strength, or taste, but I’ll ride that hobbyhorse another time.”

I look forward to that ride. I’ve nursed the same complaint for the last 15-odd years.

And I think there’s a lot to your point about Amanda’s sense of “ownership” of the tunes she perceives to be so abused.

This doesn’t take away from Amanda’s own point that the tunes are being used as a cheap substitute for genuine and meaningful character development. I have little doubt that they are (I have no plans ever to see the movie, so I’ll never know firsthand). It would be surprising if an honestly “independent” or “alternative” or “quirky” film ever got a mass distribution.

I should have clarified my point about “ownership”—clearly most all of us feel invested in the things we like; calling that “ownership” is a deliberately loaded word, but I don’t mean to say that it’s inherently an act of domination. 

I just don’t like when one person claims that her or his commitment to (or “ownership of”) something outdoes another person’s, at least without asking if the basis for that claim is well-founded. 

It’s tricky; when Lou Reed did that ad for Honda scooters, people gave him an IMMENSE amount of shit for selling out, which makes it seem like Lou Reed fans are more invested in the ethical use of Lou Reed than… Lou Reed!  And yet that doesn’t seem weird at all, really, because it’s a staple of being a fan of anything even slightly indie/alternative/underground.

In this particular case, it just seemed to me that (going by the reviews; I haven’t seen the actual film) the writer/director (Mottola, IIRC) has envisioned this thing as a labor of love, and that Lou Reed is _extremely_ important to him.  He would have been roughly the same age as the characters in the movie during the time the movie is set, and there’s this _huge_ pile-up of Lou Reed references in the movie, to the degree that it seems practically thematic.  And then the criticism was that Mottola is ruining the music by association with his suck-ass movie.  That just seems excessively harsh.  It kind of seems like a refusal to share.

The criticism that the movie uses the music to create sympathy for a character who doesn’t deserve it, or that the movie indulges boring white male youth angst blown up to existential crisis _yet again_; that could well be extremely astute, and probably is.

Clearly I’m thinking about this WAY too much. 

Back to work…

I’m glad to see criticism of the movie here, because it’s getting good reviews, but I found it completely unbearable.  Em might look like an interesting character on paper (i.e. the things Bitter Scribe points out above), but onscreen all she did was clutch her forehead a lot, deliver her lines like William Shatner, and angst all over the place.  The rest of the film is, for the most part, paint-by-number.  There’s one character whose only purpose—only purpose—is to repeatedly punch the main character in the crotch, and by halfway through I wished that he had his own movie and that I was watching it instead.

I’m another vote for Adventureland, mostly because I was so pleased with Kristen Stewart’s character and performance. 

One music moment brought me and my husband so completely out of the movie though, that we both started laughing.  The protagonist is feeling mopey toward the end of the film (as opposed to his mopeyness through the beginning and middle), so he goes to a bar and plays a song on the jukebox. 

And the song is “Pale Blue Eyes.”  I get that he’s reminiscing, but he would have to play his own copy of the song for that, because in 1987…  in a blue-collar bar…  in Pittsburgh, for jeebus’ sake…  you would have had to settle for some piece of craptastic ‘70s rock or Bon Jovi.  The Velvet Underground?  No.

I remember discovering the Velvet Underground in 1987.  I had to hunt down used albums in second-hand stores.  They didn’t play that stuff on the radio, and they sure as hell didn’t put it in jukeboxes.