Evolution of a Song: "Up"

When I first saw the trailer for "The Savages" months ago, aside from becoming terribly excited about this movie, I was entranced by the song in the second half—it has a sweet sound with just a hint of sadness, creating a tangible dissonance that gave me a reason to want to spend two or so hours of my time with these clearly messed-up-yet-loveable characters even greater than that they were played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. I found myself baffled, unable to figure out who sings this song. Finally, after getting thoroughly irritated with not knowing, I asked Google a bunch of questions and found out that it is a song called "Up" by Rob Crow, the lead singer of the super awesome San Diego band Pinback.

I wanted to hear more of the song than the snippet in the trailer, so asked Google some more questions and found the video for "Up." While the video as a whole didn't do much for me other than to stir up a sense of nostalgia with the occasional shots of my hometown, San Diego, there was something else that felt a bit off. I've enjoyed Pinback's music since high school when "Penelope" from their album Blue Screen Life received some air-play on the local independent radio station, but I had never seen what any of the members of Pinback looked like until I watched this video.

I shouldn't have been surprised by what I saw—Rob Crow looks like a typical San Diego guy. On the cover of his album "Living Well" he's wearing Vans skater shoes, long baggy shorts and a t-shirt, and a baseball cap. There is nowhere I would think to place him as living other than San Diego. And suddenly this San Diego "look" made me feel awkward.

I never felt the culture shock people told me I would feel when I moved to New York. Sure, there was a lot to learn and get used to, but I felt like I fit in more on my first day in New York than I ever did at home. In San Diego, I always felt like I stuck out in the way I dressed, the music I listened to, the fact that I couldn't get a tan--I was constantly teased (lovingly) by my swim-team teammates for my sparkling white skin, for although we practiced daily from 2-4pm, I always showed up the next day if not the same shade of ghostly pale, a glowing florescent pink. Although living far away in New York City, I've come to love San Diego and sometimes even desperately yearn for it, I still feel out of place in the dominant presence of surfer and skater cultures—it's something, for as long as I did live there, I never felt connected to.

So in watching this video, there was a disconnect between my love for this song and my unease amongst this San Diego culture. How could this song, which greatly moved me, be enmeshed in a culture I had fled? When I see someone dressed as Rob Crow is on the cover of his album, I think of boys who like to hang out at the beach skateboarding and who listen to Blink 182 and Metallica, but this is only a generalization from my formative years in the 1990's. I doubt people are listening to Blink 182 en masse anymore and, clearly, if I was listening to indie rock on the radio, then lots of other San Diegans were too. Unfortunately my ideas of San Diego culture are colored by stupid high school kids, myself included.

To satiate my need to figure out my contention with this song, I downloaded the track and began putting it into a somewhat fierce and obsessive rotation on my IPod. Despite having first heard the song at the Angelica (a movie theater quintessentially New York, with it's narrowness and subway rumblings) listening to the song in my New York apartment, walking down New York streets, sitting in a New York subway, the more I listened to it, the more it began to take on a non-New York, more San Diego feel. I envisioned things typically and stereotypically San Diego—it felt like a song that would be the soundtrack to my drives around the city featuring beaches, sunsets, and stucco houses.

San Diego by no means deserves the criticism of my high school antipathy, but since I haven't spent a significant amount of time there since then, that's the lens through which I still view it. Though I know it is more than a city of skater kids--that it is actually a fairly cultured city--when I see someone who dresses in that San Diego way, I'm brought back to that part of high school I never enjoyed. Since I'm more likely to find myself in the company of those in hipster dress--skinny jeans or plaid flannel--or something more generic--The Gap--I experience a bit of backwards culture shock when I encounter anything typically Californian. And in the end, once the shock from the initial impact has subsided, there's a connection more tender and sympathetic than might otherwise have been possible.