ben patton blog

Dear Uncle Sam,
I felt a little embarrassed about my previous entry. Did I come off as a pretensious crumudeon? Why did I make that venomous remark about pop music? Pop music is the love of my life!
The funny thing is, after clicking the “publish” button, I was immediately unsettled, so I returned to the entry, intending to edit out the bitterness. I re-read it, and reconsidered my feelings on the subject, and in doing so, I became angry all over again. I changed the word “worst” to “foulest”, and hit publish. Into indifferent cyberspace I sent my pointless complaint.
In my pissed-off moment, I said that I was “becoming increasingly embarrassed to be associated with this art form, in which art has become so scarce.”
This is true, but there’s more context, that I purposefully left out, in order to make the statement sound harsher. The truth is, I feel embarrassed when certain people, particularly older, sophisticated music-lovers, ask me what I do, and I must answer that I write pop music. Their first assumption is probably that I write that awful stuff that drives them out of shopping malls, and makes them mute their televisions during commercials.
And maybe some of the stuff I write would offend them. But as long as I don’t offend myself, I’m okay.
Also, who am I to say that “Art” has become scarce in today’s popular music? When I think about it, I’m not sure popular music has ever been an art form, necessarily. Perhaps, just a few times in history it has risen to the definition of Art. I’m sure my stuff wouldn’t qualify, if the work of the Beatles and Irving Berlin doesn’t. Or maybe it’s all Art? I don’t know, but I have decided that I’m not all that attached to the word Art, and if I learn that it doesn’t apply to my music, I won’t feel belittled.
In his 1896 essay “What is Art”, Leo Tolstoy said:
“In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man.”
I thought intercourse between Man and Man was called “sodomy”. Shows what I know.
I also wrote, in my previous entry, that I hate “80 percent of the popular music produced after 1970.”
In the great film “My Dinner with Andre”, Andre Gregory, playing himself, said:
“I think it’s quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing.”
There really was some sort of significant shift in art, particularly theater, film, and pop music, around this time. But, when I say that I hate 80 percent of it, you must also remember the overwhelming amount of pop music being cranked out! There are many great geniuses I would include in that remaining 20 percent.

One of them is the songwriter Adam Schlesinger, also a member of the band “Fountains of Wayne”.
Like myself, Adam has written music for films, television, and other artists, outside of his band, for many years. He wrote the charming ballad “Way Back into Love” for the romantic comedy “Music and Lyrics”, and he wrote the splendid faux-60’s hit “That Thing You Do!” for Tom Hanks’ fictional band, in the film of that name.
This week’s song I wish I’d written is “This Better Be Good”, from the new “Fountains of Wayne” album “Traffic and Weather”. I can’t post these songs here, not legally anyway, but I suggest you download this absolutely perfect piece of pop perfection. It’s short, fun songs like this that make me forgive pop music for it’s shortcomings, and love it even more.