The Accidental(ly Prescient) Tourist
CK: “I'm shocked by anyone who doesn't consider Los Angeles to be anything less than a bozo-saturated hellhole. It is pretty much without question the worst city in America. The reason "Walking in L.A." by Missing Persons was the most accidentally prescient single of 1982 was because of its unfathomable (but wholly accurate) specificity: Los Angeles is the only city in the world where the process of walking on the sidewalk could somehow be a) political and b) humiliating. It is the only community I've ever visited where absolutely everything cliché proved to be completely accurate.”
There aren’t that many great songs about Los Angeles—it’s true, look it up. I did. There’s actually a Wikipedia entry for “List of Songs About Los Angeles” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_about_Los_Angeles). Scrolling through the songs on the wiki entry constituted more research than I’ve done for half of my Grantland pieces this year. Man, I’m winded from all that research. That was almost as exhausting as going to cocktail parties with Noel Gallagher, or setting my DVR for pointless sporting events (Shh, I’m trying to make it seem like I’m working really hard so Bill keeps backing the Brinks truck up to Kasa Klosterman. If he asks, tell him I’ve been looking pale and rundown). There are lots of really horrible songs about L.A. on that list. Most are just forgettable and only a few are any good. Really, the only truly outstanding ones I could find are Cheech Marin’s “Born in East L.A.”, Public Enemy’s “Burn Hollywood Burn”, and Liz Phair’s “Dogs of L.A.” Every other song on there pretty much sucks. Shit, Red Hot Chili Peppers have like seventeen bad songs on there all by themselves.
It’s hard to write great music about shitty places. That’s why there aren’t any good songs about shopping malls, dentist offices, South Dakota, or the World Cup (ok, so the WC isn’t really a place, but whatever). And L.A. is one really god-awful place that I hate now as much as I did when I wrote the above quote in my well-selling road narrative Killing Yourself to Live. The fact that Missing Persons, a competent but ultimately derivative New Wave act, could pull off the single most quintessentially “L.A.” song ever written and make it good to boot (eat a dick Randy Newman) is a testament to the unending surprise gifts that pop music bestows on us in so many unexpected ways.
For whatever reason, the blogosphere latched onto the above quote—maybe because while the blogosphere is supposedly an ethereal, almost metaphysical location, it seems to emanate from the computers of L.A. and the nearby San Fernando Valley denizens (and its porn peddlers) as much as any single place. Some people took exception to my characterization of L.A. as a “bozo-saturated hellhole” but I honestly don’t think there’s a city in the whole USofA that even rivals L.A. in terms of suckitude. None of the traditional whipping boys even come close.
Take, for example, Phoenix, a city much derided by the East Coast establishment residents of cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Phoenix is often held to ridicule for its postmodern sprawling, horizontal development that devours the desert around it as it expands exponentially in circumference, and lack of a tenable water supply (did I mention it’s in the fucking desert?). In 1950 Phoenix had a modest population of 106,000. By the end of the century, the city had grown so absurdly rapidly that it could count 1.3 million residents on its rolls. And while the city lacks a center of critical mass that defines the vertical cities of the Northeast corridor, there has to be a reason why so many people would want to live there. Look, an elitist critic might second guess the implied motives of over a million people but that’s just never been my style. There has to be something attractive about Phoenix, right?
You bet your sweet ass there is. When Thunder Dan Majerle, formerly of the Phoenix Suns, opened Majerle’s Sports Grill in 1992 (the year in which he was voted an NBA All-Star despite the fact that he didn’t even start for his own team) he almost single-handedly reinvented the Celebrity-Athlete-Sportsbar-and-Grill franchise while taking it to dizzying new heights. At any of the four locations of Majerle’s a diner can feast on reinvented sports bar staples like Slam Dunk Shrimp (seasoned shrimp tossed in wing sauce and served with celery, carrot sticks and buttermilk ranch dressing; also available with Chili Pepper Garlic or Teriyaki) or Baxter’s Boneless Buffalo Wings (tender all white meat chicken, tossed in your choice of sauce, served with celery, carrots and ranch dressing; available in Mild, Medium, Maniac, Chili Pepper Garlic, Sweet Barbecue, Teriyaki and Traverse City’s Secret Sauce).
Majerle’s might be the single best (albeit in four locations) sportsbar in the country…if it weren’t for the contributions of a uniquely Phoenix pair of celebrities’ own contribution to the city’s Celebrity-Athlete-Sportsbar-and-Grill scene. At Alice Cooperstown, co-owners Alice Cooper and Randy “Big Unit” Johnson have created a unique culinary space where “jocks and rock meet.” When the seminal shock-rocker Cooper (whose “No More Mr. Nice Guy” is one of the few non-Kiss songs that could actually pass as a Kiss song) decided to retire to the golf courses of Maricopa County who could have predicted that he would team up with the Arizona Diamondbacks hero to further establish Phoenix as the definitive Celebrity-Athlete-Sportsbar-and-Grill city in America? There isn’t another city in the nation that can match Majerle’s and Alice Cooperstown’s combined jalapeno-and-nacho cheese topped dominance.
ANYWAY, I shouldn’t have to defend Phoenix, or any other great American city against the lamefest that is L.A. Missing Persons were right when they penned their synth-driven diss 30 years ago and they’d be right today if VH1 brought them together for a reunion on Bands Reunited where they could play that song for us all just one more time.
Look, the collective persons that comprised Missing Persons weren’t the first persons to lament that obvious fact that nobody ever walks in L.A. From the freeways to the traffic-induced smog, the automotivization of L.A. had been a well-known sociological principle of the city for some time. But in 1982 nobody had yet reduced this known known to quite the Camus-like level of the Absurd in quite the same way as “Walking in L.A.” had managed. The second verse and its transition into the chorus encapsulates this Angelean Absurd especially well:
I don't know could have been a lame jogger maybe/ or someone just about to do the freeway strangler baby/ Shopping cart pusher or maybe someone groovy/ One things for sure he isn't starring in a movie coz he's/
Walking in LA/ Walking in LA/ Nobody walks in LA/ Walking in LA/ Walking in LA/ Nobody walks in LA/
When I wrote that the song captured both the “politics” and “humiliation” of actually walking down the street in the city it was this above section that best stood out to me. The implication is that if someone actually was walking down the street in L.A. they would have to be either a) an escapee from the local Special Needs Home b) a deadbeat drifter of the post-Vietnam type, or maybe c) just some guy who is really poor and not very cool at all. Nowhere else in America would it matter in quite the same humiliating way. Only in L.A. is walking both a socio-economic and aesthetic marker.
So yeah, “Walking in L.A.” hit the nail on the proverbial head. It was wonderfully descriptive while remaining eminently fun to listen to—an unusual coup. Looking back, I’m not sure why I thought the song was “accidently prescient” because, honestly, I’m not entirely sure what that phrase even means. I mean, I wrote it, so I probably meant something by it, but I’m not really sure what. Maybe I was thinking that Missing Persons only stumbled upon the central motif of the song? Or maybe its accidental nature has something to do with what I called the song’s “unfathomable specificity,” but then again, I’m not really sure what that means either. Shit, looking back on it, that paragraph may be the most purposefully prescient thing I ever wrote in terms of its unfathomable vagueness.
As a New York Times Bestselling Author and Professional Critic (as certified by Grantland, Spin, and VH1) I guess I’d better salvage this particular little meme. My description of “Walking in L.A.” as “accidently prescient” will have far more cultural cache if I could just situate it within an appropriate context. Hmmmm, but what critical device would afford the meme the proper theoretical weight needed to rescue it from the dustbin of critical mishmash?
I’ve got it. Dear Reader, let me present to you…
THE TOP TEN MOST ACCIDENTLY PRESCIENT SONGS OF 1982
1. Missing Persons “Walking in L.A.” – See above.
2. The Alan Parsons Project “Eye in the Sky” – Of course it took a prog rock band to have the foresight needed to see the advent of a Surveillance Society in which each of us would be forever watched by the all-seeing eye of the Foucaldian Panopticon:
I am the eye in the sky/ Looking at you/ I can read your mind/ I am the maker of rules/ Dealing with fools/ I can cheat you blind/ And I don't need to see any more/ To know that/ I can read your mind/
3. The Clash “Rock the Casbah” – The Persian Gulf War, the 1993 World Trade Center Attack, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, 9/11, the War on Terror, the Iraq War—The Clash lit a match they never could have imagined would burn so ferociously.
4. A Flock of Seagulls “I Ran (So Far Away)” – With this saccharine sweet slice of synth perfection, A Flock of Seagulls anticipated the entire comedic repertoire of Adam Sandler, whose post-The Wedding Singer success would have been unthinkable without this song and the nostalgia it inspires in really stupid people.
5. Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder “Ebony and Ivory” – Riggs & Murtaugh, Stockton & Malone, Dave Chapelle & that guy Neil who writes his bits with him, Obama & Biden…nuff said.
6. Wall of Voodoo “Mexican Radio” – NAFTA became legally binding on the first day of the year 1994. In 1982, “Mexican Radio” peaked at #21 on the New Zealand pop charts (its highest position in any country). 1994 minus 1982 equals 12, which is the reverse of 21, which, if you add the two digits together, equals 3—the magic number. Got it?
7. The Motels “Only the Lonely” – I’m married, which is mostly great—tax breaks, guilt sex, someone to wash my ringer tee’s—but there’s one thing about getting married that really sucks. I don’t get to go on any of those cool dating websites like Match.com, Fish in the Sea, JDate (oh, the joobs that exist on that site), etc. Sometimes, I lie awake at night on the sofa and dream up entire date scenarios with fictional people that I’ve met through one of these sites. I want so badly to know who I would be matched up with. A cute university librarian with a cat named Mittens? A chick bassist in a rock band who moonlights as a bartender in a cool Williamsburg hangout? Maybe a former shooting guard from the Bismarck State College Women’s basketball team who now is an attorney for the ACLU? It could be literally anyone!
8. Duran Duran “Girls on Film” – Uh, Pornhub anyone?
9. Toto “Africa” – Is there any more pressing geopolitical concern than the plight of African nations and the impoverished people who live there? Doesn’t it just break your heart to know that literally millions of African children are surviving on less than a dollar a day? Toto deserves our admiration for seeing this human rights crisis before any of us—even Bono. There’s a call that all of us must heed, to serve, to do what’s right, to help save Africa:
The wild dogs cry out in the night/ As they grow restless longing for some solitary company/ I know that I must do what's right/ Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti/ I seek to cure what's deep inside, frightened of this thing that I've become/
10. Musical Youth “Pass the Dutchie” – Little black kids in a band! Not some post-Jackson 5 boy band New Edition nonsense but an actual band! This could have been the future. Unfortunately, because of the success of the insufferable rap music that took over the Urban airwaves right after 1982, millions of musical black youth now only dream of standing on stage in a XXXL wife beater while waving a white towel as their rapper-buddy hoarsely shouts over a cd of their “music.”
So I guess “Pass the Dutchie” was kinda the opposite of “accidently prescient,” wasn’t it? Unless you consider that half of what passes for rap music today is some colloquial update on “passing the dutchie.” That is, unless it’s about killing people, doing new hokey-pokey-esque dances, or nasally whining about how nobody understands what you’re going through (I’m looking at you Drake!). Whatever, doesn’t matter. I’m not even really sure what any of this means and honestly, I haven’t listened to “Walking in L.A.” in at least a dozen years. But books are pretty big things and you have to fill them up with an awful lot of stuff. By the way, my new book comes out this month, it’s called Downtown Owl: A Novel and you should buy it, it’s purposefully prescient in an unfathomably vague way.