The Origins and History of American Gods
A noble birth of hyper-salient tripe.
A flowerbed grows where the gas pumps used to be. Spanish moss hangs over the parking lot from the brawny arms of multi-centenarian live oaks.
The old gas station has become a Greek and Lebanese restaurant called Cafe Petra. My wife and I are the only ones eating dinner at around four. In the background, some vaguely Middle Eastern music is filling the empty booths.
We’re having a deep conversation, which hushes itself periodically as the waitress comes by to refill our Diet Cokes, which is probably the source of our growing enthusiasm more than anything else. After one such refill, the hush continues after she leaves. The Middle Eastern music suddenly foregrounds itself to me.
Like seeing a stage actor’s makeup up close, the effect is made surreal by its very foregrounding. The music is meant to suggest a vibe of authentic “elsewhere” to spice the food with the adventure you could theoretically have by going there. This gesture is mostly perfunctory. In reality, a white teenager pulled up a “Middle Eastern vibes” playlist or something. And more power to them, I say. It does make the garlic taste a little more exotic than if it came from my pan over date night playlist.
What I’m hearing was probably recorded specifically for backgrounding like this, so there is an inherent artificiality to it. But things don’t come from nowhere. This music may be a desert-mountain motif easily and subconsciously recognized as vaguely elsewhere in the American subconscious, but some vestige of authenticity has to have survived in the sounds I’m hearing, otherwise nobody would recognize it as the places it wants to suggest.
What makes it difficult to pin down is that it is also just American music, but in a meta-textual way. It still assumes the hyper-salient heroic individual, but functions more like the score of his film. When Indiana Jones goes to places unknown, the exotic score isn’t really about their culture, it’s about Indy’s relationship to those places, and therefore it’s about us because we are Indiana Jones.
Still, though, these sounds must have meant something to a people somewhere. “Tradition,” sure, but maybe the sounds of youth under sunsets echoing off faraway cliffs whose location in space is mapped like exterior synapses. What sounded vaguely Middle Eastern to me was maybe once the mood that would melt a consciousness into homeland.
Last time we were in this restaurant, actually, Hotel California was playing. A more perfect counter-example would be hard to find. The song is about the highly-individualized personal hell of late lonely American cowboy drug addiction, with a soaring crescendo that defies the doomed lyrics to make it all seem rather romantic. On the drive home, I mentioned that that song is so on-the-nose, hyper-salient that it would probably be best if we just, as a people, agreed to never play it again. She laughed and agreed.
Not that the song is bad. The opposite, really. It’s so perfectly attuned to elicit the emotions it deals in that it is almost vulgar by its own success. Hipsters may argue with me here and say it’s trite or obvious or some other lesser known figure did it better. These are just gum flappings of a culture of landless invalids who have mastered the art of manipulating their private emotional states so well that they have accidentally crippled their sincerity, and so they have to signal their taste by claiming to like worse things than better things because good things are so good that even stupid people like them.
I’m officially too old to play that whole hipster game. But my question still lingers: why does specifically American music form the very heart and soul of young people, worldwide? Why do I have near-religious experiences listening to The Killers? (Please don’t punish my candor).
You may be the sort of universalist who believes that all artistic expressions reach toward what is basically the same truth, and our music is just how we happen to express it, but surely you will find a Greek, Ethiopian, and Chinese equivalent. You are going to be very confused if you ever travel. In restaurants in Lebanon, they aren’t listening to some vague Middle-Eastern music. They are listening to Katy Perry. Even what you might hear young Germans listening to in a döner kebab shop is really just American rap rapped in German. Even our rebellion, it seems, is a highly legible global commodity.
The first time I was really shocked by this, I was on a business trip to Guatemala. I remember the fear of imminent abduction at the airport as I handed over some newly converted currency to ride in a thirty-year-old Suburban with a guy who couldn’t speak English over spine-breaking roads as it started to rain. “Lluvia,” the driver said, gesturing to the window. “Lluvia,” I said and he cheered, rolled down his window and put a hand in the rain. “Lluvia.” Electric lines draped over Guatemala City like rats’ nests as endless slums passed by my weepy window. Just a little later, in the remarkably beautiful city of Antigua, I was out drinking with the Guatemalan guys who had just joined our company as SDRs. I might have been in Berlin.
A guy named Alejandro said his favorite band was Arcade Fire. We locked into instant friendship, bonding over the American musical yearning: I had yearned to get out of my little town, and he had yearned to get out of the slums of Guatemala City. I couldn’t believe it. It was a little naive, I suppose, but it is incredible that there seem to be very few places in the world untouched by American sensibilities.
This universalizing effect is so powerful that you will occasionally meet Americans who will claim they have “no accent.” This solipsistic claim always gets my hackles up. Charitably, though, I can understand what they mean: there are regional variants of American speech and if you want to be on TV, you have to learn to smooth those out. As a result, you may come to believe the “TV accent” is universally correct speech. Really, it is the regional dialect of the American Media Hyperscape, with its own set of quirks and distortions but should be learned if you want to sound respectful to the media natives. It also is the dialect most understandable across all American dialects (and probably the world), specifically because people are accustomed to hearing it in their TV and movies. Mechanically it is “designed” to be crisp and audible over mics. (An interesting aside: I was talking to someone from Essex at a bar in New Orleans, and she offhandedly observed that Europeans joke with each other that “you can hear an American before you see them.” The sound of an American accent “carries” better in some hard-to-define way, presumably because it’s well adapted to TV speakers.)
Our blindness to subjectivity is also what foreigners, I am gathering from getting ribbed by the Guatemalan guys, find most annoying about Americans. I can tell it’s only begrudging, though, because if I listened to their country’s music as much as they mine, they would feel the same.
Anyway, Alejandro and I were good friends now and just feeling, generally, like you might if you ran into your cousin by complete chance on a motorcycle trip through Vietnam. From what he tells me about his experience working for American companies, I realized for the first time the shocking arrogance for American white women in HR departments to dub these people “latinx” (which only a single digit of actual latinos assented to—this was a decade ago). It is something we’ll have to try to forgive by understanding the source of the confusion: Americans and similar Westerners tend to believe they occupy a “View from Nowhere” which they believe “objective” and might even go so far as to think they have “no accent.”
Really, we have the thick nasty accent of our native backwater. Our homeland is unique in the history of homelands because the landscape and its ruling gods are invisible to their own locals. Why this is the case in my country and other modern Western ones is complex story that I can only find small vestiges of, like an archeologist reconstructing a forgotten pantheon by finding pottery shards in the soil.
If you mostly operate from within the Modern Western Media Hyperscape you will have heard very little about what I’m about to convey, so I need to start near the beginning.
