Seal, part 1

In a recent email exchange with my brothers and an old friend—one whose business of choice is music, that is, the music business—the confession of past pop preferences was the central subject. The idea was to list important artists in the span of one’s life, such that a certain artist could be representative of a major stage. For example, I would identify a section of my childhood through Andrew Lloyd Webber, a fact that has often been the subject of ridicule both from my brothers and from within, so I would have to list his name even though I was probably listening to other cooler bits of music at the same time. His music represented a phase of my life, for better or worse, and I can’t deny it. Listing the artists, composers, or bands that make up the bulk of one’s autobiography offers itself as a cultural memoir, in the same way that Jay-Z’s new book Decoded or Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat are memoirs based on their own song lyrics. I like gazing at my navel, especially the version of my navel that still lacked hairy flesh and the weird bulges that it does now. I don’t gaze to the extent that Jay-Z or Sondheim do, but that is just because I am the only one navel-gazing—those guys have enough admirers to make it worth somebody’s while besides their own, I guess.

My brother John started this business with a list that was pretty comprehensive. John’s musical tastes were an important part of all of our childhood, whether we want to admit it or not, and his current purpose in life is getting the rest of us to admit it. Most of what John liked, I liked a year later, with a few key exceptions, like Duran Duran, Fishbone, and Red House Painters. Much of our own musical tastes, at least Mark’s and mine, are often sideshoots from John’s that are carried to different levels. Of course, a lot of what John liked came in conjunction with what Colin liked (Colin is the “old friend” I referred to earlier), and their endless sessions of sitting in front of the ghettoblaster listening to tapes are the early-90s versions of kids these days wasting their childhood in front of an Xbox. But I always admired their dogged insistence on the validity of sitting in front of a ghettoblaster as a friend activity. I couldn’t bear spending my friend time celebrating “cool” stuff—we were much more into ironic stuff, like watching “Kid N Play” movies together and writing fan letters to Christina Ricci.

John’s list was, as I said, fairly accurate, but it had one unique characteristic that I seized upon and have since exploited. Here is his list:

• Kenny Rogers
• Journey
• Duran Duran
• U2
• Beastie Boys
• Rush
• Led Zeppelin
• Pink Floyd
• Fishbone
• A Tribe Called Quest
• The Stone Roses
• Happy Mondays
• Seal (1st album only)
• Pearl Jam
• American Music Club
• Red House Painters
• Brian Eno
• Verve
• Low
• Radiohead
• Underworld
• Boards of Canada
• Sigur Ros

The only artist given a qualification is Seal. It seems that John is not embarrassed by anyone on his list except for Seal. Kenny Rogers? He’s already a joke enough that it is endearing to have liked his music. Journey? The recent resurgence of “Don’t Stop Believin’” places them firmly in irony’s safety zone. But Seal? Why “1st album only”? Perhaps the implication that John may have liked “Kiss from a Rose” (on the second album) is too much to bear. Perhaps, because Seal has stayed in the celebrity limelight by going increasingly mainstream in marrying Heidi Klum and making maudlin appearances on Dancing with the Stars and Victoria’s Secret Presents, John can’t bear the thought that someone might think he still likes Seal. Maybe I should just take John for his word, that Seal’s first album was much more impressive and influential than his subsequent ones, and therefore Seal 1 was the only one worth mentioning. But why, then, does John not mention the 1st album of Pearl Jam, the 1st album of The Stone Roses, both of which were the only albums that had a major impact on John’s life, at least as far as I know?

All of these rhetorical questions might get at some sort of truth, but I want to suggest that there is another reason why Seal got the qualification—his music is still as good as it once was, but the perception of him has changed to the point that we read that music differently. All of his current faults--his sentimentality, his occasional platitudes, his leaning toward pure pop, his ineffective reach at a soul tradition--were all apparent on his first album, but all that is good about him was there too. To a certain public, those faults have now become the prism through which to read Seal. This, effectively, both excludes him from ironic nostalgia (you never hear people joyously declare their former love for “Kiss from a Rose,” mainly because it is not indicative of its era enough and it is not obviously bad—it remains a very strange, and really interesting, pop song) and from current hipness (he is married to Heidi Klum and wrote a song for the Nicholas Cage vehicle A Family Man—nothing is less hip than those facts). So, in an ongoing attempt at sincerity (much more difficult than cynicism, at least in culture blogging), I am going to perform a genuine defense of Seal, after the break.