What Makes You Think You’re the One
What Makes You Think You’re the One
A happy distraction arrived at work the next week when we got a call from our biggest client, a global conglomerate that owned half the brands in your average bar—the cheap vodkas, the expensive vodkas, the old-school scotches you thought were made by monks—asking us to hold an “informal focus group” with our trendsetters in New York during the CMJ Music Festival. CMJ was technically a music-business conference but functioned for fans like an urban festival, held in small venues across Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of our client’s brands was a sponsor, and they knew it was a hotbed of trend information, but they wanted more than they got from our reports.
“Your reports tell us what music they love,” explained the insights director, speakerphoning into our SF office. “But why do they love it?”
“We always strive to cover the why,” I said smoothly, raising my middle finger at the phone.
“We just feel like we could get deeper,” came the voice of the insights guy. “If we were in the same room with them.”
“Of course you could,” said my boss, swatting away my finger. “The Why is a bottomless ocean. We’ll write up a proposal.”
The Why: always the golden question. If marketers could understand why kids liked Arcade Fire, they figured, they wouldn’t have to pay for the rights to an Arcade Fire song in their ads; they could commission their own knockoff version for similar effect. They wouldn’t have to buy up small-batch distilleries; they could capture the essence of Arcade Fire in a brand, slap the label on a bottle of generic rotgut, and stick it on the shelf next to Grey Goose. The Why was where the real money was.
“Beautiful,” the client was saying. “Find a nice restaurant with a private room. Figure budget for drinks. Dinner too. Maybe we’ll catch a show afterward—we can get passes as long as it’s not too buzzy.”
I was very much liking the sound of this, but my boss’s expression had started to shift. “Will the trendsetters be sampling product?” she asked coolly.
“Oh, we may let them sip a new ultra-premium rum we just launched,” he said. “But the goal here is the Why.”
“Mm-hmm,” my boss said, pursing her blue-red lips. I wasn’t sure what was going on; buying our trendsetters dinner was not remotely typical, and I’d never seen that look on her face during a new project call.
He rattled off a few other demands—“Percy should moderate, they’ll feel more comfortable talking to one of their own”; “Let us know when you’ve picked the show, we’ll make sure they carry our rum at the venue”—and then said it was great chatting with us ladies.
My boss ripped off her headset and pronounced, after a guttural grunt, “Fake research.”
“What does that mean?”
She grunted again and typed lightly on her laptop, telling me to hold my thought by way of one raised eyebrow. I waited. She was the founder of the agency, but we were small enough that she still had her hands in everything. I liked her as much as I could like a treadmill capitalist who needed a half Xanax and Norah Jones to sleep at night, which, it turned out, was a fair amount. She was smart and tenacious and she managed me with respect.
When she was done typing she looked at me steadily. “This isn’t about the Why, honey. They already pay us plenty for the Why, they’ve got Why coming out of their ears. This is about seeding their new rum with influential scenesters during CMJ, to get them to tell all their friends.”
I was confused. “Why don’t they just pay them to be brand ambassadors?”
“Their budget was probably earmarked for insights. Plus it’s inauthentic. This isn’t Red Bull, this isn’t the nineties. Everyone knows when a brand is paying for ambassadorship now.”
I nodded. “Okay, so it’s fake research. Does that…” I wanted to say matter . “Upset you?”
“Of course it upsets me!” She clamped her thumb and forefinger onto the edges of her forehead and moved her pliable, fiftysomething skin in circles. “It upsets my integrity as a researcher!”
I caught my eyes before they rolled. We’d had this conversation before. I didn’t understand the concept of integrity in an industry like ours, which existed solely to help corporations sell young people products they didn’t need. I thought we were all swallowing whatever sad excuse for integrity rose up in our throats every morning, but apparently that was just me; my boss and co-workers felt they were playing a vital role in the system, making products more relevant for a consumer who was often misunderstood by the business world. There were times I could see their point. “So, what, we’re going to turn him down?”
She looked back at her computer, where she was filling in our project costs spreadsheet. “No,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the screen. “We’re going to charge double.”
—
New York had shifted into a premature winter in the few weeks since my visit to the studio, brittle leaves barely clinging to the trees on lower First Avenue. I found the restaurant our office manager had booked—Peruvian inspired, inoffensively trendy—and introduced myself to the hostess. “People love this shit,” I muttered under my breath as I made my way to the private back room. The client was already there.
“How was your flight?” he said as he shook my hand. He’d clearly put effort into dressing down for the event, wearing a pair of dark-wash boot-cut jeans and sneakers, and was twisting the expensive watch on his wrist as if he knew it gave him away. I set my backpack down at the head of the long table and gave my standard answer about getting so much work done on the flight.
The brand manager arrived, and I knew he was the brand manager because he was wearing a fleece vest with the fucking name of the rum on it. “Hey!” he said, barreling toward me with his hand outstretched. “I’m Kyle!”
“Hi, Kyle!” I said. “Can I ask you to please remove all logos from your clothing? We don’t want to bias the respondents.”
“Oh! Sorry!” He stripped off the vest, revealing a button-down that also had the name of the rum on it, embroidered just above the pocket. He looked at it, then up at me. A server appeared at my shoulder and asked me to review the prix fixe menu.
“I’m going to trust you can figure this out,” I said to Kyle with a smile before turning to the server.
Trendsetters were trickling in. Two greeted each other with recognition, but two wasn’t bad. I fanned out an assortment of discussion stimuli on the vintage credenza, mostly CDs of bands playing CMJ as well as older artists I considered key influences. A proliferation of tabletop candles sent warm shapes moving on the walls and I felt something I recognized, curiously, as excitement. It was nice to know what I was doing, even if it was all fake.
I started by going around the table for introductions, asking each for their name, job, hobbies, and favorite bands playing CMJ. Everyone was obsessed with the Decemberists, whose showcase had already become an impossible ticket, along with several smaller bands whose names I pretended to recognize. The server moved smoothly behind the trendsetters, delighting them one by one with their choice of red or white. Kyle reentered the room wearing an ill-fitting East Village NYC sweatshirt and leaned against the credenza next to the insights guy.
“Nobody’s mentioned Girl Talk, who played yesterday,” I said, holding up the mash-up artist’s CD. “Any thoughts?”
The trendsetters fell over each other to answer:
“I was there! It was the best!”
“He ended up practically naked, we were all dancing onstage!”
“Sampling is so exciting, so democratic!”
“Plus it’s all hooks, you’re never bored!”
I took notes on a yellow legal pad. Songs aren’t supposed to be all hooks, I wanted to say, and for a moment I felt old. “What about Beach House, who we’re going to see tonight?”
“Magical,” chirped two in confident unison, and another elaborated: “That’s the opposite of Girl Talk. Beach House is closer to the Decemberists—otherworldly.”
“What’s appealing about otherworldliness?” I asked, knowing full well what was appealing about Beach House’s mystical, mind-expanding sound.
They explained enthusiastically. Only one stayed quiet: a boy I’d plucked from the deep center of a warehouse dance floor largely for his striking resemblance to Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, except younger and with hair. He was sitting directly to my left. He’d already finished his glass of wine and was looking around for a refill.
“What about you?” I asked him. “Any thoughts on Beach House?”
“Eh,” he said. “I’m sick of all that whiny shit—it all feels very post-9/11 to me, very soon-to-be dated. I just want to party, man. Give me Girl Talk any day.”
“What about last year’s CMJ breakout, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?” I asked. “That’s very danceable.”
He made a face. “Dance music for whiners,” he said, which drew a laugh from the credenza. The server refilled the boy’s chardonnay and he gulped it like lemonade. “My favorite thing about CMJ isn’t the shows, actually, but just the energy of the week, how there are so many people in town, musicians everywhere. You know that band Caroline?”
Something wild reared up in me, about to buck—it felt violating, that word in this context—but before I could react, his gaze slid off me and onto the trendsetter who was nodding the hardest, a blond girl seated across from him. “They were at this party I was at last night,” he told the blonde. “Some other band was playing, then the Caroline guy got up, totally wasted, and sang a Fleetwood Mac deep cut. It was amazing.” He turned back to me. “That’s the kind of stuff that happens during CMJ.”
“The lead singer of Caroline,” I confirmed. “Interesting. Which Fleetwood Mac song?” I held my pen poised above the paper. I could feel my heart in my fingers.
“I dunno. Lots of drums.”
“Mmm.” I nodded. “A faithful cover? Or did he add his own spin?”
The clients bent heads, whispered. Billy Corgan looked at me like I was insane. “It was a party,” he said.
Kyle pushed himself off the credenza and held forth a tall, square-shouldered bottle. “Who wants to try some rum?”
—
After dinner our whole motley crew walked to Cake Shop, the venue for the show I’d chosen, Beach House. The clients were happy because the trendsetters had been universally effusive about the rum (not exactly shocking given that they’d been warmed up with wine, food, and a glowing backstory from Kyle about the organically farmed sugarcane used to make the base—he may as well have kept his vest on). And Cake Shop won me extra points for authenticity, with its sweaty, airless venue hidden underneath a bakery. “Put pictures of this in your report,” the insights guy whispered as we descended the stairs. I dutifully snapped a pic of the crowd with my digital camera.
But Beach House was the wrong choice, too mellow and far too beautiful for the crass context of our evening. They put the audience under a hushed, introspective spell. Both clients French-exited almost immediately, which I tried not to take as an insult—they probably had trains to catch, kids up at six. As soon as they were gone my work persona slipped from my body, and the suddenness of the evacuation left me feeling wrung out. I couldn’t stop thinking about Fleetwood Mac. Every tall, curly-haired dude looked like Joe until he didn’t, until a quarter turn of the head revealed him to be a pale simulacrum, weak in the jaw, tight in the smile. Had he really been wasted? Joe could put back the beer, but he always stopped before his gait started to stagger like his dad’s. Had he been depressed about Caroline’s low profile at CMJ, their decidedly un-buzzy afternoon set? “Britpop Night” had faded quickly from dance floors with the end of summer, and album sales were slumping. Was he okay?
The boy with the Billy Corgan face stood alone at the edge of the crowd sipping the client’s rum neat—they were all ordering it, unbelievably, with their own money—his nose aloft like a dog on the scent of a better scene. I wanted to corner him with all the questions in my head. Who else was at the party with Caroline? And what did he mean by wasted? But of course young Billy didn’t know any of this; he just wanted to party, man.
I slipped up the back stairs, spun my iPod wheel to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and carved a jagged route back to my hotel room. And then, with my laptop on my lap in an uncomfortable chaise overlooking Lower Manhattan, I wrote my strangest blog post yet.
What Makes You Think You’re the One
The Drummer bangs hard on the snare to kick it off—one, two, three, four, one. The Singer receives each snare hit like bullets to his torso, staggering, arms draping off an invisible crucifix. And then he sings.
She isn’t here, the girl who thinks she’s the one. But with his eyes closed, in the carousel of his drunken mind, the Singer sees her face vividly, prismatically. It slides into focus at the end of every measure and then it spins away again. It’s a face he hasn’t seen in a while; the song has conjured it.
What makes her think she’s the one? He shouts the line with a level of indignance he dimly acknowledges as wrong for the setting, which is just a party, after all. But it’s a punk song, practically; it’s Lindsey Buckingham raging harder at Stevie Nicks than he ever had before, the kind of rage that comes only when you know you’re guilty too. It’s Mick Fleetwood fully unleashed. It’s a lyric that must be spit, that must be spat, a lyric aimed at shoving someone out of her own head, hard.
He opens his eyes and oh look, he owns them all—even the dudes have arrested their beers mid-raise, mouths hanging, though it’s the girls who look like they’re on the verge of melting into their cans of Sparks. He can tell they haven’t heard the song before. Rumours and “Rhiannon,” that’s as far as they ever went on the Mac. Fair enough. He’s no deep-cut snob. Neither is the girl who isn’t here; it’s something they’ve always had in common.
But the truth is, she’s just as bad as the rest of them. He shuts his eyes again, sings menacingly at her careening face. See, she used to get those same melty eyes when he sang. It wasn’t until he got good—until she looked around at his shows and saw other girls with that same dumb look—that she started going cold. Now, no matter how much she smiles or claps, her eyes harden when he sings. She wants to be the only one. She wants him as her deep cut, a B-side unearthed from a rarities bin, proof of her own specialness because she’s the one who discovered it, because she doesn’t know how to sing her own damn song.
When I woke the next morning, the post had earned only a handful of likes, along with a smattering of confused and occasionally hateful comments. My beloved Alma had written, somewhat hilariously, I do not know these people? I deleted it instantly, mortified, even as I hoped, with some small piece of my pathetic heart, that Joe had seen it, and that he’d received it as I’d intended—as an apology.