Good Morning!
Today we’re listening to Too Much Joy’s “Susquehanna Hat Company”
Earlier this month, Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk wrote a guest post on Robert Christgau’s And It Don’t Stop newsletter.
Quirk has both made music and written about it, and while this was a more love letter than an essay (Christgau is turning 80, after all), there was one passage that really grabbed me (bold text is my doing):
…or Tre from Green Day accusing me of getting “paid money to pick the punk rock scene apart,” then asking, “Why are you writing in the first place?”
I gave Tre the same answer I’ve given every musician who’s ever suggested to me that music writing is a suspect endeavor: “That’s like me saying why are you singing.” I asked him what he and his bandmates talked about all day, and he admitted, “We talk about music.”
“Right,'“ I said. “So, people writing articles about music are just having that same conversation with people they haven’t met.”
Distilled down, that’s really the raison d’etre for letters like this. It’s a way for us to talk about & share music despite geographic (or other) distances. In a way, Tre’s quote serves as urtext for most of my content diet on Substack or #musictwitter.
And Quirk’s band, whose music Christgau once described as a “strictly functional medium for smart ass words” served as an urtext for bands like Fountains Of Wayne; serious and/or cerebral musicians who didn’t seem to take themselves that seriously, and whose lyrics felt like a treasure hunt for hidden meanings as much as anything.
Amongst my tight music geek circle in high school, Too Much Joy occupied the same space as lesser-known groups like Hoodoo Gurus; adored by us, but stuck on the JV bench of alternative music fame.
We loved all the songs, knew the words by heart, and in the case of this track, may or may not have gone to the library to see where Susquehanna was (Pennsylvania), or if there was, in fact, a hat company there (turns out it was the name of a vaudeville routine).
And of course, much like Tre and his friends, we talked about the music.
Listen:
“Susquehanna Hat Company” by Too Much Joy | Cereal Killers, 1991
Click the album to listen on the platform of your choice:
What’d you think of this one? Good? Bad? Meh?
Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
P.S. Lively up your inbox! Every day The Sample forwards you a newsletter to discover. The more you use it, the better it gets at delivering what you want.
love these thoughts about music writing, although i’ve never heard anyone say it’s suspect. as someone who makes music and also writes about it, i often wonder if i’d ever really be satisfied consuming and analyzing other peoples’ work and never being on the receiving end of that dynamic instead. we perceive so much more space between creators and critics than there actually is. but then i realize that even my work as a musician is unoriginal--it’s all inspired deeply by the music i listen to. all this to say, great quote.