A certain strain of neoclassical economics holds that subjective individual preferences have no ultimate analytical significance. This is the ideological upshot of a laissez-faire attitude toward taste: All tastes are just residual, a revealed preference for x over y, and the difference between x and y is immaterial, a local phenomenon beneath study. It has the illusion of significance to the individual, but from the Olympian perspective required to grapple with human socioeconomic behavior, it’s just noise.

One of the tragedies of getting old is seeing this perspective confirmed in the indifferent destinies of commodities that were once far more than mere commodities to you. Distinctions that seemed crucial, epochal, even existential, are slowly eroded until you are forced to admit to yourself that maybe they never existed at all. Or at best, the distinctions were not ontological, not in the intrinsic nature of the things you cared about, but were instead historically contingent. Which in turn means your sense of self, the differences that were so salient and so definitive of how you thought of yourself, were also contingent, historical artifacts.

Anyway, I was prompted to these bathetic thoughts this morning by reading Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams while having breakfast at a diner counter near a radio blasting a classic rock station. “Dance the Night Away” by Van Halen was playing, and next came “Mysterious Ways” by U2. The transition was seamless and unremarkable, only I can remember when I was in high school, when listening to U2 and not Van Halen was of intense social importance, when the difference was glaring, and it dictated how one wanted to perceived and whom one felt comfortable hanging around with. It seems incredibly silly now, but growing up in semi-rural, semi-suburban Upper Bucks County, the discontinuity between Van Halen and U2 created a space in which to exist, and a hope that one might turn out to be something other than what the suburban environment seemed to promise. You could listen to something like the Beastie Boys and think your friends were the only other people who got it — them and maybe some idealized people out there who also would have been your friends if you weren’t so isolated. The special few who would redeem the future.

But of course, that nascent sense of personal uniqueness and destined escape was wholly internal to the suburban experience; it was part of the program, an essential component of what detached houses and cars and the rest of it inculcated.    With its veneer of conformity, suburbia imparts a sense of aggrieved, threatened individuality, but more important, it gives its children a constitutive myopia about it, making it impossible for them to see that the ambitious discontentedness, the certitude that one is far more special than the mediocrity of shopping malls and chain restaurants and the rest, is part of the code for reproducing the suburbs, not a disruptive mutation. In short, it would be weird if you didn’t feel alienated. Radical alienation is the first step toward cynicism and pliancy. You meet people at a high school reunion and discover that actually you all hated the same thing back then — yourself. It just got expressed in different ways: listening to Van Halen, listening to U2.

One of the first and more memorable moments that I had a premonition of what being old would be like was when I came back to college in January 1992 after a holiday break. I was at a party and the customary Steve Miller Band songs were blasting, and then suddenly, with no fuss, Nirvana was playing. I felt instantly as if I had been completely exposed. I thought there was something special about being into a certain kind of music — and Nirvana in the summer of 1991 was very much that music. It was supposed to be a bulwark against being perceived as mediocre. Suddenly I saw that the distinctions I was investing myself in were always already unimaginative, insignificant — superficial distractions that had preoccupied me and protected me from pursuing some other kind of self-knowledge. The future didn’t promise escape but re-enclosure and surrender. The escape routes you learned were already traced on commercial maps. They led deeper into enemy territory. You wake up to discover that you are in fact enlisted in the enemy’s army.

Moreover, at that moment “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was playing, I saw instantly that the distinctions that made me in my mind who I was didn’t really belong to me, and they could be wiped away in an instant, by some frat bro playing a certain CD on his boombox. I realized I didn’t even know what could belong to me, in that sense. I had an intimation of that bitter-old-man insight that there is in fact no distinction to be found in consuming and projecting allegiance to those sorts of commercial products. I was lifted up for a moment to the bleak promontory from which I could see that all those cultural commodities are basically the same. It was terrifying, because from that perch one can see the higher one, from which all “individuals” are essentially the same mortal creatures, preoccupied with distinctions that are indistinguishable from the perspective of eternity. And now a Beastie Boy is dead.

In this post about zero-sum validation games in social media, Freddie deBoer expresses his frustration with people’s refusal to let other people just like what they like.

Even our purely subjective aesthetic choices are not allowed to be our own anymore. If tastes are subjective and people are allowed to make whatever choices they want in the media they consume, people can’t use those tastes to justify their self-conception as arty or hip or whatever. So what you get is a lot of people heaping derision on those who make different aesthetic choices. Nobody can leave other people alone anymore.

Much of this antagonism is inescapable, given how status and class work in an ostensibly caste-free society. Our aesthetic choices have never been “allowed to be” our own. You might say that possibility has always been a utopian aspiration, a rallying cry for liberal individualism. Autonomous taste formation has always been a myth, a means for shaming people for their habitus. (What you are seen to “naturally” like becomes a social destiny.)

With the shift to an aspirational consumer culture (necessitated by grow-at-all-costs capitalism) and its promises of social fluidity, the boundaries of social caste are maintained less through tradition and bloodlines and such but through appropriately staged taste displays, as Veblen and Bourdieu, etc., have argued. Status insecurity drives the engine of fashion, and the value of positional goods, while draping an ideological veil over the conservation of power, made to seem a matter of clever consumption rather than capital ownership. A nominal openness in the arena of taste (we all have freedom of choice and opportunities  to display our consumerist ingenuity) and the existence of occasional taste-lottery winners invite us to blame ourselves for failures to climb the social ranks, even though the game is largely rigged in advance. Anyone can express their difference, but not everyone (or perhaps not anyone) can dictate how it will be understood and judged. The result is the milieu of resentment DeBoer describes in the post, and in this essay.

Stemming resentment is not simply a matter of not judging others. The problem is the network structure of sociality, not necessarily personal invidiousness. Because anything expressed through social media is  recorded and circulated in a network, redeployable for all sorts of decontextualized purposes, it’s also automatically a judgment whether we intend it to be or not. If we mean to stop judging other people for what they like, we would need to stop ourselves from broadcasting anything about what we like. Social media situates personal expression in an arena of status competition far more than, say, ephemeral conversations do. Social media provide material support to the idea that consumption is first and foremost a performance, not about what enjoyment you get but what envy or interest you inspire in others.

Pettiness about other people’s consumer choices was certainly prevalent before the Internet, but the ceaseless competition for attention enabled by social media has made it worse. The omnipresent resentment stems from the not altogether mistaken idea, incubated on social media, that the hype for what other people like affects the distinctive value of what you like. Social media drives home the notion that no “need” is not social at its root — no need is private and intrinsic but is always inflected by social imperatives, is an effort to fit in or gain status. Baudrillard delighted in making this point in “The Ideological Genesis of Needs.” He claims, “it is impossible to isolate an abstract ‘natural’ stage of poverty or to determine absolutely ‘what men need to survive’. It may please one fellow to lose everything at poker and leave his family to starve to death.” This leads him to ask: “Is loss of status — or social nonexistence — any less upsetting than hunger?” Social media are premised on the answer to that question being self-evidently “no.”

The structure of online social networks ensure that nobody is leaving anybody alone anymore, capturing every social action and turning it into a discrete, quantifiable moment of value creation. The value is created through the sorting gestures made by the others in the network — liking or ignoring a shared thing, curating it, assimilating it into something else, forwarding it on, approving or disapproving. Because these judgments are internal to the network and themselves constitute a concrete chunk of digital data, they become a marketable commodity for the networks’ owners as well as a source of market information affect the value of other commodities, the relative demand for them. And as we refine the ability to measure our online influence, our tastemaking will become both more zero-sum and more pertinent to our lives. Our opportunities in life may be shaped by Klout scores, since that data can be readily used for discriminatory purposes to shape the sorts of retail environments we pass through and where we exercise most of our “freedom to choose” and “become who we are” through consumerism.

Under incipient conditions of “frictionless sharing” where we are encouraged (or eventually forced) to feed every consumption choice into a network, no choice is innocent or separate from the value it might create by circulating within that network. No subjective opinion has any meaning in the abstract; once we recognize any preference as a separate thing from the experience that formed it, once it becomes reflexive, we are tempted to deploy that preference as a signifier. Preferences can be communicated, but the experiences that prompted them aren’t — they aren’t transferable and have no social value.

So it becomes more useful to have preferences than experiences, to have preferences at the expense of experiences, and to have all “experiences” take the form of social sparring over preferences. This is a game that can be won — my trip to, I don’t know, Watkins Glen can beat yours if my pictures and comments about it get more views. My love of the band Rush becomes something with theoretically measurable impact — it’s not about what I hear when I listen but what others think about the fact that I’ve chosen to claim I’ve heard something by Rush. I am never not aware of the audience I can have for my listening. Hemispheres is my jam.

In this process, the value of all personal experiences, once turned into the negotiable currency of opinions, escapes our control. As deBoer writes, “the more time people spend justifying and validating themselves, the bigger gulf they feel between the self-concept they try to project and how they actually feel about themselves.” That’s because social media prompts us to put virtually everything that could anchor self-esteem into circulation, onto the attention market. Social media works to make everything we do reflexive.

The interior gulf between the intention and reception of the performed self that deBoer describes is also a measure of the inherent volatility of all status signifiers — made more volatile in the endless churn of social media. We are less sure than ever of whether what we think we are projecting will secure the distinction we expect. But that doesn’t mean we can simply stop playing. (It seems to mean that we play harder, project more.) DeBoer basically goes on to argue that we should stop regarding “validation” as an inherent need, an idea that Baudrillard could apparently get behind. But that’s tantamount to arguing we should opt out of ideology through some voluntary effort of will. We aren’t really afforded the wherewithal to refuse to participate in games of social status, which would only cease to trouble us if it social class were still overtly dictated to us and rendered immutable by custom and brute force of law. Absent that kind of caste helplessness, there seems to be no incentive for protecting certain of our experiences from the attention market. Why not try to take advantage of the chances for social mobility with whatever resources technology affords us? Even if we could stabilize some internal sense of self by not putting our treasured subjective opinions up for external judgment, that stabilization would come at the price of self-ostracism and status loss that would redraw our horizon of opportunity.

Rather than reject the possibility of validation, one might instead seek personal validation through the effort to validate others, at least at an interpersonal level, if not at the level of status. We can’t necessarily “like” one another into the upper middle classes or “like” our way to the dissolution of class altogether (especially if we consider it the creation of cultural capital and not its destruction), but we can circumvent some of the resentment by withdrawing more of our social behavior from the circuits of capital, refusing to mediate our validation gestures, and rejecting the elision of validation with capitalist value creation. Even if it were possible in our society of ubiquitous surveillance to be social without it being mediated, however, the effort it would take would be liable to stoke a different kind of resentment. No one wants to watch other people turn their opinions into an effective kind of capital while you struggle to withhold your own. All the personal broadcasting going on makes it seem as though it is besides the point to have an opinion that’s not shared; it’s almost taken for granted that we don’t have tastes until we force them on others. If you don’t know I like Rush, then what’s the point of liking Rush? How do I even know if I like them? I haven’t made the feeling real until I announce it.

I feel like this post is spinning in circles a bit. The point I am trying to make is that it is much more difficult than it would seem to simply opt out of conspicuous consumption when everything we do is already presumed conspicuous, by ourselves and everyone else in smartphone society. In theory, nothing escapes mediation; even our active efforts to avoid broadcasting ourselves and our opinions and our tastes can be thwarted by well-meaning friends who share in our name. And we can’t will the kind of social context that would make cultural tastes and mediated “sharing” other than what it is under capitalism — a ploy for distinction.

Cultural critic Mark Dery is something of a Tom Wolfe for the BoingBoing set, writing cranky and sneering essays about sensationalistic or offbeat subjects, compensating for the narrow range of conclusions these topics tend to offer with rhetorical excess and a thick smear of knowing pop-culture allusions. In his most recent collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, Dery writes about, among other things, Star Trek slash fiction, Holocaust tourism, Chick tracts, Lady Gaga’s intelligence, and spambot poetry.

Some of the essays are stale because they are dated (feels a little late to be reading about the death of Pope John Paul II), but in general, they are not out to prompt you to think of their subjects in a radically new way, especially if you have already given them any thought on your own (e.g, YouTube Downfall parodies “dramatize the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times”; “Facebook returns us to the adolescent psychology of high school”). The point of the pieces is less to argue for a surprising interpretation than to entertain and assuage readers, make them feel as though they are exempt from the “apocalypse culture” under consideration, surveying it along with Dery from a safe, skeptical remove. Except when he is writing about Nazis — in those essays he is keen to remind us that we are all probably more fascistic than we think.

Dery’s style predates the predilection of the current crop of cultural essayists (those operating in the malignant wake of deified DFW) for self-abnegating posturing — explained well by Maria Bustillos in this Los Angeles Review of Books review — which makes reading the book feel very much like a return to a 1990s zeitgeist. This jars a bit with the Internet-driven content he’s dealing with. The approach feels out of sync with the meme coverage I’m used to from Hipster Runoff, etc.: Dery’s irony is not ambiguous or ambivalent, just sarcastic in a self-righteous Jello Biafra sort of way. His writing conspicuously lacks the disingenuous deference that a lot of online writing adopts, always aware of itself as potential personal-branding copy, potential social-network seeding. Dery’s arch-outsider tone is a relic of the time before zines were replaced by tumblrs. (His distance from the spirit of Internet culture is evident in how he wrote about blogs in 2007 as if they needed explaining; blogging is a really “dorky” word, he insists, but it turns out these “blogs” can actually be pretty cool!)

It seems likely that Dery is aware that, in the contemporary context, he’s “doing it wrong.” But rather than adjust to the milieu tonally, he often becomes overtly defensive and tries to establish that he still gets it by dumping in huffy long-hyphenated-string-of-words adjectives plus what he takes to be relevant cultural references to an imagined straw-man audience. That strategy in itself feels dated, a holdover from the time when the Quentin Tarantino approach to discourse was ascendent and writers tried to bully readers with the unexpected breadth of their allusions. Riddling readers with references, in that cultural moment, conveyed a gangsterish toughness rather than pretension. But the reactive immediacy of online cultural critique, and the ease of information access, has depleted that tactic’s sting. You don’t drop a reference and leave people feeling dumb anymore; instead you link a reference and everyone can feel smart. Or instead, there are increasingly customized “trending topics” that everyone in a niche responds to, which earns one more attention and cultural capital than trying to invoke something unusual and obscure.

Dery’s defensiveness is most apparent in”Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back,” a tedious rant about Lady Gaga’s refusal to be a 1970s glam rocker. After basically complaining that Lady Gaga is dumb and her music stinks, he writes,

By rights I should be femdom’d by the Lady, then thrown to the tender mercies of the butchest of the Caged Heat babes in Gaga’s “Telephone” video, you’re thinking. I’m guilty of rockism, that unbecoming affliction that causes middle-aged, strenuously straight white guys like David Brooks to subject us, periodically, to a column’s worth of mawkish, cornpone about the irony-free pleasures of the real Bruce Almighty (Springsteen, of course)

This passage comprises much of occasionally mars Dery’s essays: forced references, the projection of hostility onto an imagined audience of benighted poseurs, the attempt to disavow his own lack of youth by finding a different old square to scapegoat. Why throw David Brooks into this discussion of “rockism”? Why not attack the credence of the rockist critique itself instead of saying “Not me, man. But him.” Writers get older and fall out of touch with what striving young tastemakers are pushing, and that’s just fine. His defensiveness about it, however, makes me feel like I should be more defensive about it too; it makes me feel old and out of touch, an unwelcome reminder.

At times, it feels like the stakes in certain of Dery’s essays is the salvaging of his own edginess rather than illuminating the cultural phenomenon he’s examining. These fall into a trap of regarding cool as zero-sum, as something that needs to be clawed back from the clueless people who are claiming it. It’s always tempting to want to proclaim that some trendy thing doesn’t deserve its attention, but other people’s trends are only threatening if and when you acknowledge them, and attacking them only makes them stronger while making you seem like a patronizing curmudgeon. It’s not actually a public service; no denunciation of Lady Gaga or, say, Girls will ever give anyone any lasting relief.

Dery is at his best when he finds a clever hook to refresh a tired debate, as in his essay from 1997 that wonders if 2001′s HAL is gay and uses that question to explore questions of artificial intelligence more broadly, or in his 2005 essay about advertising and foot fetishes. An essay from 2009 cleverly considers the Satan/Santa overlap. These pieces are amusing distractions, indicative of why the book jacket copy calls the collection “a thrill ride.” One can have a fun few minutes reading, and when it’s over, the disorientation only stays with you for a short time. I found myself enjoying and then immediately forgetting most of this book, which I don’t mean to be as much of a backhanded endorsement as that sounds.

Still, I wished the book better lived up to its namesake, one of my favorite X songs.

There is nothing mysterious about how hype is generated: marketers and PR people coordinate with attention brokers on various media and relentlessly bang the drum for whatever it is they want to promote. But, as Devon Powers details in this paper about hype in the International Journal of Communication, hype seems mysterious because it comes with its own disavowal. It’s “contaminated publicity” that infiltrates past one’s defenses by seeming to refute itself; it tries to work by implying, “This thing has already been too publicized.” It engages people not on the level of the thing being hyped — it tends to posit the idea that everyone already knows what the thing is basically about — but by evoking a cultural conversation, as if there is some alternate answer to the question “Why is everyone talking about X?” than “X was heavily and concertedly marketed.”

Hype already presumes that no one completely buys into it; the passive dope who just responds to hype with naive enthusiasm is obviously a straw man, the creation of which is hype’s chief achievement. Hype creates this stooge that makes us feel smart in being jaded about hype. Advertising generally works by trying to make audiences feel smart and insecure at the same time; it flatters us but makes us know that the flattery is conditional. Hype says: yeah, you are probably smarter than to fall unreservedly for this obviously overhyped thing, but still you better know about it so you know just why you haven’t fallen for it. As Powers notes, Through our engagement with hype “we are at once too savvy and not savvy enough.”

By definition, hype is never a surprise, an accident. In fact, we know when something has gone “viral” precisely because it hasn’t been hyped in advance; its spread is unexpected. Why something like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” caught on is a legitimate question, the birth of meme-ology. Something like Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls is another matter. It is not a meme. It can only be understood within the context of its preparatory promotion. As Powers argues, “Hype is a state of anticipation generated through the circulation of promotion, resulting in a crisis of value.” The crisis of value is in part aesthetic — the intensity of hype implies the thing in question can’t stand on its own and can’t attract its own audience.

But it’s also a crisis of what we mean by value. Hype is a switch point where attention comes to seem valuable for its own sake, as the point of all cultural production. A hyped work can only be about its own popularity. Hype reinforces an idea of value that fits well in a world of social-by-design products, suggesting that art is only meaningful to “consume” when you yourself have an audience to watch you consume it. What’s the point in trying to enjoy something no one else is watching? There is no advantage, no value, in that. Powers notes that “consumption is not synonymous with endorsement, but it is increasingly read that way.” I might modify that to: We increasingly know we are consuming something only when it can be registered as an endorsement — when we know it has made some statement about ourselves. Powers writes:

As more of an individual’s relationships, transactions, beliefs, and self-concepts take place in, or are primed for, public consumption, and as the economy continues to shift toward entrepreneurialism and self-employment while technological advancements shift toward mobile, social media, each of us is likewise pulled into these promotional tropes.

That is, given the imperative to be productive on social media, hype is as much a model for personal conduct as it is promotion for a particular good. It teaches us to be careful in how we promote ourselves through the things we choose to attach ourselves — to stoke and undercut expectations about ourselves simultaneously. Since self-promotion is a given, not a choice, we should aspire to do it right. Hype is compelling because it starkly models how to do it wrong and how to do it well, and persuades us we’ll always know the difference, even when they are the same thing.

Warped nostalgia can take you to weird places. A few weeks ago, I suddenly started listening to this Van Morrison album Beautiful Vision, which I’ve owned for more than 20 years and never particularly liked before. Now I can’t stop listening to it.

Part of this is egotistical contrarianism. Most critics think the record is mediocre; the incredibly lame album cover may have something to do with that. It might be the worst cover ever for a musician who has impeccably bad taste in cover art. (Okay, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart is probably worse.)

It’s like he is daring his audience to listen to it. The message seems to be: “See how indifferent I am to the surface things of this world? I put out my music with this on the cover. That’s how far I have moved beyond petty commercial posturing. Fuck you, here’s a rainbow.”

But probably the design was a calculated attempt to move into the burgeoning New Age niche of the time, especially given that space-music synth player Mark Isham was among the musicians on it. The cover has the Windham Hill hallmark fonts and design motifs, which are applied almost parodically. Whose hand is that supposed to be popping out of that crescent, emerging from the otherwise depthless space? What’s with the smeary blotches? It looks like someone spilled something on the negative and didn’t bother to wipe it up.

I am drawn by this design that seems to make no place for me, that makes no concessions to anything a person like me would find appealing. I am also drawn by the thought of listening to a revered musician’s rejected work. It gives me intimations of immortality — I’ve got so much time left that I can burn some of it listening to Beautiful Vision instead of Astral Weeks. I’m not worried about time. I’ve beaten the hype cycle. Listening to “bad” albums also indulges that arrogant side of fandom that leads me to believe that I can hear the greatness in records lesser fans are beguiled by. I am the only one who appreciates their merit; I alone understand where Morrison in his genius was coming from. I too am an artist, an artist of listening.

But mainly what keeps me playing the album is anti-nostalgia. Beautiful Vision, though clearly an indulgent nostalgia exercise for Morrison (“Down the mystic avenue I walk again” and so on), inspires in me no memories of the good old days when I used to listen to it, it invokes no glory from my past, borrows nothing from the melancholy of my lost youth. Unlike Morrison, I don’t want to go back. He can go back for me. I’m moving forward. Or maybe I’m mythologizing my present moment for myself through sheer repetition.

I like that Beautiful Vision sounds nothing like any music I have ever liked before. The younger me heard this record and thought, What a bunch of bullshit. The whole album is drenched in a diffusive, trebly sheen, like it is trying to twinkle. Though it concludes with a bombastic instrumental that rains chords on listeners’ heads like so many velvet hammer blows, it steadfastly refuses to rock. It proceeds with a kind of sublime indifference to its audience. No hooks, no attempts to engage listeners directly — instead he captures a complete self-absorption, totally lost in his own music and esoteric preoccupations. He’s not afraid to throw out a song title like “Aryan Mist,” which is one of the album’s many references to occult spiritualist and apparent racist Alice Bailey. He can’t be bothered to explain that the ”Vanlose Stairway” is a real place in Copenhagen where his girlfriend lived and not some made-up mystical abstraction, though he sings about it like it’s the Veedon Fleece or his own personal stairway to heaven. Then he takes the opposite tack with “Across the Bridge Where Angels Dwell” — allegedly a reference to an actual bridge in San Mateo that led to a house where his ex-wife and daughter lived. Morrison chooses to present this private iconography in the blandest, most generic spiritual terms, as if to protect it from our phony bandwagoning.

But that’s a big part of why I like it all of a sudden. I take the album as a soothing investigation into how to turn precious memories into “precious memories” or a “beautiful vision.” That is what Greil Marcus is getting at in When That Rough God Goes Riding when he lumps Beautiful Vision in with a bunch of other of Morrison’s 1980s and ’90s albums that he says “carry their titles like warning labels.” The warning is that the spiritual process generates generic artistic by-products. The titles are indicators that the aesthetic substance has been extracted and consumed in the search for private spiritual meaning, and what’s left is a holy relic from a religion you can’t belong to.

Marcus claims these albums have “no tension,” whose “tedium” is “almost heroic.” At this point in his career, Marcus argues, Morrison had embraced the placidly indifferent side of his musical persona: “He wants peace of mind and ordered satisfaction most of all, and sings as if he already has them.” Marcus thinks that is a bad thing, but it’s actually kind of awesome. Beautiful Vision promises spirituality as a process of abstraction and nostalgia as process of exclusion. No one else needs to understand your memories for them to transport you, and you don’t have to torment yourself with how ineffable your nostalgia is. If you get preoccupied with your own mythology, you flatten out your personal history, which is better remembered spontaneously and not in deliberate and protracted trips through your inner sanctum.

In fact, your memories mean nothing to anyone else unless you are willing to make them into broad metaphors. The song “Cleaning Windows,” where Morrison connects his youth of listening to soul records and washing windows with his view of his current self as a yeoman musician, expresses this tension: “cleaning windows” wants to be a metaphor for his bringing some spiritual clarity to the audience through his devoted, unassuming devotion to his humble craft, but in practice Morrison doesn’t care how dirty your window is, and the last thing he seems to want is for you to be peering through his. Clean your own damn window; I’m getting paid to do this.

Marcus would seemingly prefer that Morrison always sing as though he’s desperately seeking transcendence, not comfortably assured of it. He wants Morrison’s music to validate an endless struggle, a life that promises only fleeting rewards in ecstatic instants to the aesthetically attentive, moments in which music and art unexpectedly transport you after you’ve paid your dues in patient attention. Morrison is supposed to be the rootless poet — “nothing but a stranger in this world” — who makes us appreciate the valiant struggle of art vicariously while we get to take comfort in our commonplace lives. You don’t want to have to live Van Morrison’s creative torment, especially when you can simply consume the experience.

When Morrison was making Beautiful Vision, and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, and Poetic Champions Compose, etc., he seems to have been working against this deliberately. He doesn’t want to commoditize his struggle; he wants to bask in its private resolution. The lyrics are still all about spiritual quests and finding transcendence, but poetic pain no longer is the route.

Morrison was apparently determined (if you believe this Wikipedia page) to reject the heritage of American blues and soul music that he had relied on for so long in favor of something more authentically Celtic. Blues and soul music operates by and large within that idea that suffering is the only communicable form of artistic commitment, the blues the only gateway to transcendence — only pain is real. Instead, he extracts a different message from the dubious and somewhat inhospitable theosophical material he was working with — that the poetic and the powerful are impersonal, and art that can move you draws its energy not from some wellspring of personal suffering that permits an individual to express spirituality authoritatively but from nature at its most ordinary. Stop fawning over your memories by combing them for anguish. Your pain’s got nothing on a rainbow.