'High Fidelity' shows fun and folly of music formulas

Thursday, April 6th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Do you ever find yourself speaking in lists? Do you spend more time organizing your compact discs and vinyl than washing your dishes and balancing your checkbook? Have you frustrated friends and loved ones by insisting on assigning most things a hierarchical value ("That hail storm was pretty bad, but certainly not among the worst of the last seven years")?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, there's still time to get help. Then again, if you really wanted to, you probably would have by now. You're also quite likely (but not necessarily) a youngish man with a fervent passion - detractors might say dangerous obsession - for pop music and its layers of cultural minutiae, the ways in which it lends itself to categorization and dissection, the quality it has of making sense when little else does.

Arrested development? Perhaps. That's what it is in Nick Hornby's male cult novel High Fidelity, whose back cover boasts this tasty blurb from the late guy magazine Details: "Keep this book away from your girlfriend - it contains too many of your secrets to let it fall into the wrong hands."

Too late; it's now a Hollywood movie starring John Cusack as Rob, a hipster record-store owner whose love life won't stop spinning out of control (even though he owns a Stiff Little Fingers white label and a mono copy of Blonde on Blonde).

If you're a Gen-X guy who read High Fidelity, chances are you're a Gen-X guy who related to High Fidelity. Either that or you reeled in horror at the idea that someone else could have written your autobiography without ever meeting you. It's so universal, at least among a certain Y-chromosome subspecies, that the film uprooted the novel's setting from London to Chicago without missing a significant beat.

We could offer you the top five reasons why it was able to do this, but that's for another story. Instead, let's look at why so many guys insist on assigning concrete order and qualified ranking systems to something as unqualifiably beautiful as music. And what better place to undergo such an examination, seeing that most entertainment journalists enjoy few things more than cranking out top-five (or top-10) lists of the best albums, movies, singles, performances, etc.

Granted, most of us don't go quite as far as Rob and his two employees, who pass the days rattling off top-five tallies of favorite A-sides, Elvis Costello songs, even break-ups (in chronological order, of course). But we feel Rob's pain, and we enjoy inflicting it on others.
"There's just something so ridiculous about top-five lists," says Mr. Cusack, who also co-wrote and co-produced the new film. "It's this strange thing that guys use to objectify and quantify art into a pecking order. It's some kind of competitive hierarchy kind of thing.

We're always trying to put things in their place."

Guilty as charged. We want sense out of nonsense, control out of chaos. Call it the pop-culture version of Manifest Destiny: It's out there to conquer, and we're just the ones to do it.

Sure, we're as emotionally touched as the next person by a divine melody. But we must make it our divine melody, and then we must compare it to other divine melodies. Letting it float into the ether is just too passive, too accepting, especially when we can use it to impress others with our staggering knowledge.
That's the harsh analysis, anyway. Luckily, there's a kinder one. It goes something like this:

When you love something as much as many of us love music, you're overcome with a powerful urge to make sense of it. That's why folks who love numbers become mathematicians, why bug buffs become entomologists. Granted, they often get paid for their passions, but it's the same concept: A certain breed of fanatic is not content to just sit back and appreciate. He is overcome with the need to categorize, to quantify, to list. If that need spills over into the land of neurosis, so be it.

Of course, there are always degrees. If you eschew personal contact in favor of comprising your list of the top speed-metal bass lines of 1987, you might want to re-examine your priorities. No one likes an isolated fanatic.

So share your obsessions with those who care about them. Don't just say that something is the best, or among the all-time, desert-island, top-five best. Explain why you feel that way. Dare to express your feelings about your absolute favorite guitar solos by a Steely Dan session guitarist. Share with the group. It could be the first of the top-five steps on the road to recovery.