30 Day Song Challenge: Day 17 (A Song You Hear Often on the Radio)

I don’t really listen to the radio very often. When I do, it tends to be on bright and breezy days when I open the window and read the paper over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, feeling like I may not be so firmly entrenched in the 21st century after all. I also like to listen to classic rock and AOR stations, like Dublin’s Radio Nova, which seems to have an unfortunate habit of playing this particular slice of overindulgent Americana at least once an hour.

It’s not that I have a problem with overindulgent Americana (I am a Springsteen fan, after all), it’s just that this song can get a little tiresome after about the hundredth time in one day. I can’t listen to this song on purpose anymore, and I rarely delight when it appears on my shuffling iPod. In fact, I’ll usually skip. Now, allow me to emphasise a point I think may have become a little garbled: I don’t think this is a bad song. At all. Sure, it reeks of the 80s (did he really need the freeze-frame airpunching at the end of the video?) and the lyrics are a bit sexist and the structure is predictable, but it’s still a decent song, if not exactly my favourite ever. (I will, however, leap to my feet if it plays when I’m drunk, declaring “I fucken love this song!”)

I suppose drunken me has a point. I do kinda fucken love this song. Despite its rampant egotism, its overreliance on that one riff, its maudlin and sentimentalist lyrics, and its oh-god-why-have-you-done-that-to-my-eyes cheap VHS-effects music video, I do fucken love it. If I’m in the mood, that is, because this isn’t one of those super magical songs that can instantly change my emotional state. No, this is one of those ordinary songs that is affected by my own emotional state, my own feelings projected onto the song. If I’m in a bad mood, I think Jack & Diane is nonsense. If I’m in a good mood (or indeed sloshed) I’ll think it’s one of the Great American Songs, capturing so perfectly that small-town aesthetic I’m so enamoured with.

So therefore Jack & Diane is a take-it-or-leave-it song, a song that I have no problem with at all, but that neither makes nor leaves a lasting impression on me, and I reckon that’s why it annoys me that I hear it so much on the radio, because it means nothing (or very little) to me, and so just becomes part of the background of what I’m doing, and pervades the air with its nothingness. At least if it were a song I loved I could sing along, or a song I hated I could turn it off. But as it stands, it’s neither here nor there and so stays on the radio to take over my ellipsical moods. But having said all of that, we must look on the bright side: it’s better that they play John Mellencamp rather than Boyzone.