The Haters (3 page)

I thought Kool & the Gang was nothing less than the soundtrack to pure human happiness. Then one day I played it for my newfound buddy Corey Wahl, the drummer from school jazz band. He had recently demonstrated our friendship by yelling at a dude who knocked me down in soccer. So I attempted to reward him with some K & the G.

But somehow it did not get him fired up.

“I don't know, man,” he said after about twenty bars. “It's kind of corny.”

I didn't know how to respond to that.

“Ha ha!” I said, assuming he was doing a weird deadpan joke thing. “No, but for real. How funky is this.”

But Corey just kind of nodded in a way that meant the opposite of what nods are supposed to mean. And we sat there wordlessly continuing to listen to it.

And for the first time, doubt about Kool began to creep into my heart.

I remember pretending, to myself, that I wasn't suddenly understanding how you could hate on Kool & the Gang. I remember thinking, in an increasingly desperate way,
This is super funky and great. I am enjoying this a lot. There goes the guy with the clown slide whistle again. It is very cool when he does that
.

“This is the band that does ‘Celebration,' right?” Corey said.

“I mean, yeah,” I said.

“Let's listen to that,” he said.

“Another thing we could listen to is ‘More Funky Stuff,'” I suggested kind of feebly, but he was already putting on “Celebration.”

Look. If you love Kool & the Gang, you're fine with “Celebration.” It's not the funkiest tune out there, but when you put
Kool & the Gang Greatest Hits
on shuffle, and “Celebration” comes up, it's not hard for you to get into it. It's an upbeat track with satisfyingly clean production. Also it automatically suggests that whatever you're doing, e.g., chemistry homework, is a celebration. And sometimes that is exactly what you need to get through five pages of chemistry homework.

But we sat there listening to it, and Corey had this intense, absorbed, critical look on his face, and for the first time, I found myself hating “Celebration.”

“It's just pretty cheeseball,” said Corey.

“Yeah, but I mean,” I said. But I didn't have anything to finish that sentence with.

“But what?”

We listened to Kool tell us to bring our good times, and our laughter, too.

“I mean uh . . . I don't know. I mean yeah obviously but uhhhh.”

“. . .”

“Mmmmmmm. Well . . .
cheeseball
, I mean, sure, but that's, uh.”

We listened to Clay Smith strum his party-guitar octave sixteenth notes in his relentless and increasingly unbearable way.

“That's what?”

“Well but yeah though, but I do know what you mean and, obviously, yeah.”

“I kind of feel like I'm in a furniture-store commercial,” said Corey.

As we continued listening to the hits of Kool & the Gang, I realized that I could never love Kool & the Gang ever again. “Celebration”
did
make you feel like you were in a furniture-store commercial. “Funky Stuff”
was
kind of corny. And in retrospect, the existence of “More Funky Stuff” was
not
awesome. It was instead ridiculous and embarrassing. Because why couldn't they come up with a different groove? They really thought, we can just do a second song of exactly the same groove? That's for real what they thought?! What was wrong with them?

Every subsequent song was another nail in the coffin. “Jungle Boogie” was trying too hard. “Ladies Night” was trying
way
too hard. “Get Down On It” was the song you would hear if Hell was experiencing high call volume. “Cherish” was the song you would hear when you finally got through.

You're probably thinking I hated Corey for humiliating me like this. But I didn't feel humiliated. I felt grateful. I felt like he had saved me from what could have been a lifetime of listening to corny, cheeseball music.

We quickly became close friends. And pretty much all we've done from then on has been listen to stuff. We just sit around Corey's basement eating his parents' bright-orange cheese surplus and going on epic deep dives with Rdio and Spotify and Grooveshark and YouTube and searching for the Unpoisonable Well. The well that can't be poisoned. The music that you can love forever with all your heart, because it's impossible to hate on.

Obviously by jazz camp, we were still looking for it. Because everything we listened to, every band and artist and album, we always found ways to like it, but we always found ways to hate on it.

The Beatles:
You can't really be a fan of them so much as a historian or paleontologist

James Brown:
His life's work is basically the soundtrack to an infomercial for cocaine

LCD Soundsystem:
Their life's work is basically the soundtrack to an infomercial for the random pills in the outstretched sweaty palm of a rich kid in a hoodie

Pharrell:
His songs are fun except after a while they're actually not that fun because he's kind of too cool to express true unguarded joy or any other deeply felt emotion or actually any emotion at all because he's probably a robot

Kanye:
Kanye's artistic output is like if a corporation's only product was commercials for itself, so I guess GEICO

Can:
Enough with the bird noises

Bon Iver:
Way too emotionally high stakes for casual listening in the sense that it makes every single part of your life feel like the part of a TV show where you are in a hospital saying goodbye for the very last time

Vampire Weekend:
Any given lyric might require you to have memorized
Ulysses
or the entire Bible or something

My Bloody Valentine:
Can only be correctly enjoyed while lying semiconscious on a filthy mattress in an abandoned apartment

Django Reinhardt:
Can only be correctly enjoyed while riding around the Alps in a tiny car with a poodle and a baguette

Odd Future:
You can only listen to dudes ironically rapping about killing and raping everyone for so long before you realize that, despite all the irony and playfulness and everything, when you get right down to it you're still just sitting around a basement listening to a bunch of dudes telling you about killing and raping everyone

Okay. I'll stop. I love all those guys. But that just makes me an expert at hating on them.

That's me and Corey. We're expert well poisoners. And forget about trying to
make
unpoisonable well music.

I mean, Corey had a drum set and an amp down there in his basement, but we barely ever played stuff. Anything we did was just the less-good version of something else that already had some kind of fatal flaw. Periodically we'd try to do some Afrobeat or some shoegaze or some proggy fusiony thing, but sixteen bars in,
I knew it wasn't good enough to put into the world. And so did Corey. Our basement sessions were always over pretty much before they started.

And we played jazz at school, obviously, but in my head that didn't count. Jazz was music we were comfortable liking because there was no danger of us loving it and then eventually being betrayed by it. It was safe somehow. It was basically a game on your phone that you would periodically whip out and try to beat your high score. It was fun and challenging but not really something that you would think to show other people.

Also, it's not like that high score was super high, because I wasn't amazing at jazz or, frankly, anything.

I mean, no one was going to write a Wikipedia article about me anytime soon.

Wesley Namaste Doolittle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wesley Namaste Doolittle
(born September 15, 1999) is an
American
person
.

Early life
^[edit]

Doolittle is
adopted
.
^{[citation needed]}
His
birth parents
are
Venezuelan
. Hopefully he is still in the early part of his life.
^[?]

Career
^[edit]

Doolittle has no career to speak of. And when he finally is forced to get one, it is really not clear what he is going to do. Odds are it will probably
^{[according to whom?]}
be something horrible like
corporate lawyer
or guy who demonstrates kitchen products on the
Home Shopping Network
.

References
^[edit]

There is no reason for you to be reading this section and probably we should just get back to the girl in the practice room.

5.
YES CAN WE PLEASE GET BACK TO THE GIRL NOW

Okay. So, in the practice room, there was a girl. She seemed to be deep into a very demanding guitar solo. However, I couldn't hear if she was any good or not. The guitar was not plugged in. It was a brand-new-looking Les Paul that momentarily gave me a guitar boner.

Was she beautiful? I would have to say probably yes. To me, anyway, she was very beautiful. But I sort of have a low Is This Girl Beautiful Threshold. She was also definitely kind of strange looking.

Maybe the best word for what she was is look-at-able. You could look at this girl for an incredibly long time. I mean, obviously, you couldn't, because she would probably get pissed. But if it
were
an option, like in some magical dream scenario where she wouldn't get bored either and was happy to just sit there being wordlessly looked at, you could look at her basically indefinitely. Maybe she'd be on her phone.

Here's what she looked like: Her hair was a normal length but bleached kind of creamy papery white and her skin was pretty dark and moley. She had small, black, somehow very sharp eyes and this
intense comet-shaped eyebrow situation that made her look sort of concerned and skeptical at all times and a nose that was feminine and womanly but a little bit also made you think of a Labrador retriever. I know none of this is helpful at all. She had a scrunched sort of puffy mouth and round cheeks that I think you would call “apple cheeks” and a chin shaped like a hammock with a giant bowling ball in it. Maybe a less heavy ball. A giant soccer ball.

So in other words it was the shape of basically every chin.

Okay. I am going to stop trying to describe how this girl looks. She was a highly look-at-able guitar-playing girl, and obviously I started crushing on her immediately, because that's just how crushes work. Great.

As I began setting up nearby, she stopped playing and glanced at me. I racked my brains for something charming to do. But somehow what I went with was frowning and scrunching my eyebrows and nodding for no reason. It was a pretty alienating display that I chose to follow up by announcing, “Shredfest.”

“What,” she said. Her voice was low and sounded like it didn't get used a lot.

“Shredfest,” I repeated. “A festival of shredding.”

“Huh.”

“Shredding on the guitar.”

“Ohhh.”