The Soundtrack to an America I’ve Never Been To
Updated: Sep 3
America is a desire machine, and a well-oiled one at that. As a kid, it didn’t seem like a real place so much as a playground with neon lighting. Loud and impossibly vast, it sold me a fantasy of red Solo cups, fake IDs, and toothpaste-commercial smiles. I imagined myself partying, laughing and getting my heart broken in those dorm rooms and college dive bars, believing that somewhere over the hill, in a place stitched together by celebrity tabloids, pop songs and John Hughes, a version of me was already living it.
I didn’t speak its language until I was old enough to access the internet without parental supervision. Around seven, I started playing janky RPG games like Poptropica or IMVU where I’d hit up conversations with avatars by popping up clunky little chat ballons above my head. Everyone’s name seemed to be either Ashley, Jack, Laura, David or Brad. The usernames were masterpieces of chaos: lmao_xd_puppy, xLoLliPPpoppx, sassycorpionxx. There was always a fucking “x” somewhere. We’d exchange a few lines in the simplest English possible, and I’d Google every bit of slang like it was a secret code that might grant me access to another version of me, the kind who dates a terrible frat boy and screams 'woo!' at college soccer games in a suburban wonderland. When I was alone, I’d constantly repeat lines I saw from the pixelated realms and start slipping English at times when it made no sense to do so.
Slowly but surely, I began locating this so-called country, not on any map, but in my imagination. “It’s a place where people are always in costume.” I remember thinking. I imagined Katy Perry wandering the streets in a cupcake bra and a cotton candy-pink wig, not for a shoot or a bit, just because that’s how people were over there. I watched the California Gurls video on repeat, convinced that California was a pastel dreamland where ice cream didn’t melt. It was an inflated balloon, Jeff Koons' wet dream in motion.
On the other side of the coin, I was also developing a grittier taste, courtesy of VH1. I remember a commercial break that mashed up Green Day’s “Basket Case,” Alice in Chains’ “Would?,” and the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” I was eating awful cereal, having refused a proper breakfast with my parents, just so I could watch the four Ramones sit around a kitchen table while chaos exploded around them. My TV obsession was peaking, and I was soaking up everything the screen hurled my way. I was on my way to become the picture-perfect consumer.
If music videos were my introduction to a flimsy, mostly imagined version of American culture, How I Met Your Mother was the more real-looking version of what life might actually look like over there. People didn't wear cupcake bras doing their groceries, at least. In one of the early episodes, Ted tries to bump into Robin so that he can invite her to his party. She says she’s reporting live from “75th and Columbus,” an address Ted repeats before rushing out the door. That line, those cross streets, might be one of the first things I remember hearing on TV. I repeated it endlessly, even though it meant nothing to me. Where I lived, addresses didn’t sound like ship coordinates. But I clung to it anyway. It was a signal from a place I hadn’t yet seen but somehow knew.
On the show, Ted was painted as the hopeless romantic, the sweet guy, terminally in love, allergic to casual. The kind of dude who would wear Neutral Milk Hotel shirts under blazers and got heartbroken by women who worked in patisserie shops. I ate it up. That could be me, I thought, full of yearning and soft irony, believing Belle & Sebastian lyrics were the ultimate rite of passage. Through the episodes, I discovered Bloc Party, Beck and The Decemberists. I didn’t know where America was, exactly, but I was starting to pick up its sound.
Now, at 25, I can tell screen from substance, or at least I’d like to think I know when I’m being sold a fantasy. The cherry-flavored dreams have loosened their grip a little bit more. Hyperreality, political psychosis, cultural landfill, and the ever-oozing flair of postmodern nausea leaks through the cracks in the so-called American dream. Still, disillusionment doesn’t kill my desire. As the neon glaze faded, I became drawn to another vision of America, not the polished, but the peripheral. I started reading about and watching the "forgotten" spaces: rural towns, empty highways, places skipped over in glossy montages.
I remember watching Paris, Texas and feeling an inexplicable homesickness for a place I’d never stepped foot in. Roads were stretching into nowhere and flickering motel signs promised absolutely nothing. It was a hum that felt more real than the archetypes of American life I’d grown up with on television. It was still a well-established mythology but it bit a little. It was like stepping into a dream someone else had left running, half-lit and familiar. Ry Cooder’s score captures that feeling perfectly: a sound that drifts like heat over asphalt, all slide guitar and nothing more. The sparseness and minimalism of the soundtrack is metaphysical. It looms over a place where nothing needs to happen for something to be felt.
My interest in “Americana”, as slippery and overused as the term may be, pushed me toward the songwriters who carved meaning out of its imagery. Through Bob Dylan, I started to get it, not “it” as in some profound inner truth, but “it” as America as one contradiction held together by strip malls and self-mythology. Bob Dylan's music tossed me into Desolation Row and told me to figure it out myself. That song is what America sound like to me now: cracked pavement and melted ideals.
The Velvet Underground's Heroin didn’t offer me the New York of sitcom skylines or curated aesthetics but gave me another reality of a city twitching under the weight of its own system that was decaying. Patti Smith understood that too, her voice less singing than testifying, half prophet, half street preacher, smeared in Rimbaud and sidewalk grime. There was an essence in that very dirt.
Fiction can be consolation (or salvation if you want it) There’s truth thrumming under those “No Vacancy” signs, in sunburnt deserts that reek of gasoline. Red Solo cups crushed underfoot because someone botched a beer pong shot, soccer bleachers creaking under the weight of teenage hangovers. I didn’t live any of it. Not the road trips, not the keg stands, not the heartbreak at prom in the parking lot of a Target. But that doesn’t make the imagery less familiar, less comforting. My coming-of-age happened in montage form, between commercial breaks, in a language I had to teach myself through chatrooms and misheard lyrics.
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The image of Katy Perry permanently in a cupcake bra perfectly captures how media shapes a child's fantasy of America as an absurd, costumed hyper-reality.
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The part about imagining California as a place where people are permanently in costume and ice cream literally doesn’t melt feels embarrassingly accurate to how distorted early internet American pop culture looked from the outside.
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