Huey Lewis Has Ruined My Life

Something strange is afoot in Minneapolis. I thought this was a countrywide phenomenon, but as it turns out it's just here and I can't figure it out. If you are often referred to as a "hipster" by your family, friends, neighbors, strangers on the street, etc. (and I don't want to argue about hipster/non-hipster crap today and yes, I'm including myself in the "accused hipster" camp.) you are then required as a Minneapolitan or St. Paulite to then ignore sports entirely if you want any sort of credibility, possibly by throwing out the sports section while digging up the New York Times crossword puzzle in the back of the paper, just so you are not tempted to see what is happening with the Twins or if the Vikings are making any off-season deals. This is ludicrous, inane, elitist and just really dumb.

Now, I am not necessarily a true Sports Guy. I don't know who has the highest batting average on the Twins right now or who has the most home runs. I know who is going to the All-Star Game (Mauer, Morneau and Nathan) and I can give semi-informed opinions on two of our four "major" sports teams (I don't like hockey much and I despise the NBA as an entity), I am admittedly more of a Music Guy, I can rattle off all kinds of useless information about many, many different bands and I will argue this is akin to knowing what Wade Boggs batted in 1986 (an astonishing .357 for those who really need to know). These "guys" aren't mutually exclusive, however. You can be both. You can like your local baseball or football team and still like Clinic and Tokyo Police Club. I know, because I do. In Minneapolis, though, being a Music Guy and liking sports, however mildly, is akin to admitting that you own a vast array child porn or are eagerly awaiting a Huey Lewis And The News reunion. Suddenly, you're suspect at best.

Speaking of Huey, I think Mr. "I Want A New Drug" is sort of responsible for this. First of all, these guys were painfully dorky. Not geeky or nerdy, just dorky, the way your Uncle Sal is, with his lame jokes about 12-inch pianists and his polyester plaid pants, where everyone just sort of groans and goes "Well, that's Uncle Sal!". Sure, they had several hits but Lewis singing about wanting drugs was about as convincing as if, say, Frank Sinatra had released a rap album and wanted us to take him seriously. Secondly, Lewis & Co. admitted to loving sports on a near constant basis (indeed, two of their albums are named Sports and Fore!), and were a little defensive about it if I remember correctly. Even though the wore the facts that they golfed a lot and were, I think, 49ers fans like a badge of honor, they were aware it made them a little unhip. People that were hip in the 80s (i.e. people with bleach blond hair who dressed like extras from Tron) immediately hated them and it wasn't just the bad music (while I love Back To The Future more than an adult man should, they singlehandedly ruin the soundtrack for me). They just sucked. If you admitted you liked them, you were admitting you sucked, too. Hipsters however, hated them just upon looking at an album cover with a golf reference for a title--Lewis didn't have a chance. I don't think it was this way B.H. (Before Huey).

When I was in high school I worked for a now-defunct company called Suncoast Pictures (they were owned by Sam Goody) at the Mall of America. We sold movies (this was the mid-90s so it was just VHS tapes but then during my senior year we started carrying laserdiscs, which were the size of an LP and were the coolest fucking things I had ever seen--The Godfather was issued on four discs, had a behind-the-scenes documentary with it and cost something like $150. Surely, nothing would ever be more awesome. The machines that played them cost somewhere in the neighborhood of the asking price for a 5,000 square foot condo on New York's Upper East Side. Awesome.) and it was a rag-tag bunch. One of the people I worked with this guy whose given name was Francis but insisted everyone call him Fritz (I just realized this now: he had to have done this in "honor" of Fritz Lang, but I didn't know Metropolis was required hipster viewing back then.) He was an art student at the University of Minnesota and he was the first hipster I had ever met, even though I didn't know what a hipster was at the time. He was 22, knew more about movies (or "films" as he always called them) than I did, would do awesome things like ask for "yellow soda" at restaurants because, as he informed me, the servers would never say "We have Mello Yello" if you ask for Mountain Dew like they do with Coke and Pepsi and it pissed him off (by the way he would also order "cola" from time to time and this was more confusing to the server than just ordering a Coke and being informed they only had Pepsi.) He also loudly, actively hated sports. If sports came up he would always say "I don't watch sports, dude. They're boring." and stomp off (looking back on this, he was so over-the-top anti-sports it was insane. He was also the kind of guy who thought Krzysztof Kieślowski's Trois Couleurs Trilogy was too commercial--never heard of it? My point exactly.) I never had the occasion to ask Fritz if he liked "The Power Of Love", but it's safe to say he loathed everything Huey Lewis stood for, except for maybe new drugs. If you haven't put this together yet, Fritz was clearly a douchebag. But at the time he was the coolest person I had ever met (this is more telling than I'd like it to be, for the record) and I immediately stopped following sports because it was cool to do so. This lasted until oh, the second day of my freshman year of college when I realized that: a) I would never have anyone to hang out with on Sunday afternoons if I didn't watch the Vikes and b) I could accurately be described as "a douchebag".

People that could be described as hipsters in other cities don't do this. My friend Tipsy St. Swingsteen has some friends in Philly and she once said they are just like her friends here except they are also rabid Phillies, Eagles, Sixers and Flyers fans. My friend The Displaced Yankee currently lives in Durham, NC and works and an ad agency chock full of hipsters and pseudo-hipsters. Sometimes they go to truck pulls(!) and something called "mud rallies"(!!) on the weekends and follow Duke basketball religiously. In New York if you are hip, you like the Mets (never the hated Bronx Bombers) or go to the minor league Brooklyn Cyclones games. But here if you say you are doing something sports-related it's met with people making faces like someone might have shit on the bottom of their shoe and/or a possible tirade about the insane amount of money paid to athletes. Yes, they are overpaid, so are Radiohead, it doesn't make me like them any less.

There was a time B.H. that people liked sports and music and it wasn't a problem. When I was little, there were older kids in my neighborhood that would talk about the Twins, North Stars, etc. and also talk about The Police, who had that song about the magic lady, and some band called Devo, that I had never heard of. One kid talked about Devo all the time and then when I finally heard "Whip It" when I was about eight, they were the coolest guys on the planet, until I saw them. Devo were geeks, I mean really geeks. Even though I was only eight, when I saw a picture of Devo I asked the older neighbor kid, who was borrowing me his copy of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, "Are these guys nerds?" I remember this clearly because the other older kids laughed and it was the first time I had made older people laugh at something I had said (without one of them saying, "Oh, how cute!") and not something I had done. But none of it mattered. Devo were geeks, he was a North Stars fan and a Devo fan and being a fan of one didn't draw suspicions as to his allegiance to the other. He didn't need to look like a fan of either by wearing a hockey jersey (of which the North Stars had one of the finest of all-time) or by wearing an upside down flower pot on his head (which would have resulted in a pummeling at the hands of his friends, most likely.) he just looked like a 14-year-old kid looked in 1984-- ringer t-shirt, Levi's and Adidas Top Ten high top sneakers. His clothing betrayed nothing about him, and somehow that was a lot more endearing than walking into a place, looking around and seeing that the guy in the corner is a D-Backs fan because of his Randy Johnson jersey and immediately knowing that the girl dressed in all black with the cat's-eye glasses listens to Bright Eyes while she cries herself to sleep at night (note: I don't know exactly what "place" these two people would be in at the same time, really, unless it was an AA meeting.)

Before Huey came along and started to turn the tide things were simpler. A.H. (After Huey), if you liked sports and music both, everyone assumed that you liked "If This Is It" and yacht rock--not "real" music, the kind of music that also requires a wardrobe so you can easily be identified as a "serious" music fan, which is indescribably pretentious. You couldn't possibly like The Cure and the Twins, could you?. If you watched the North Stars, it was assumed you were also going to see Foreigner when they played the Met Center the following night--even if you had a fever of 103. But I'm here to try to shift the tide back. I like sports and I am a "serious" music fan (admittedly--and embarrassingly--I have what could be described as an "indie rocker" wardrobe--lots of t-shirts, plaid western shirts, slim fit jeans, black Chuck Taylors, etc.) You don't have to pick one, you can pick both and if anybody gives you shit tell them to come talk to me. We'll watch the Trois Couleurs Trilogy, listen to some music and then we'll watch a Vikings game and so help me God, if they say the movies and the music are more entertaining than the game (barring a blowout, so maybe we'll watch a Vikes-Packers game at Lambeau in December--those are always nail-biters) I'll strangle them with my bare hands.