"The Pretender" by Jackson Browne

Singalong 007: The heart and soul of the spender

“I'm going to rent myself a house in the shade of a freeway”

A friend asked me recently about Sonos, since I’d mentioned in passing that I'd just spent some hours troubleshooting our speakers. He’s thinking about buying a Sonos and I surprised myself, as I always do, with the vitriol in my response.

I told him that I hate few companies in the world as much as I hate Sonos.

I told him that this was entirely my own experience, that there are evidently millions of happy Sonos customers and daily users who have no truck whatsoever with Sonos. Who are, in fact, delighted by these products and their magical Star-Trek-like functionality. I told him that I carry a nontrivial amount of shame about my feelings, but that my feelings nevertheless are relentless and they get re-triggered just about every time I attempt to use our Sonos and its godforsaken App. It's beyond my emotional capacity to regulate these feelings, which reliably exasperates my beloved.

“I want to know what became of the changes we waited for love to bring / Were they only the fitful dreams of some greater awakening”

I mentioned to my friend that I have a similar, yet distinctly different, hatred of Bluetooth technology, but that I found myself gravitating more and more to the various inferior bluetooth products in our midst, simply to avoid using the Sonos.

I am mystified that, after years of being driven crazy by Bluetooth products and hating them intensely, all it took was the arrival of an even more infuriating technology to magically turn me into a Bluetooth Believer.

Will we someday miss Bluetooth like we miss the MiniDisc? Will anyone ever miss the MiniDisc?

I can hear comment rumblings already: "What's your problem, Trev? Why all the hate? All those engineers working day and night, racking their minds just to make your life better, to bring pristine sound into your home without making you bust your hump with components, custom furniture and running a bunch of dusty cables."

Also: “What does any of this have to do with The Song?”

I know, man. I should absolutely get over myself.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Sonos, first for the amazing products and then doubly for helping shine a light into the dark crevasses underneath my naïve love of music, the simmering grief within me that fuels the pursuit. Thank you, Sonos, for revealing my inner angry maniac to myself, undeniably and revoltingly resolute.

“They say in the end it's the wink of an eye”

"The Pretender" is another song that hit me like a ton of bricks decades after I had ignored it, and Jackson Browne in general, as I was growing up. I didn't care about any of that Laurel Canyon stuff, iconic as it is. My first deer-in-headlights encounter with it was when I was doing gigs with my friend Bret Mosley. "The Pretender" was part of his set. He showed me the basics of the song so I could back him up. I went through the motions, but I just couldn't follow the story. I definitely didn't like the record. I was unreachable in my pretensions. Aloof to the truth.

“Caught between the longing for love / And the struggle for the legal tender”

You see, I had an extremely fragmented musical brain for a long, long period in my 20s and 30s. The memories remain painful. I compulsively kept breaking myself open, discarding structures and relationships just to pick through the pieces.

The cello was a big vehicle for a lot of my explorations, but I also leaned hard on sheer antisocial behavior: introversion, contrariness, under-earning, picking up and moving to a new apartment, a new town, a new state, a different country, dropping out of school, quitting jobs and getting myself fired from bands.

My love life? A cringey sandwich of unrequited crushes and codependent quagmires, peppered with occasional one night stands.

“Out into the cool of the evening strolls the Pretender / He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there”

Musically I tried scaling the walls of the classical, jazz, rock, brazilian and experimental castles, flinging myself at them with half-hewn attempts at singing, drums, piano and guitar, only to fall exhausted back into the muck, hopelessly craving a sense of musical citizenship somewhere, anywhere.

Basically, I was enough of a backwards Pretender myself that when the actual song finally came my way, I couldn't even hear it for what it was. I had to go several more rounds, get knocked on my ass a few dozen more times before I could let the song in.

Is this a post about a song or about a sonos? You tell me. The drag about Bluetooth is that it'll suddenly grab the sound away from your phone when you're just casually trying to listen to something random through the phone speaker. But when you actually want to *use* the Bluetooth? Intentionally? It somehow magically forgets itself, making you go back through all the connection protocols again (re-start, re-pair… repeat) just to make it do the thing it was automagically doing before, unbiddenly and annoyingly. I feel taunted by it. It's as if the thing can actually read my mind, detect my intentions and then proactively do the opposite of what I want.

As a lifelong audio guy, the Bluetooth doodads annoy the crap out of me. Give me a dusty, shorting-out cable any day. It might suck just as bad, but at least it's not playing mind games with me. I’ll take the mess of cables and the disintegrating record jackets. That kind of decay taunts me in a more tolerable way: I can feel like I’m paying attention to the past instead of being left behind by the future.

“Ah the laughter of the lovers as they run through the night / Leaving nothing for the others but to choose off and fight / And tear at the world with all their might / While the ships bearing their dreams sail out of sight”

And yet the above is a trivial set of annoyances compared to the existential rage provoked in me by the Sonos setup process. Your brand new Sonos brings with it a fat, shiny payload of hype. A bevy of false promises with a noxiously demeaning interface that pulls the user by the pubes into a slick maze of "wait and see" setup screens like "getting your [x] ready..." and "connecting your [x] to [y] network..." with those three promising little bouncy dots but nary a status bar to give you - the adult purchaser with responsibility, resources, expectations and the necessity to manage them - any information or agency regarding the time commitment these opaque protocols will be requiring of you today.

“I'm going to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means / And we'll fill in the missing colors in each other's paint-by-number dreams”

We had just moved into our house, so my to do list was extra-long, and I can conservatively estimate the time I spent setting up and troubleshooting our Sonos system over those two days at three hours, including the hour I spent with their phone support. We finally connected it and slowly, painstakingly got the things working, so I thanked the kind technician and we hung up.

And? I totally told my friend to stay the f away from Sonos. For the sake of his sanity.

See, he's musical too. Some things are just too much for people like us. We used to inhabit record stores, stereo stores. They promised us jetpacks, etc.

This robot world of music “consumption”, where the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and the soul of the spender, does not deserve a song like The Pretender. But the previous world is no more.

You will now Pretend, not in order to assimilate but to survive. And then you will Pretend it was your choice all along. We’re all happy idiots now, though true love could have been a contender.

Say a prayer for The Pretender.