Idaho dad is a refreshing call to tune in and chill out.
Nathan Apodaca is an unassuming father, like me, who’s teenage daughter introduced him to TikTok, like mine. Unlike me, his account @420doggface208 touched a societal nerve with a sensational video.
When his truck broke down, Apodaca grabbed his old longboard, a bottle of Ocean Spray juice and skated to work jamming to Fleetwood Mac’s classic song Dreams from 1977. His morning commute with its playful indifference stands against the dumpster fire of 2020. It’s a nostalgic response perfectly set, an uplifting reminder of the impermanence of tough times. Things didn’t always suck. Things will get better. It’s a liberating act of submission, an “Ahh, hell with it.”
Apodaca’s video became an immediate hit. Savvy brand managers at Ocean Spray gave him a new truck. Fleetwood Mac enjoyed renewed interest in their music. As art impersonates life, bandmates Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks created their own video tributes. Together they’re an additive body of work, a ray of light in an otherwise difficult year.
Now here you go again
Dreams lyrics by Fleetwood Mac
You say you want your freedom
Well, who am I to keep you down?
It’s only right that you should play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost
The Dreams soundtrack is more than an infectious reflective groove. Analytical psychologist Carl Jung saw dreams as the psyche’s attempt to communicate with the conscious mind, to bring forth an awareness of what is real and true. As the gateway to our subconscious personality, we should listen to our dreams to better know ourselves and our place in the world. Dreams can orient us so that we might bring orderly peace to uncertain chaos.
Beyond the personal connection to dreams, Jungian philosophy describes the collective unconscious as a universal meta psyche, a creative life force in which all people are connected.
The flash of popular attention on a meme is testimony to a deeper connection we all feel when we see something special. Even if aided by an algorithm designed to bring it to our attention, and UX designed to encourage us to share, the audience must still decide to consume and share. When the ensuing cycle of sharing outside of the social platform crosses over to competing platforms and news coverage and virtual and physical water coolers, we’re catching a glimpse of the collective unconsious.
Phil Collins has seen a similar resurgence via memes anchored in his 1981 signature song, In the Air Tonight.
Here’s a recent example from YouTube stars TwinsthenewTrend who share their reactions from hearing the song for the first time.
We can see the collective unconscious playing out beautifully between the interplay of two people bound since pre-birth. I find myself reacting to their reaction, a connective playback that makes the twins creative artists in their own right.
In a curious foretelling, they turn away from Collins’s piercing gaze on the iconic album cover. “It look like he starin’ into my soul. I’m scared. I can’t look at him! For real!”
I saw what you did
In the Air Tonight lyrics by Phil Collins
I say you with my own two eyes
You can wipe off that grin
I know where you’ve been
It’s all been a pack of lies.
The brilliance of this video is that the teens don’t hold back. They listen and open themselves up to learning something new. They’re quite expressive to the point we feel them.
Notice how initial looks of suspicion immediately give way to bobbing heads and curiosity. Their reactions are so much fun! “Oooh, like a ring entrance… Play that thing… Oh yeah… like a WWE entrance!”
Then that magical beat drops. The twins are visibly overwhelmed as mystically as Heaven for the Church Expectant. It’s almost too much to bear. Listen to their sheer joy: “Wake em up!… That was cold!… I ain’t gonna lie, I ain’t never seen nobody drop a beat three minutes into a song… He killed it… That’s unique… Let’s wake ’em up!”
Collins croons, “I’ve been waiting for this moment all of my life! Hold on!” We see what the twins see. We too are lured into the anticipation and the late-song climax. Together we experience a musical intercourse, a unitive act of mutual sharing that is additive in nature. Our reaction to their fresh perspective yields a renewed joy to a classic experience that’s always been there, waiting to be revealed.
My kids Mary and Simon had the same sort of reaction when I first played In the Air Tonight for them in 2017. I remember exactly where it happened.
We were headed to San Marcos for a “Friendsgiving” on Thanksgiving day. With light traffic on the lower deck of Interstate 35 through Austin, I cranked the car’s radio to near max volume. Normally my wife April would complain and turn it down, but she didn’t, recognizing in the moment one of my “memory makers” (I’ll address nostalgia shortly.)
Speeding through the concrete walls, we all felt the longing of distant guitars driving a moaning melody. The soaring vocals with Collins’s pleading edge overtake us right up to the explosive drop of that timeless beat. My kids loved the song instantly. We still pause and vibe whenever we hear it.
Why is memory so vivid? Perhaps the same reason the twins’ video is so remarkable. We live vicariously through a virgin experience with all the feels. Magic happens when we’re open to it.
In the Air Tonight is a special creation story. Phil Collins achieved infamy through his vulnerability and artful discipline.
First, he accepted his role as a daring artist, open and susceptible. Crafting something new for public consumption requires us to lay ourselves bare. We’re drawn to artists when they exhibit courage, a fleeting virtue admired across time and region and culture. The artist faces real risk of embarrassment or humiliation or worse: silence and rejection and privation when they subsist on their art.
For Collins, the song exposed deep personal wounds. It’s as if he had to purge out of himself, an exorcism with medicinal effect, like cauterizing a gash on his soul. He bravely cries out in confused anguish. We recognize it as the inherent suffering in life, the club’s cover charge for merely being.
I don’t know what this song is about. When I was writing this I was going through a divorce. And the only thing I can say about it is that it’s obviously in anger. It’s the angry side, or the bitter side of a separation.
Phi Collins on the creation of In the Air Tonight [BBC]
Secondly, Collins disciplined himself to avoid the high-hat cymbals and snares that might become a crutch of the mere mortal drummer in the house band at your local pub. Where percussionists dutifully establish order so the guitars and keys and singers might harmonize with mathematical synchronicity, Collins constrained himself so that he might find something fresh, unique and set apart. He experimented on a relatively new instrument, the Roland CR-78 to achieve the innovative gated reverb sound.
The result is legendary. Collins managed to create music that’ll transcend the lifetime from which it emerged. In the Air Tonight is recognized in every top 100 list of the 1980’s, a decade marked by the distinct sound of society crawling out of the rubble of a war-torn century. LA Weekly calls this work “the sleekest, most melodramatic drum break in history.” As the root of so many memes, we can expect his song will endure as long as generations continue to discover it
Why? And how did this happen?
Collins seems to tap into a primal hyper vigilance deep within our unconscious mind. Embedded within such a mournful song, his break hits like a tribal warning gong. Pay attention! There is danger about! It’s a clap of rolling thunder after lightening flashes. How else do we explain our excitement as the song builds? When every dad, and now their kids, break out air drum sticks to mark the infamous beat, we’re acting out something deep within all of us.
Apodaca’s Morning Vibe and Collins’s In the Air Tonight show us how creative breakthroughs come from constraint.
Great plays in games are remarkable because they happen within field boundaries and rules to govern just competition. Engineering marvels are bound by the laws of physics. Master painters are constrained by their canvas.
Reasonable theological arguments are made from the idea that more comes from less (see Peter Kreeft’s Twenty Arguments for God’s Existence). If we follow the axiom to its logical conclusion, God as Creator brought everything from nothing. The ultimate is (every thing) came from the ultimate is not (no thing). Imagine the absence of light and elemental matter as the ultimate constraint, and therefore, the ultimate source of all beauty.
The mystical idea of a personal encounter with an eternal life force is belief born in the religious realm. The Christian invokes the Holy Spirit, the Buddhist meditates on Dharma, the secularist practices mindfulness. Opening one’s self up to the creative element inherent in nature requires an act of self-emptying, like free driver, so you may sink down deep into the dark.
Tapping the collective unconscious embraces suffering. It requires a sacrificial act, to leave worldly concerns behind, to constrain passion and desire. One must give up something meaningful to find meaning. Beauty in both memes came from grieving personal loss, acceptance of fate, and sharing their experience with the world.
Nostalgia is a reasonable proof of quality culture. I’ve observed in Zoomers a particular interest in music and style from the 1990’s. They want the same connection to their musical past. We Gen-Xers did the same thing. We stayed close to the classic rock riffs and beats influencing popular hip hop, grunge and alternative rock.
As a father, I take special care in making memories with my family, as every dad ought. After all, we parents are primary arbiters of culture to our children. We should take care to guide them into society. If we don’t, society will take their precious little hands and guide them into uncertain chaos. Hanzel and Gretel suffered immense danger when their father abandoned them.
Fleetwood Mac has objective quality. We can tell because it’s enduring and interconnected. Dreams connects to other cultural hits from which my kids are aware. They recognize Edge of Seventeen in the hilarious jukebox scene in School of Rock when Joan Cusack permits herself a relaxed moment singing with Jack Black. And who can forget Forrest Gump’s running montage to Go Your Own Way, an inspirational track timeless in its pace, strive and potential.
It’s such a joy to relive these connections with our kids. They’re deeply curious about what made certain music popular, and why. Their instant, on-demand, crowd-sourced experience is so different than ours. We experienced a collective introduction of music through narrow media channels like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and the Top 40 Countdown, Soul Train, Columbia Music mail order subscriptions, and the rise of MTV.
We lived through a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts: the corporate filter of what would be popular helped to define what would actually be popular. History tells us they got it right, too. Renewed interest in Boomer bands like Fleetwood Mac and Phil Collins aren’t a fluke. TikTok and YouTube are making these bands accessible to a new generation because they’re discoverable. Sales of these classic bands are popping off today.
Did the music execs of yesteryear know something we didn’t? Did they have a consumer data feedback loop? Yes, they did! The industry’s data aggregation and analytics weren’t as sophisticated as today’s marketing tech, but they had data from albums and concert ticket sales. DJ’s fielded call-in requests. Music makers could sense the “it” factor in talent to the degree they could manufacture it in boy bands and girl bands. They listened to their gut on what would and wouldn’t work.
Recognizing the bubble gum pop has a place, the inauthenticity is evident. We know this because the music doesn’t endure. When we hear it again, it’s the same flash in a pan, an iterative experiment.
The Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland has a fun permanent exhibit of One Hit Wonders. If you’ve never been, you should go. Your kids will love it!
They’ll love this meme too. Enjoy!
Feature image is We inhabit the corrosive littoral of habit by James Gleeson (1940) in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Gleeson’s work is marked by his exploration of the subconscious via religion, mythology, literature and psychology.