The New UnCool

The first time I heard Ben Folds Five was on the radio – Back when kids used to listen to the radio and Top 40 was at least two years away from taking over along with its Clear Channel poison. The song was “Battle of Who Could Care Less,” and within a few days I had ordered the album through BMG. A little later, “Brick” hit the airways and wouldn’t go away, but I had already memorized the album and it hardly mattered that it had an overplayed single. That, plus I made out for the FIRST TIME with a girl named Sarah from Warroad, MN with Ben Folds Five playing in the background. I was fourteen years old and it was beautiful. Six years later, Sarah would be a lesbian (no joke!), and Ben Folds Five would be simply “Ben Folds,” already on the long slide down into hipster hatedom.

On September 11th – You know, thee September 11th, I had pre-existing plans of going to buy Ben’s new album “Rocking the Suburbs.” Classes were cancelled by noon, and after a few hours of watching smoking remnants and frenzied newscasters in New York, I wandered across campus to (the former) No Name Records only to find that they had sold out all the albums in stock, and due to the fact that no planes were being allowed to fly anywhere in America, would not have a new stock in until things got less “crazy” in the world. I went to four record stores that day, on foot, walking across a quiet shocked Minneapolis in search of the album, which I finally found and purchased at CD Warehouse… a place I rarely went due to lack of selection and over-all cheerlessness. That, plus they charge too much.

I went home to the dorms and devoured the album, playing it over and over again – Those opening power chords of “Zak and Sara” still make me feel that everything (regardless of what everything might be) will be, eventually, all right.

Subsequent albums were somewhat of a let-down in the face of the immediacy of “Rocking the Suburbs,” and so it was with a bit of reluctance that I stopped by the Electric Fetus to buy his brand-new Way To Normal yesterday afternoon and listened to it while I cooked gnocchi (the freeze-dried easy to prepare kind) and waiting for Katie Rose to come home from work. I wasn’t sure if it was cool to like Ben Folds anymore… No one looked at me weird at the Fetus when I bought it, but usually I get comments on ‘what a great album’ it is when I buy new junk, and this one was met with stolid silence. I wondered momentarily if this is what happened to Elton John fans in the ‘80’s. Elton was rockin’ too, remember that? Then he got chubby and elegiac.

I am pleased to report, however, that the new Ben Folds album is pretty good. It’s not great, it’s not even close to perfect, but it has enough sparkly piano and upbeat irony-clad sentiment that I look forward to going home tonight and spinning it again, bouncing around the room to that big-production synth-n-string backed power pop. It’s probably very un-cool, but I’m okay with that. It makes things seem retrospectively “all right.”

Stream Way to Normal via Spinner here.