Herb Sundays 115: Nick Hornby
The beloved North London writer with a playlist of "Kick-ass women of the twenty-first century"
Herb Sundays 115: Nick Hornby (Apple, Spotify)
Art by Michael Cina.
“Teachers know that if you tell a kid to write about anything they want, most of them will sit there with a paralyzed expression on their faces. If you tell them to write a story involving a piece of cheese, a ladder, and Beyonce, they will suddenly start scribbling furiously. I'm the same with playlists. Someone asks me to make one, and I think, BUT THAT'S EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD. So I have to reign it in. Bernard Purdie's drumming! Songs that were written for fictional musicians in movies! (These are not hypothetical examples, I'm afraid to say.) I just wrote a post over on my Substack about what women writers have meant to me; so here are some women singers from the twenty-first century. Most of these songs appeared in the last three or four years.
Most of these songs appeared in the last three or four years. If I had to choose one that I would make you play over and over again until you love it and can sing every word (and as far as I know, I don't have to), it would be Monica Martin's 'Go Easy Kid', which I believe is a timeless classic. x10 by Koffee is a great morning prayer, which is why I opened with it. If it makes you cry, you're in a good place. Everyone knows Pheobe Bridgers, but you may have missed her contribution to The Metallica Blacklist, where artists were asked to cover their favourite songs from the Black Album, and if several chose the same song, then no matter - it went on the album anyway. (There are twelve versions of 'Nothing Else Matters’) Margaret Glaspy is my favourite...Oh, there's no point. Just listen.” - Nick Hornby for Herb Sundays
When I saw
had joined Substack (he’s on a tear already), I knew I had to reach out. Since this is a newsletter about playlists (and the duality of taste, obsession, self-perception, etc.), Hornby’s work, which strafes these topics, makes him a must-have Herb. After all, Hornby penned one of the great love letters to the mixtape High Fidelity (1995), which, alongside its American film adaption (2000), ranks as some of the best mainstream looks at “record” people ever made, scraping off the cool kid fluff, and getting down to the semi-sad truth of it all, indeed a herb tableau.Of course, I saw the film when it came out in theaters and then had to read the book. I watched the film with my wife while we were dating on a sort of “this is a movie I liked a lot that you might like” type gambit, but I was nervous about it. Had it aged well? Was it too revealing? What’s shocking is that it does hold up. The protagonist, Rob (the record store owner), was still to blame for their troubles, maybe even more so than in memory, not his partner Laura.
Even though the world has changed irrevocably, the music nerd archetypes are largely the same, so much so that it was re-spun into a TV Show in 2020 (there was one season, which can be watched on Hulu now) starring Zoë Kravitz as Rob (Robyn), because even though it was definitely a “guy” book, it is ultimately about how young-ish people feel, how they become adults, and how they wrestle with giving up (or not) on the allure of the arts as a sole North Star in life.
Hornby shared his thoughts on the book and the show for Rolling Stone:
“Every time I’ve had cause to dip back into the book, I’ve been struck by its melancholy. That’s transferred to the series; Zoë’s Rob has the blues. Her music is a shield against the world, but it can’t provide all the protection she needs — and in any case, her generation has more to worry about than mine ever did.”
The film is a love story but really about the needs of young people, sometimes men, who find the need to wrap themselves around the arcane knowledge of music (or something else) for status and/or safety. I’ve been listening to the book here and there this week, hoping not to hit any outdated tripwire, but it is giving the goods. Even though Hornby’s book takes place in London, the film transferred well to the record store-rich landscape of Chicago. I didn’t interview Hornby but asked one question: Why did the movie end up in Chicago?
NH: Because the guys who adapted it were from Chicago. They thought the book was about them, so they changed it. It's the best kind of tribute.
I’m guessing he means John Cusack and his writing partners, a key Illinois figure who captured the necessary nervous energy. Watching segments of the film again, the casting remains impeccable including a young and slightly dangerous Jack Black. Even in this deleted scene below, the awesome Beverly D’Angelo is included. In it, she is trying to sell her estranged husband’s collection to Rob, a bit that is almost erotic, both in the obvious sense and, of course, in the need to “score” rare records simultaneously; the record part is obviously the main push.
An excerpt from the book on these record store types, from Rob himself:
Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (“If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.
This intense triviality is backed by a forceful devotion, which on the week of Steve Albini’s passing, a stained glass Chicagoan if there ever was one, still feels anew. Luckily Albini lived long enough to move on from some of the rancor of his edgier youth, which we presume Rob does at the end of the book, but we will never know.
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