I don’t think there is anywhere else in the world whose myth in pop culture looms larger than Los Angeles. One reason is, of course, that’s where (for the most part) pop culture comes from. But the other reason is that so much about LA works so well as a metaphor for the modern world.
Roland thinks L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think–I don’t know, it’s not what I expected. It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I’ve seen a lot of L.A. and I think it’s also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is all right.
-Sara, from the movie LA Story, touching on the reason why it works so well as a metaphor. It’s a city of dreams, both good and bad.
Once upon a time, what seems like a very, very long time ago, I lived in Los Angeles. It’s not important why or how I was there (except that I was not, in any way, connected to the entertainment industry, unless you count my sad, broken attempts at dating industry douchebags who could barely form sentences). I found that Los Angeles lived up to its myth in a way, but only if you let it. It’s so huge that one of the good and bad things about it is that each Angeleno lives in their own city. They carve out their own niche, sometimes in the immediate area where they live and work, sometimes out of patches of the city, and for better or for worse, you have to be aggressive about carving out that special niche or LA will eat you alive. And I think that’s where the myth comes in. Los Angeles needs that myth to fill in the gap between what people expect and what can actually be accomplished with a car and a dream.
Aside: I should say that while I did not like living in LA, I love Hollywood. I love the seediness, the dirtiness, the fantastic music and clubs that are always going on. I lived in West LA, near LAX, about 30-40 minutes from the Sunset Strip, but was there as much as possible. After work I’d fight traffic to go to Amoeba Music or just to drive along Sunset from Hollywood to the ocean – a car, of course, being an important part of the Los Angeles myth.
But Los Angeles itself is a completely fictional place. That’s the conclusion I came to living there for a year. It doesn’t exist. Oh, it’s on the maps, sure, but whatever you think of when you think of Los Angeles is part of the Myth of the place (be it from a noir film or from a Beach Boys song, two things at the extreme opposite ends of the spectrum of the LA myth) and the songs written about it (and the musicians who live in it) only add fuel to its fictional fire. Your Los Angeles would be different. It would not be the same city as your friends’ Los Angeles and it would never be the same as the songs and movies about Los Angeles and Hollywood, because Los Angeles is a myth.
This song ranks as probably my favorite song of all time, period. It is X’s “Los Angeles” from their seminal album of the same name.
It’s an incredible burst of energetic SoCal punk with biting, cutting, lyrics about a woman whom LA has turned into a racist homophobe and then realizes she has to leave. What I like about this song and this band is that they are, to me, what Southern California is all about. In your face, a little glam, a little messy, but so NOT a Beach Boys song. SoCal punk is something I enjoy a great deal, and Black Flag, X, and the Germs always get heavy rotation on my iPod. Later, bands like Social Distortion and Bad Religion would carry the torch for the hardcore music from LA. This song, “Los Angeles is Burning” by Bad Religion, explores another aspect of life in the City of Angeles – fires. It’s also the perfect example of how the idea of “secret lives” from LA Story fits right in with the idea in this song of the interaction of media and reality, how a place that thrives on fiction deals with a real threat, or, rather, how Los Angeles perceives everything as fiction, even its own doom. What I love so much about this song is that those heavy guitars sound like a fire to me. The electric guitar in the bridge sounds like a siren; his vocals are stunning, immediate and urgent.
A placard reads,
“The End of Days!”
Jacaranda boughs are bending in the haze
More a question than a curse
How could hell be any worse?
The flames are stunning
The cameras running
So take warning
Download Los Angeles is Burning
And then something for comparison. The first two bands in this entry are Los Angeles bands with something interesting to say about their home city. Death Cab for Cutie? From Washington State. And here’s how they view Los Angeles in “Why You’d Want to Live Here”:
While I love me some Death Cab and while that song brought immense amounts of comfort to me during my worst moments in LA, the lyrics are fairly uninteresting. “Los Angeles sucks,” is the gist, and while there’s some pretty turns of phrase (“Billboards reach past the tallest buildings / We are not perfect – but we sure try / As UV rays degraded our youth with time”) but all in all, the song is one of their blandest. I include it here as point of comparison and for atonement. This is the song that got me through my time in Los Angeles because I didn’t want to carve out that necessary niche, and this is the city I got, whereas I really feel there was so much more I could have gotten out of it.
Finally, another non-LA band who have perhaps written the best song about Los Angeles ever written. I cried the first time I heard it. Soul Coughing are a New York band, but Mike Doughty appears to have spent a good deal of time in LA (there’s a song called “No Peace, Los Angeles” on his first solo album, and the city gets several other mentions and some musical shout-outs in the band’s laidback style). The album El Oso has some SoCal punk influence, but this song, “Screenwriters Blues” is from Ruby Vroom and is a beat poem set to music with funny, heartbreaking, true-to-the-myth lyrics. Plus, it contains the lyric “You are going to Reseda / We are all in some way or another going to Reseda / someday to die” which, for anyone familiar with the geography of Southern California and the drive from LA to Reseda, it pretty f’ing hilarious and also a turn of phrase I plan on using as much as possible:
“Screenwriters Blues” describes the feeling, the mood of Los Angeles (at least in my experience) better than any other song or movie I’ve ever heard or seen.
Gone savage for teenagers with
automatic weapons and
boundless love
Gone savage for
teenagers who are
aesthetically pleasing
in other words
Fly
Los Angeles beckons the teenagers
to come to her on buses;
Los Angeles loves
Love
Los Angeles loves love! Los Angeles is a myth, but it’s a good one.
(I fully take responsibility for omissions to this list; this is just my favorite songs about LA. What are yours?)
Great entry! I definitely agree with your analysis even though I’ve only been to LA once. But it was just last October and it was the most bizarre place ever.
I quoted in an email to my friend who lives there from the Decemberists’ “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” afterwards:
“How I abhor this place
Its sweet and bitter taste
Has left me wretched, retching on all fours”
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