Mark Foster and his peeps

I like music and all, but this one band keeps effing with my brain. I’m considering quitting.

I do not care to tell you how much I have listened to Foster the People the past few weeks. I’ll just say that Foster the People has spent more time penetrating my ear holes than all real life humans combined. And they only have one CD.

I will make no arguments for their awesomeness, because even I am unconvinced of their awesomeness. But I am convinced that they have wedged themselves thickly into some dopamine-producing part of my brain.

I can’t put my finger on anything that makes them different from any other band—but that’s precisely the problem! In Wikipedia, they are listed under the genres of neo-psychedelia(!), indie pop, indie rock, indie electronic, and indie dance. (Related hilarity: The most indie rocker of our time.) I’ve listened to their Pandora station for hours upon hours, and I have perused YouTube at wee hours when I should have been asleep, all in hopes of finding some more of that good stuff. And yet there is no other band I have found that more than vaguely resembles their sound. It’s like they are a gateway drug in a universe where no other drugs produce a high.

I’ve been obsessed with trying to figure out what it is that keeps me coming back. My current hypothesis is that it has to do with the drums, because nothing else about their music seems terribly interesting. The riffs are pretty simple, the vocals are unextraordinary, and the lyrics are, in places, juvenile. But there must be some pretty serious brain-teasing rhythmic violations embedded throughout, because otherwise I’d’ve been back listening to NPR by now. The drums are the likeliest perps because they are often quite intricate: in some songs it sounds like they might have two or even three drumsets going. (Being indie electronica, it’s mostly digital percussion, though.)

I can’t imagine that this obsessiveness will go on much longer, but if it does, then I need to start seriously considering whether music is deleterious to my health. If addiction is a disease, and if the rule of thumb for whether something has become an “addiction” is if you continue the behavior not for the pleasure but rather to avoid pain or discomfort, then I might soon have a disease.

I’ve.got.a.disease.of.music.y’all.

If you want a taste (or should I say, “wanna hit, mann”?), check out the song Life on the Nickel. It’s the best song with the worst chorus I’ve ever heard. (Just please don’t listen to it with computer speakers because that’s lame.)

You could say I’m an evil person for sharing this addictive substance with you, but I don’t believe it works that way. Preferences are highly personal. That’s not to say that there is no objective standard of “quality” – some music truly does suck – it’s just that the extent to which we enjoy a song or book or movie or person depends so disturbingly highly on context that if you become addicted to Foster the Peeps, then it’s probably your environment (and, to an extent, your genes) that is to blame, not me.

Or I could be wrong and therefore an evil-doing evil-doer. If so, you should be thankful that I haven’t even mentioned Van Morrison because hoo boy has that man got a hold of my heart.