The Lost Importance of Being Earnest

On hearing the drums echoing tonight, waking up to a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and throwing off inhibition.

Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash

Somehow I managed to live twenty-eight years on this planet without once hearing the song “Africa” by Toto. Maybe I caught a few snatches from a grocery store sound system or heard a line or two in a video somewhere, but until recently, my only exposure to the song was the words of oft-quoted line “I bless the rains down in Africa” with no accompanying tune to create an earworm in my head.

When I finally did hear the song on Spotify, something in me latched onto it immediately. Was it the harmonies? The satisfying repetition? The easily-learned melody? The somewhat inexplicable lyrics? Whatever the draw, I wasn’t alone– Vice.com published a breakdown in 2017 of why “Africa” had become “the internet’s favorite song.” I was just six years behind the times, I guess.

As a homeschooled kid who grew up mostly sheltered from secular music, I’m usually a bit more than six years behind the times. So when I posted a somewhat self-deprecating tweet about my first experience with “Africa,” I expected to be gently ribbed for what was probably poor taste in music. But instead, my Internet friends almost unanimously responded in favor of the 1982 hit, with links to a capella covers and Weird Al renditions and recommendations of more Toto songs. 

That Vice article I linked above does a better job of explaining the song’s nostalgic popularity than I could. The self-deprecation of the songwriter who clearly has never been to Africa (and maybe thinks it’s a country? unclear) and is in love with someone, whose connection to Africa is foggy, creates an intentionally vague track that ends up being, as the youths say, a vibe. The best explanation for how the song made me feel was summed up in a line spoken by Daniel Craig’s pseudo-Southern detective character in Knives Out: “It makes no dayum sense! …Compels me, though.”

The older I get, the more comfortable I am with admitting that the things I love sometimes make no dayum sense, but they compel me and that’s enough. 

I haven’t always been this way, of course. A combination of deep-seated anxiety and inherent self-consciousness–and the knowledge that as a sheltered homeschooler, I was objectively behind the times most of the time–has made me sensitive about what I’m silly about, eager for approval from my peers, quick to pretend my love for things deemed uncool is not really as strong as it really is. Perhaps I leaned into teenage apathy too late, but throughout my early twenties it often seemed to me that I couldn’t acknowledge the more dorky, out-of-sync parts of my personality without labeling myself as awkward and out of touch. I had to be detached from the fangirl tendencies of my actual teenage years, shower any mention of my love for romantic period dramas with caveats, and for heaven’s sake remember that listing the Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Concert as my favorite musical album was simply not the done thing.

But I am tired of pretending to be someone more esoteric and high-minded than I really am. I don’t think I was fooling anyone, anyway. I am letting go of my compulsive need to give disclaimers or to apologetically acknowledge that my taste is cheesy or, heaven forbid, “cringe.” As I approach my 30s, I want to be what my friends in their 40s tell me they’ve become: blissfully free from regard for other people’s opinions. In the words of a popular internet comic, I’m going to shhhhh and let people enjoy things. In this case, “people” is… well, me.

—

Every morning, almost without fail, my two-and-a-half-year-old son Andy greets his father and me with, “Good morning! Nice sunny day!” We couldn’t figure out where he’d learned this particular salutation, delivered in this precise order, until we realized that Mr. McFeely says it now and then in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And since a DVD of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is on replay nearly every day in our household, it all begins to make some dayum sense. 

I tell people that my toddler loves Mr. Rogers, which is absolutely true, but he comes by it honestly: I love Mr. Rogers. I like learning about how people make candles and what goes on behind the scenes at a bowling alley. I feel comforted by the gentle and familiar repetition of a coat carefully hung up in the closet, a sweater zipped three-quarters of the way, a pair of tennis shoes tied without looking. I want to be reminded that I am lovable exactly as I am by a sharp-tongued puppet with extreme and closely concentrated sunburn. (Or are those birthmarks? Either way, I can’t help thinking Lady Elaine might want to see a dermatologist.) I love the utter unpretentiousness of the long-running children’s public television program; the care and attention given to each imaginative detail; the earnestness of it all.

Mr. Rogers does not care who thinks he is cheesy, whether he’s making a fool of himself with a toy trolley, what others might think of his looking intently into a camera and seeing the child on the other side. (I don’t use the past tense because though the actual Fred Rogers is gone–shh, my toddler doesn’t know that–the character is fully present in our living room, being himself and managing whatever is human and mentionable with grace and humor.)

Mr. Rogers is not cynical nor cool nor impressed by those who are cool– he just likes you exactly as you are. Cheesy music taste and all.

—

Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest is, ironically, just about as far from earnest as a piece of theater could get. Every line is sardonic, every theme satirical, every character a sly poke-fun at the moral and cultural expectations of the day. The title, of course, is just a play on the names of the two heroes (who both claim the appellation of Ernest with varying degrees of truthfulness). The happy ending is trite, the moments of real insight few and far between, but nearly every exchange is patently hilarious and that’s what I love about it. I make no apologies. Earnest is as far from earnest as Mr. Rogers is from cutting social satire, but the title kept coming back to me as I tried to parse out what it was I liked so much about “Africa.”

I think what I liked is that it’s a song you just feel. You just love it because you love it. You aren’t going to inspire anyone’s respect for your music taste by putting it in a playlist. With the exception of parsing Internet trends for Vice, there isn’t much that can be said in an analytical, big-brained breakdown of the poetry in the lyrics; there will be no thinkpiece 100 years from now about how “Africa” subtly explains what it means to be human. I doubt the instrumentation is taught to students at Julliard. It’s “basic,” as the youths say (or at least they used to say six years ago) and yet what is basic is, often, what sparks joy for many people.

Why on earth does that have to be a bad thing?

Perhaps, in this violent and broken and burning and often-sad world, the most basic joys need no self-deprecating excuse. Perhaps a vanilla latte just tastes good and a predictable rom-com just feels comforting and an 80s pop hit with a weird pronunciation of “Serengeti” just compels you. Perhaps it is okay to be earnest and enthusiastic and unashamed of what you love. Perhaps you are not smarter or better or more in tune with your humanity because you have esoteric and sophisticated taste. 

Or perhaps you are smarter and better and finely attuned, and perhaps I just don’t really care anymore, because I am busy driving down the highway belting out that it’s going to take a lot to drag me away from you, at least until my toddler shouts for me to stop it and put on Wogers’ Neighborhood songs instead.

---

P.S. I didn’t write anything new over the last couple of months—new baby and all that—but here are a few links from the archives!

Fitting Family Time Into Inconvenient Lunch Breaks in I Should Write This Stuff Down (from 2022)

…Said No Parent, Ever in Frazzled (from 2021)

In Defense of Pretentious Fifty-Cent Words in The Haven (from 2020)