Embrace your weirdness
To quote another weird song (by Morrissey and Marr), “There is a light and it never goes out.” (Image by David Mark)
I think we need to take a moment and talk about the masterpiece that is “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians.
One of the YouTube comments said it best: “I could listen to this a million times and want to hear it two million times.”
The song represents a series of artistic choices that I bet many of us would have second guessed, should we have been lucky enough to be blessed by the muse with such a gem of a song idea in the first place.
“Shouldn’t I make the chord progression more interesting? It’s mostly just two chords, and they aren’t really supposed to go together.”
“These lyrics don’t rhyme. Should I make them rhyme?”
“Can I get away with a bridge that has only one chord?”
“Might this organ riff get annoying after awhile?”
“This is really an oddly specific number of tears I’m referring to. Maybe I should go with something more relatable.”
According to Wikipedia, the song hit number one in the U.S. and Canada in 1966, plus number 7 in France. Its weirdness worked. More than a half century later, it still does.
It’s understandable that most of us want to fit in. It’s been the key to survival over the many millennia of human civilization. But the impulse to fit in makes us pretty boring. When we want to share something—our art, our ideas, our work—with other people, we might actually find more success if we embrace our weirdness.
As a matter of fact, the things that make you cringe when you read your own writing, see a picture of yourself, watch yourself on video, or listen to a recording of your voice might be the very qualities that allow other people to connect with you. The earnestness that makes you feel so exposed is where you share who you really are, without artifice. That’s what makes it hard to put yourself out there, and that’s why it’s so valuable when you do.
We might want to cover up the freckles, lose the accent, wear tamer clothing, hide our age. We might aspire to be like someone else, imitating the cadence of their speech and the way they present themselves. But in obscuring who we are, we make ourselves—our true selves— impossible for other people to find. That’s a loss.
Many people, including me, relish the complexity and ambition of the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” another number one hit from 1966. But Brian Wilson’s weirdness is a different flavor. Rudy Martinez wasn’t competing with “Good Vibrations” when he wrote “96 Tears.” Each songwriter was doing his own thing, in his own weird way. The songs can’t be compared to each other. Each is a classic.
It can be tricky to look at ourselves and see that potential. It’s hard to avoid comparing our work with that of others. All we can do is keep going, resisting the tendency to hide our quirks and proclivities. What happens when we highlight them instead? Embracing our weirdness might just lead us to sense of acceptance we’re longing for. At the very least, we can accept ourselves.
