Last week, I took Macy to see Phoebe Bridgers and had two realizations that initially seemed unrelated. The first concerned Phoebe Bridgers herself. I consider myself reasonably attuned to popular culture, particularly music. I go to a lot of concerts. I still seek out new bands.
That said, I do recognize that I can’t keep track of every new artist Macy is listening to at every given moment, and she has introduced me to artists I didn’t know before. Usually, though, they have been relatively new performers with relatively small followings, such as Girl in Red or Cavetown. So when she suggested we go see Phoebe Bridgers, I wasn’t especially surprised that I had never heard of her.
Then I went to buy tickets.
Phoebe Bridgers was not playing some charming little club or smaller venue. She was playing the Chase Center, an arena that holds over 19,000 people. Even more surprising, she had sold it out for two nights. Somehow, an artist could attract nearly 40,000 people in my own city and remain entirely outside my field of vision.
When I mentioned this to Macy, she wasn’t particularly concerned because, as she explained, Phoebe Bridgers makes “sad teenage girl music.” In fairness, Macy believes there is a sad teenage girl living somewhere inside me, a diagnosis supported by my enduring affection for Dawson’s Creek, the original Beverly Hills, 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and any television drama in which attractive young people stare meaningfully at one another while an indie song plays in the background. By that logic, Phoebe Bridgers should have found me years ago.
Still, the experience was unsettling. I had assumed that while I might not know every new artist, I at least understood the general boundaries of the culture. Phoebe Bridgers had apparently built an enormous musical world just beyond them.
When I was younger, keeping up with new music felt possible. I knew which albums had been released, which bands mattered, and which songs everyone was listening to. Now the culture is too large and moves too quickly. Thousands of new songs appear every day, delivered by algorithms that know precisely which parts of the world to show us and, perhaps more importantly, which parts to conceal. The fact that I had never heard of Phoebe was one sign that new music no longer reaches me automatically.
There is a related change that is harder to explain: new music no longer speaks to me in quite the same way. I still love music, but I miss those young adult years when the lyrics of a song could feel as though they had been written specifically for me. I see that experience now in Macy. She can tear up listening to a song because the words capture exactly what she is feeling. Somehow, she also seems to know those words almost immediately.
I rarely know the lyrics to new songs anymore, although I can still sing every word to every song on Led Zeppelin III. I would like to blame the singers for mumbling. A less comforting possibility is that my hearing is getting worse. The words I learned when I was young remain permanently embedded in my brain, while new lyrics reach me as sounds I can hear but words I can’t retain. The music is still out there, but it now takes more effort for me to find it and, once found, more effort to understand what anyone is saying.
The second realization came at the concert itself.
Phoebe Bridgers has a no-phone policy. When we entered the arena, everyone had to place their phone, smartwatch, and other electronic devices into a pouch that was magnetically locked. You carried the pouch with you, but you could not open it until the concert was over.
The idea had seemed mildly alarming ahead of time. We have very little unoccupied time anymore because we fill nearly every pause by looking at our phones. Standing in line, waiting for someone to return from the restroom, or sitting through the gap between an opening act and the main performer all become opportunities to scroll. Macy is no different, so the prospect of both of us spending several hours with no way to fill the dead space seemed strangely daunting.
Once the show began, however, the absence of phones was wonderful. No one was filming. No one was checking Instagram. No one was staring at a screen while the person they had paid to see performed directly in front of them. We were all forced to pay attention to the same thing at the same time. I also discovered that a concert arena is surprisingly dark when 19,000 people are not holding glowing rectangles in front of their faces.
It felt strange at first, and then peaceful. For a few hours, I had no idea what was happening anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t monitor the news, check Arsenal’s injury list, or respond to an email whose sender had almost certainly survived the previous two hours without me. All I could do was stand beside Macy and listen.
Only later, reflecting on the evening, did the two realizations begin to seem connected. First, I had discovered that an enormous part of the world had been proceeding without my knowledge. Then I had discovered that, for a few hours, I didn’t need to know what the rest of the world was doing.
John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom would have understood the first realization.
He might have benefited from the second.
“The end is here”
– Phoebe Bridgers, “I Know the End” (2020)
Rabbit at Rest, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1991, is the fourth and final full-length novel in John Updike’s series about Harry Angstrom. Updike first introduced Harry in Rabbit, Run in 1960. Harry was twenty-six, married, the father of a young son, and still clinging to his brief high school glory as a basketball star. Unable to tolerate the constraints of adulthood, he did what would become his defining act: he ran away.
Updike returned to him once every decade. In Rabbit Redux, Harry confronted the upheavals of the late 1960s. In Rabbit Is Rich, which also won the Pulitzer Prize, he became a prosperous Toyota dealer navigating the end of the 1970s. By Rabbit at Rest, Harry is fifty-five, overweight, semi-retired, and suffering from heart disease. He divides his time between his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania, and a condominium in Florida.
Updike wrote Harry across more than thirty years, allowing him to age alongside the country. Through Harry, we see postwar optimism, racial conflict, sexual liberation, oil shortages, consumer abundance, the Reagan years, AIDS, debt, drugs, television, fast food, and the growing suspicion that America’s most confident years might be behind it.
By the time we get to Rabbit at Rest, Harry has benefited enormously from that America. He has money, a Florida condo, a golf club, a comfortable car, and enough leisure time to complain about all of them. But he no longer feels central to the world around him. His son, Nelson, runs the family dealership. His wife, Janice, begins taking classes and building a life that does not revolve around him. The culture is changing, and Harry increasingly experiences it from the sidelines.
And he watches a great deal of television. Television gives Harry the sensation of remaining connected to everything. He follows sports, news, commercials, disasters, politics, and the endless stream of images passing through American life. He possesses a remarkable quantity of information, but very little of it helps him understand his family or himself.
Harry’s body is sending information too, and he is equally determined to ignore that. Early in the novel, he experiences chest pains while boating with his granddaughter. Doctors tell him that his arteries are blocked and warn him to change his diet. Harry responds in the manner of many people who receive clear medical instructions: he treats them as the opening position in a negotiation. He continues eating salty snacks and fatty foods. He resents the limitations imposed upon him. He understands that his body is deteriorating but cannot quite accept that the rules should apply to him.
At the same time, the family business is collapsing. Nelson has developed a cocaine addiction and has been stealing money from the dealership. Harry has always regarded Nelson as weak and disappointing, yet much of Nelson’s anger can be traced to growing up beneath Harry’s judgment. Harry sees his son’s failures clearly. His own role in creating them remains harder to detect.
Nelson enters treatment, but the damage is already substantial. The Toyota franchise is lost, taking with it the business that funded Harry’s comfortable life and gave the Angstrom family its place in the community. As his family and finances unravel, Harry falls back on the strategy he has relied upon throughout the series: he looks elsewhere for excitement and reassurance rather than confronting his own role in the destruction around him.
Eventually, Harry runs again. He drives alone to Florida, where, despite his damaged heart and his doctor’s warnings, he joins a group of young men playing basketball. For a moment, he becomes the person he once was and makes one final shot. Then his heart gives out.
“I hate you for what you did”
– Phoebe Bridgers, “Motion Sickness (2017)
Harry Angstrom is not a particularly admirable man. He is selfish, prejudiced, lustful, dismissive of his wife, cruel to his son, and astonishingly skilled at explaining why his own appetites are someone else’s fault. At times, spending more than five hundred pages inside his head can be exhausting.
Yet Updike makes Harry difficult to dismiss because his weaknesses are exaggerated versions of familiar ones. Harry wants the world to remain recognizable. He wants his body to keep working as it did when he was eighteen. He wants his wife and son to remain in the roles he has assigned them. He wants America to feel like the country in which he once knew his place. When reality refuses to cooperate, he experiences change as a personal betrayal.
What I felt when I discovered Phoebe Bridgers was a much smaller and less dramatic version of Harry’s realization. I had not consciously believed that I knew every musician in America. But some part of me apparently believed that anyone capable of selling out the Chase Center twice would at least have crossed my radar. The size of her audience became evidence not simply of her popularity, but of my own diminishing cultural jurisdiction.
The realization was not exactly that I had become old, although the evidence supporting that conclusion was becoming harder to dismiss. It was that I was no longer standing at the point where the culture naturally passed in front of me.
When you are young, popular culture comes looking for you. Music, movies, fashion, slang, and technology all compete for your attention because you are the audience everyone wants. As you get older, you can still participate, but participation requires more effort. Eventually, entire cultural movements can unfold without ever entering your particular line of sight.
Harry feels something similar throughout Rabbit at Rest. America is still everywhere around him, but it is no longer necessarily his America. The Japanese company Toyota controls the fate of the family dealership. His wife is developing ambitions that do not include serving him lunch. His son’s addictions belong to a world Harry does not understand. Even basketball, the one arena in which Harry once felt entirely at home, now belongs to younger bodies.
The world has not disappeared. It has simply stopped consulting him.
“And when I grow up, I’m going to look up / From my phone and see my life”
– Phoebe Bridgers, “Garden Song” (2020)
Harry responds to this loss of centrality by consuming more. He eats. He shops. He watches television. He absorbs news and sports and advertising. He keeps taking in information because information creates the feeling of involvement. If he knows what is happening, perhaps he still matters.
Updike draws a connection between Harry’s physical diet and his mental one. His heart is clogged by decades of overconsumption, while his mind is crowded with television images, commercials, headlines, statistics, and half-formed opinions. He is overfed in every possible sense and nourished by almost none of it. That may be the most contemporary aspect of a novel published before smartphones existed.
Our phones promise to connect us to everything. At any moment, we can know the score of a game being played three thousand miles away, the latest political outrage, the temperature in London, the relationship status of someone we have not spoken to since college, and which actor from a television show in 1987 has recently died. This information is not useless. Some of it is important. But the ability to know what is happening everywhere can make it surprisingly difficult to notice what is happening directly in front of us.
At the concert, I initially experienced the locked phone pouch as deprivation. The device was still physically in my possession, but I could not reach it. For the first few minutes, I was acutely aware of all the things I might be missing. Then that feeling passed.
Without the option of looking elsewhere, I looked at the stage. I listened more carefully. I watched Macy watching Phoebe. I noticed the crowd and the lighting and the unusual darkness of the arena. The world became smaller, but the smaller world became more vivid.
Harry spends much of Rabbit at Rest watching life. He watches television, watches his family, watches the country change, and watches his own body fail. But watching is not the same as paying attention. He receives endless information without acquiring much understanding.
That is why his final basketball game matters. For once, there is no mediation. Harry is not watching basketball on television or remembering his high school career. He is on the court. His body is failing, but he is fully present inside it. The moment destroys him, yet it also briefly restores him.
I am not suggesting that putting my phone in a locked pouch was the equivalent of Harry Angstrom’s fatal return to the basketball court. For one thing, I survived the encore. But both experiences raise the same uncomfortable question: How much of life do we spend monitoring instead of living?
Harry’s problem is not merely that he has spent too much of his life watching. He is also beginning to understand that the world is gradually turning its attention elsewhere. His children and grandchildren will inherit it, although they will not experience it as an inheritance. To them, it will simply be the world.
That is part of what children eventually teach their parents. When they are young, we introduce them to music, movies, sports, cities, food, books, and everything else we have decided matters. For years, we serve as their guides. Then, almost imperceptibly, the direction reverses.
Macy introduces me to artists I have never heard of. She knows the language of a culture I encounter mostly as a visitor and can learn the words to a new song while I am still trying to determine what the singer said in the first verse. Harry experiences the rising generation as evidence of his own decline. I am trying to see it as a gift. The world may be moving beyond the boundaries of what I know, but Macy can still invite me into it.
That is what happened at the Chase Center. I entered knowing almost nothing about Phoebe Bridgers. I left understanding why 19,000 people wanted to be there, even if I still couldn’t repeat most of the lyrics.
More importantly, I got to experience it beside Macy.
“Don’t be a stranger”
– Phoebe Bridgers, “Scott Street (2017)
At the end of Rabbit at Rest, Harry lies in a hospital bed after his final heart attack. Nelson comes to see him. Their relationship has been filled with disappointment, resentment, competition, and cruelty, much of it created by Harry himself. Yet Harry manages one final expression of approval. It cannot undo the years that came before it, but it gives father and son a small moment of connection after a lifetime of failing to understand one another.
Harry’s tragedy is not simply that he grows old or dies. It is that he spends so much of his life looking for evidence that he still matters that he repeatedly overlooks the people to whom he actually matters.
The world is getting too large for me to know all of it. New artists will become famous without my noticing. New words will enter the language without asking my permission. I can respond by watching more, scrolling more, and trying frantically to keep up. Or I can occasionally allow the world to grow smaller.
For a few hours at the Chase Center, the world consisted of a dark arena, a singer I had only recently heard of, and my daughter standing beside me. I did not know the score. I did not know who had emailed. I didn’t even know most of the words.
But I was there.
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