Jack & Diane
A little ditty about the transition into adulthood
As I was preparing to publish this piece, a thought popped into my head about Sam & Diane. Will have to delve into that sometime soon. Anyway, enjoy.
Here’s the video link, but I recommend you play this on your favorite music streaming service to get the full effect. It’s a sparse song that benefits sonically from recent remasters.
Jack & Diane
John Cougar, 1982
In his pre-Mellencamp days, well actually in his brief interlude between longer Mellencamp periods, John Cougar unleashed a fine tune into the world.
Let’s just get this out of the way. For most people, artists fall into one of the following categories:
Don’t like them at all
I am neutral toward them (I wouldn’t change the channel if they came on, but I wouldn’t seek them out).
I like one or two of their songs
I like most of their songs
I am enthralled by my favorite artists and love almost every single song they have ever recorded
But then there exists a weird sixth category:
Artists from whom I really love the songs I love and actively dislike the rest. It’s kind of love/hate with these artists.
This last category is a bit unsettling. Generally, if I really love multiple songs from an artist, that artist becomes one of my favorites and I’m at worst neutral on the remainder of their catalog. But there are a few artist who just don’t work that way. Bowie and Mellencamp both fall into this category for me. Their songs that I love, I really love. And the songs I don’t love, I really dislike.
Jack and Diane is a song I love.
Maybe it’s his midwestern roots, but this tune is imbued with Americana. It harkens back to itinerant folk singers crooning the lot of the common person in catchy songs.
First, I love the opening. The combination of acoustic and electric guitars with the hand clapping and deeply resonant drums, grabs the attention.
Bursts of electric guitar growl, then audio decay into a silence sparsely populated by hand claps. So like life. Big dreams, bold decisions followed by the cold reality of effort and luck. Then onto the next growling dream.
For me, this is an autumn song, a winter song. Probably because that’s when the aunts and uncles and cousins would get together at my grandparents’ house near Buffalo, NY. Holidays happen in cold weather and the songs you hear at the holidays become associated with cold weather.
In contrast to the raucous opening, the verse settles into a gentle narrative. Life is composed of brief moments of sound and fury surrounded by so much basic living. The lyrics are so quotidian, non-heroic, that most listeners can immediately identify with the protagonist, Jack. Jack--a common nickname for John? Aha, so the song in autobiographical.
I remember listening to this one with my cousin John in the basement of my grandparents’ house one holiday or another. I was singing the lyrics...well, singing the words as a 10 year old understood them. The core meaning of life going on after the thrill has gone, of having one’s best years behind them, was completely lost on me at the time.
Unlike the obvious double entendre of some other songs, I knew I was missing the point and I tried hard to get it.
Oh yeah,
Life goes on
Long after the thrill of living is gone
But I couldn’t. How can a fifth grader understand the pain of someone whose glory days were in high school as they sit staring at the endless years of adulthood in front of them? At that point in childhood, growing older as quickly as possible would be like a genie’s wish come true. Who wouldn’t want to be older? Why would this guy be singing about wanting to be back in the time of his life that I was trying to escape?
Holding onto 16 as long as you can
Change is coming ‘round real soon
Make us women and men
Of course I get it now. There is something endless about each year of childhood. Changes, skills, permissions that you want to happen seem to take forever to arrive. So we can understand why kids believe they have infinite chances at friendship and love, that there will be endless coming-of-age moments. That the rest of life will be similar to how life has been so far. But it won’t.
For some people, adulthood will be miserable. For most people adulthood will be a mix fun moments combined with increasing responsibilities. But it won’t be that golden openness of childhood.
Time is a fleet-footed traveling companion.
For all of us, each passing year means the odds of having lost someone or something precious increases. The statistics are against us.
So we cling to joyous moments all the more. That’s a little bleak. Take us to the light, John (Jack).
The chorus (or it a big late-song, major-key bridge?) gets big and anthemic. The chant “oh, let it rock. Oh, let it roll” climbs to the rafters. Yummy.
I’m not sure what his message is (if any--sometimes a song is just a song). Maybe if we turn up the volume, let it rock, let it roll, that existential crisis fades a little.
One key point to note is the song’s title. This isn’t “The Ballad of Jack”. This isn’t his story or the story of the life he might have had. No, this is their story.
For a brief moment, their futures intermingled. They became more. And the fact that two people shared their hopes somehow makes reminiscing about this lost future much sadder.
My high school years were certainly not my glory days. Though I had some pleasant times, I couldn’t wait to escape. My adult life is vastly preferable, but I know that many people lived a different experience. In any case, I now understand the sentiment.
I thought those get-togethers with my cousins at our grandparents’ house would last forever…but they didn’t. I know that whenever the final one happened, there was no sense that it would be the last. No special ceremony or farewells. Just the expectation that we would do this again, like we always had.
Some of them I have never seen again.
A little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane
Two American kids doin’ the best they can
And a lovely little ditty it is.