Tyler Coates

There’s a scene in The Perks of Being a Wallflower in which the three main characters are driving through Pittsburgh at night. All of a sudden, “Heroes” comes on the radio, and Emma Watson’s character gets really excited about how beautiful it is. “What is this song?” she asks, completely genuinely, and the other two characters don’t know the answer. This is, of course, a film that takes place in the early ’90s (when you couldn’t just look up the lyrics of a song on the internet), and it’s played with the utmost sincerity that, somehow, doesn’t feel forced or lame. I thought it was pretty refreshing, and it also displayed the true joy one feels when they hear a beautiful song for the first time. It’s a discovery. That rarely happens in the age of the internet, a time in which not knowing a popular song is almost shameful, especially when making fun of someone’s ignorance of some slice of popular culture—even popular culture that existed before that person’s time—is something that’s so easy to make fun of. I don’t remember the first time I heard “Heroes,” but it’s definitely not a song I was born knowing by heart; my parents didn’t listen to David Bowie when I was growing up, either, so I had to discover it somehow, just as I came to love all of the songs that were released before the time I was cognizant of them. I suppose that’s part of the reason why I think this post is not very funny.