1. You can't walk five feet anymore without someone going nuts about Conor Oberst. Just today the girl at the bagel shop called him "the next Bob Dylan," and my mailman said he was "blown away" by his "trenchant, gut-wrenching lyrics that make him seem like a precocious mix of Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen."
2. Okay, I'm making up the thing about the mailman, but still. People won't shut up about the guy.
3. I have to admit it: I'm having a tough time getting on the bandwagon. I think he's pretty inspiring as a story, genuinely decent as a human being, and he's got a neat haircut, but he strikes me as a bit of a guitar-pounder who never met a lyric he couldn't overwrite, and you can find a lot of those at an open mike near you. Something tells me without the neat haircut, he'd just be Conor, the guy serving me a Mochaccino in Omaha.
4. I feel evil saying these things. I mean, pop music is truly terrible. We should be bending over backwards to thank guys like Conor Oberst for existing. Who would we rather have, Ashlee Simpson?
5. I mean, really, it's probably just me. I can't handle young genius of any kind. I'm a huge jerk. Really.
6. Still, if some guy showed up at your house party and started playing heart-tugging songs like Conor Oberst does, you'd be like, "Who is this clown?"
7. Which is to say: musical genius is all about the context. Put Conor Oberst on Austin City Limits and it's like, "Wow, guy's a genius." Put him on the subway, and it's like, "Shut up, dude! I'm trying to read Harry Potter."
8. I'm probably just envious. Conor Oberst has done more by the age of twenty-four than I'd do with five lifetimes. When I was twenty-four I spent most of my time trying to watch porn on scrambled cable channels.
9. When Chopin was around, was there some idiot like me writing stuff like, "I don't get all the fuss!"
10. One thing that's cool about being Conor Oberst is that the girls who like you aren't those cheesy bubbleheads who are into Sugar Ray and Maroon 5. The girls who are into Conor Oberst are more like those long-legged, purple-haired girls you see on the train who are so comically pretty and stylish you can't believe they actually exist, and by the time you get to your stop you've actually courted, dated and married them in your head.
11. The reason some guys don't like Conor Oberst as much as girls do: every guy has had a girl leave him for a guy like Conor Oberst â?? that is, a smart guy who pays attention to stuff.
12. But it's not like guys don't have their Conor Obersts, either. Guys are the worst â?? we'll fall in love with any singer who's smart and cute. Who's that harp girl? Joanna Newsom? Geez Louise. I love her, and I have vacuum cleaners that sound better than that.
13. My personal Conor Oberst is Aimee Mann. Totally embarrassing, I know. Fifty years from now people will be like, "What the fuck is this?"
14. I was going to see Aimee Mann in concert not too long ago, but I chickened out. I didn't want to be surrounded by my pasty kind, standing there in our ripped jeans and Howard Dean T-shirts.
15. My new Conor Oberst is that dancehall girl M.I.A. She's amazing. In my fantasy life we've just gotten a new apartment and some kick-ass paintings.
16. If you're Conor Oberst, it's not like Natalie Portman is some kind of unattainable fantasy. It's actually real. One night she's at your show, grooving out. Then the next morning she's smoking a cigarette in your kitchen while you're calling your grandma to get her buttermilk pancake recipe.
17. Or if not Natalie Portman, at least someone like Maggie Gyllenhaal.
18. Cool rock kids like to be snobby about celebrities, but when you think about it, everyone took it pretty easy on Jack White for going out with Renée Zellweger. That's like the 2005 equivalent of William Burroughs dating Charo.
19. I've kind of had it with cool soundtracks like The O.C., Life Aquatic and Garden State. It's like, "Okay, okay, the director has eclectic taste â?? would it kill you to pick a Bob Seger song?"
20. I told my friend I didn't like Garden State, and it was as if I told him his mom was fat. People are bonkers about that movie.
21. It took me a long time to warm up to the White Stripes, too, so maybe I'm going to have my Conor Moment later on.
22. Besides, it takes me a while even to listen to stuff. I finally got around to buying that Kanye West album. I haven't listened to a lick of Interpol, The Rapture or Franz Ferdinand. I did see a Franz Ferdinand T-shirt in Urban Outfitters, though, which really killed them for me.
23. It's exhausting to keep up with new music. Sometimes I think I should throw out everything except Stevie Wonder's Talking Book, and I'd be perfectly happy.
24. I wonder if some people pissed on Talking Book when it came out. If so, I would like to travel back in time and fight them.
25. For the longest time, I thought Conor Oberst's name was Bright Eyes. I still don't get the distinction, even though it's been explained to me forty-five times.
26. And I actually wrote a whole draft of this piece calling him "Conor Oberest." What a duncecap.
27. I didn't go see the Pixies. Life somehow moved on for me.
28. No one did it better than Fugazi. Does saying that really date me, in an awful, pathetic way?
29. Do you think Conor Oberst really can make buttermilk pancakes?
