The Modern Lovers, 50 Years Later
Original Album Art
If you’re lucky enough to find a vinyl copy of the 1976 album The Modern Lovers, it’ll probably
be on a top shelf at a record store with the rest of the expensive, curated LPs; a copy at a
Brooklyn vintage shop was priced at $100 this spring. Yet, the Modern Lovers’ self-titled album
never made much of a dent with audiences—save for critics— when it was first released.
Although The Velvet Underground’s John Cale produced some tracks, it didn’t lyrically deliver
on the cool or rebellious factor that spoke to many young rock fans. Instead, frontman and
lyricist Jonathan Richman—whose dopey voice can only be described as an allergy
sufferer’s—drones on about respecting his parents, wanting a responsible girlfriend, and not
using drugs.
However, it has since gained a small cult following. A few songs have even made their way into
movie soundtracks, including Roadrunner (2021), a documentary about Anthony Bourdain—a
well-documented Modern Lovers fan. Fifty years after its debut, the album not only holds up;
it deserves more attention.
Blending themes and sounds from early fifties rock with seventies proto-punk, The Modern
Lovers unpacks a lyrical and musical fascination with past and present. In its own naive but
honest way, the album criticizes the cynicism that arose in the seventies and bookended an era
of midcentury optimism. Sure, things might be different now, the album concedes, but that
shouldn’t stop us from appreciating the present.
Richman was born into the booming economy of the fifties, when rock and roll began to shake
up the conservatism that dominated the culture. That momentum carried into the sixties, an era
that saw rapid social progress, with young people at the forefront, imagining a better world.
But by the time Richman came of age in the seventies, much of the promise of the past two
decades had been quashed: the once-great engine of rock and roll was beginning to succumb
to corporatism, while the nation struggled fiscally amid an energy crisis. All this turmoil
foregrounded the nation’s bicentennial, which occurred the same year as the album’s release.
I’m in love with modern girls and modern rock and roll, Richman declares defiantly on the
opening track, “Roadrunner.” The song dares to take pleasure in the present moment, despite
everything going wrong. But don’t be fooled—all the rebellion in that sentiment is complicated by
Richman’s fawning over the bygone nineteen fifties, an arguably much less hip era. He evokes
the timeless “spirit of 1956,” describing an American Graffiti-like scene of cruising
Massachusetts backroads with nothing but the radio for company, infatuated with the world
going by.
In reckoning with a reverence for these two decades, the album highlights a clash between
growing up in a fantasy of the “old” world—the leave-it-to-Beaver fifties—and becoming an adult
in the “modern” seventies, when anything goes. What do we do when the world we grew up in is
at odds with the world we now inhabit, the album asks?
Like kids of Richman’s era, Y2K babies are no strangers to inheriting promises from earlier good
times that can’t be lived up to when times are…well…not so good. Today, young adults face a
similar incongruence between envisioned futures and embodied realities, with median home
prices rising, placing traditional milestones of adulthood out of reach.
It can be easy to look at how good our parents had it when they were young and how bleak
things have become. On “Old World,” Richman acknowledges this attitude but rebukes any
bitterness that comes with the tendency to compare then to now:
Well the old world may be dead
Our parents can’t understand
But I still love my parents
and I still love the old world
Like Richman’s generation, many people today feel we’re hurdling toward inevitable ruin thanks
to corrupt politicians, human rights violations, and impending climate doom; look at virtually any
comment section regarding today’s news headlines, and you’ll get the idea. Then— like now—it
had to do with things like the economic crisis, political assassinations, and war.
But the album reminds us not to let our bitterness or intellectual hand-wringing stop us from
enjoying the moment altogether. On “Modern World,” Richman sings:
Well, out on Route 9
It's bleak and nearly dying
Stop all this weak stuff
And drop out of B.U.!
It’s not that the album advocates for ignoring the bad in the world—Richman seems to
recognize the nation’s unglamorous downward trends—but instead, it defends pure and genuine
aestheticism, highlighting the small ecstasies the world has to offer. The “modern moonlight”
cast by neon signs on cold nights, the beauty of the streets your girlfriend grew up on, seedy
sex on Boylston Street, rock and roll, and so on—these aren’t going anywhere, no matter how
bad things get.
Especially now, when it feels like we’re on the brink of irreversible political damage, this album is
worth revisiting because it serves as a reminder that this point-of-no-return anxiety is cyclical
and human, and that the future doesn’t have to seem so bleak. Something similar has
happened before and will happen again, and it’s comforting to be reminded that people have felt
like this in the past and still found a way to keep going. As Richman sings, the modern world is
not so bad, not like the students say.