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Music and petrifaction
Jan. 31st, 2007 12:07 pmI confess: I am one of those people whose musical tastes petrifed at some point in my early 20s. I'd never been a really big buyer of popular music albums -- I own a few dozen LPs, my cassette collection is primarily filk, and I somehow entirely skipped the stage of owning a dedicated CD player. Then I got an iPod back about four years ago and, combined with access to cheap used CDs at Rasputins and the like, I started seriously building my collection in a systematic way for the first time in my life. And what I'm hunting down and buying is the music of my youth. Not all of it is stuff I actually preferred in my youth, but it's the music that stuck in my brain as part of the soundtrack of my life. And it's pretty much all '60s, '70s, and just barely a smidge of '80s, with a solid underlayer of classical and renaissance.
It isn't that I don't think there's any newer music that's good. Part of it is that there was a period in my life when I listed to radio stations playing contemporary styles a lot, and then I shifted my listening habits. 95% of my radio listening for the last decade and more has been NPR (we'll get back to this point), I work in environments that don't include background music as a rule, and the couple of friends who were likely to drag me off to concerts of groups I wasn't familiar with yet moved off to other parts of the country. So newer music didn't work its way into my consciousness as the soundtrack for anything. And, after all, there's so much catching up to do on the artists I already know I like.
All of this is leading up to NPR, Terry Gross, Fresh Air and why it's so odd that I'm Googling for album listings and pencilling a note on my calendar for a date in late April. You see, on Monday's show, she was interviewing this guy from a band called "The Decemberists" and for the first time in ages I have this urge to go buy albums from a band I'd never heard of a week ago and think seriously about going to hear them when they're in SF. Maybe it was the mention that a reviewer had called them "hyper-literate" and accused them of only wanting English majors for fans. Maybe it was the serious discussion of getting the grammar right when writing pastiches of traditional murder ballads. Maybe it was the concept of a "progressive rock" band singing intelligible, literate songs about fairy wives. This isn't a review: fergoodnessakes I haven't listed to more than a few snippets of any given song. But my faith is renewed that maybe there have been some bands recording in the last two decades that are worth checking out after all.
It isn't that I don't think there's any newer music that's good. Part of it is that there was a period in my life when I listed to radio stations playing contemporary styles a lot, and then I shifted my listening habits. 95% of my radio listening for the last decade and more has been NPR (we'll get back to this point), I work in environments that don't include background music as a rule, and the couple of friends who were likely to drag me off to concerts of groups I wasn't familiar with yet moved off to other parts of the country. So newer music didn't work its way into my consciousness as the soundtrack for anything. And, after all, there's so much catching up to do on the artists I already know I like.
All of this is leading up to NPR, Terry Gross, Fresh Air and why it's so odd that I'm Googling for album listings and pencilling a note on my calendar for a date in late April. You see, on Monday's show, she was interviewing this guy from a band called "The Decemberists" and for the first time in ages I have this urge to go buy albums from a band I'd never heard of a week ago and think seriously about going to hear them when they're in SF. Maybe it was the mention that a reviewer had called them "hyper-literate" and accused them of only wanting English majors for fans. Maybe it was the serious discussion of getting the grammar right when writing pastiches of traditional murder ballads. Maybe it was the concept of a "progressive rock" band singing intelligible, literate songs about fairy wives. This isn't a review: fergoodnessakes I haven't listed to more than a few snippets of any given song. But my faith is renewed that maybe there have been some bands recording in the last two decades that are worth checking out after all.
