Don't Get Me Wrong

So while it's true I've kept one ear on the '60s and another on the '70s, I've got a third vestigial ear on whatever is happening in my present. Occasionally I'll get excited about someone "now", e.g., The White Stripes, The Black Keys, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, De Danaan, etc. But such bands are the exception to the rule nowadays. And there are many equally creative, talented bands out there we fail to hear about because they never find a way to escape their regional stomping grounds; they don't know the right people, don't have access to the right connections, don't have an appealing physical look, don't have "catchy" pop hooks, are deemed "too old" to be marketable, came around "too soon" or "too late" -- the ensnaring variables go on and on. But there was a time when people with vision and talent more often than not did get recognized if they had their sh*t together, because more people were paying attention and more people had a better general music education to have an ear for good music. There were more public venues, and more people were out and about taking in what life had to offer, instead of stuck in some compulsive internet cul-de-sac of a mental existence! (ahem!) And there were more record companies interested in real music that they were willing to accept on the musicians' own terms and motivated to promote in a way that was accurate -- because the fans were hip and the musicians were more about their long-term credibility than the fast money. Most of what I see now that manages to penetrate into the national or global awareness, flashes in and flashes out of real inspiration, because the record company machines eventually flatten them out to the lowest common denominator of taste, replete with musical tropes and electronic digital effects that seem rented out among the Top 40 like overused bowling shoes. And we'll not even talk about the ill effects upon the creative potential of popular music due to the monopolies on radio stations and video channels. And then there is the current era's hyperactive use of distortion. If it were just here and there, strategically placed to create an evocative sonic texture, or give concrete artistic meaning to the odd song with a particular sort of mood, fine. But now inarticulate noise is employed as a full fledged instrument in of itself. "That's Doug; it looks like he plays a guitar, but he's really our rhythm distortionist." Distortion is now aurally sculpted across endless galleries of undeveloped songs disguised as music, created the way a sculptor trapped in solitary confinement might go mad and start forming an array of sculptures from his own dung. If the innumerable bands who are using all this distortion are trying to say, "life sucks!!!", then I got the point well over a decade ago. You've been beating that pathetic horse so long it's become just a scrap of bones. Now let's move on and learn to play our instruments, shall we?

The Release from the Banal

From the previous post, you might assume I'm a Baby-Boomer, but in actuality, I'm a member of the so-called, "Generation X". In my adolescence, I had been content to enjoy the likes of Adam and the Ants' "Friend or Foe", Duran Duran's "Hungry Like a Wolf", ABC's "Look of Love", etc. And then I heard (or rather saw -- remember, those were the days when MTV actually played music) the song, "It Can Happen" by Yes. My mind was blown. I had discovered prog rock without knowing what it was. I soon lost interest in New Romanticism and Jungle Beat music. Yes's album, 90125, was a whole universe of inspired feeling and energy to me. It matched very much the passionate aspiration and mystic idealism burgeoning in me as a teenager. The music seemed at once technically stratospheric and emotionally heroic, as well as incomparably sincere. And every song on the album was strong, which by the 1980s was a rare thing indeed. I had a tape-player, and I wore that tape out. I found nothing to compare with it in the contemporary scene, and I was hungry for more. So I got the greatest hits album of the group, originally released in the late 1970s, Classic Yes. It was a breathtaking discovery. This group had a deep well of achievement. Thus began a life-long commitment to musical archaeology, and an ever decreasing interest in the contemporary scene of popular music. It was not an act of will. It simply was that older music just sounded better and reached me more deeply. By comparison, the music made for my own generation seemed in general to be overproduced, artificially enhanced, full of empty-headed rebellion, stuffed with cod emotion, shallow in musical conception, and effect-oriented rather than truly communicative. Eagerly I awaited the next Yes album, for it seemed they might be one of the few that could carry on the banner of compelling popular music. Their follow-up work which came finally in 1987, entitled, Big Generator, was a signal disappointment for me. It had the energy and prowess but not the inspiration and originality of 90125. From there, I cast off more deeply into the musical seas of the 1970s and 1960s, though occasionally catching a fair wind from what was happening in the present. Whenever I have veered from this course (a more recent example was when I heard the brilliant album Hittin' the Note by the Allman Brothers Band), it is because I have heard a band recommitting itself to the inspired, great-hearted music of that golden era of pop music before everything got dumbed-down for the emergent party-culture and anesthetized by too much synthesizer. Some in my boat felt rescued by the Grunge movement in the 1990s, but I wasn't angry enough about the world to find appeal in its muddy guitars, growling vocals and nihilistic philosophy. I respect what it sought to achieve, but sadly, music soon fell from this brief return to authentic emotion and fell into a dismal era that resembled the post-Buddy Holly/pre-Beatles pap of the early 1960s. The only alternatives were whiney, jangly alt-pop and demon-throated berserker-metal. From where I was coming from, none of these represented a viable listening choice. This blog is about my journey into a musical world before "purist" critics, "doughnut-machine" record companies and a degenerative culture of superficiality put the clamp on the growth of popular music. The music I will espouse in the course of this blog should be rekindled in every generation of listeners.

What's Missing from the Appreciation of Music?

Popular music criticism has always been a problematic place, ever since the seriousness of the Beatles' approach to music in the latter half of their career inspired journalists to start writing about it like they once did baseball. For one, you notice from the get-go that critics often use it as a place to grandstand their own purposes, usually only properly listening to a bit of it, so that, even if their reviews are positive, they are not wholly accurate and involve a lot of philosophizing that has nothing directly to do with the music. After the Beatles, the critics had evolved an approach that made them appear to know more about music than the musicians themselves, which was equally ridiculous. Sadly, the more ridiculous component in this scene were those musicians themselves, who became so caught up in the criticism that they did back-flips trying to please these critics, who weren't really listening to them in the first place. What amazes is the way critics would fall all over themselves complementing and extolling the virtues of a musically mediocre band whose lyrics (however semi-literate) appealed to the socio-political notions of the critics. By this stage there was much talk about "authentic" rock and roll, forgetting that, in popular music, there never was nor ever will be anything you can call "pure"; it's always been a hybrid medium, and that has always been its virtue. All of this messy lack of really listening was driven as much by commercially-driven agendas as the critics claimed the music of the musicians was. Sell those newspapers and magazines to the hip crowd, appeal to their sense of elitism, while also appealing to their post-adolescent insecurity about embracing a popular music that seeks to be about something more than the aggressive anticipation of a hot date or the bemoaning of a doleful breakup,. This the deftly critics accomplished by also claiming that for popular music to be legitimately "serious" it must be about rebellion and nothing else. and rebelling is a lot easier than thinking or feeling. In the end, this tradition of criticism was gunning for any band that attempted instrumental cultivation, dynamic orchestration and lyrical sophistication, ready to fire off a gun-blast that sounded the fatal word (or so they hoped), "pretentious". These critics finally found their darlings in the Punk Revolution, which they hailed as "the saviors of popular music". From there on, these critics shot down without premeditation anyone deviating from this musically crude ideal, and street credit (at least among white performers), depended on having some form of "punk leanings". Thus was an era of progressive development in popular music undone, and though there still have been some wonderful moments since, the music overall has never been as good. The sad thing is that, though we know better now, the histories and reference books of popular music that deal with the latter half of the twentieth century have been written either by these old school critics with their puritanical notions of what "true rock and roll is", or by hacks who merely paraphrase what these critics said decades ago, thus perpetuating a misinformed understanding of music from the sixties and seventies. This blog will seek to undo the effects of that in way more consistently articulate and analytical than what one finds in write-in reviews on Amazon. It certainly will have be more forthright than the feeble attempts at critical revisionism found in most popular music information websites. The reviews and comparative studies essayed here will have no motive in profit, but only in what makes for good listening for different moods and different seasons. In short, if you are restless listener, seeking always to explore and deepen your engagement with popular music, this will be the site for you.