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.