So sue me.
At some point in my life--a life that, actuarially speaking, isn't yet half over--I stopped listening to new music. At some point after that, I stopped caring.
This was all prompted by the lovely and gracious Badger waxing wroth on the matter of James Blunt, to which I replied I had no idea WTF James Blunt is/was. Badger then said I'd recognize him because my ears would bleed were I to chance upon his music.
The problem with Badger's theory is that it takes little to cause my ears to bleed. Anyone who has ever showed up and performed on American Idle* would qualify. So would Barbra Streisand, even if she was a Goldwaterite instead of a Leninist. Peter Cetera (whose voice, in duet with La Streisand--singing the ouvre of Barry Manilow--graces the soundrtack of Hell) and Micheal MacDonald are two more. Whoever sang "Butterfly Kisses" yet another. Pretty much all disco**, almost all rap, and ¾ of country and countless ballads all qualify in the most effortless fashion. Folk music, as well, invariably causes torrents of blood to eject from my ears so I resemble Dracula's idea of a RainBird sprinkler. To fill in the gaps, almost anything to hit the top 10 between 1970-1979 would also easily cause aural hemorrhaging. Round it off with anything easy listening and you now have almost eleventy gazillion ways to kill me from the eardrum alone.
It's no so easy to describe the stuff I do like, although Badger has a better handle on that than most. Poppy and I are closer on matters of religion and politics than we are on music, which says a lot right there...although we have SO MUCH ELSE in common that this is merely an amusing sidebar to our pal-ship. At least we like the same operæ.
Even going wa-a-a-a-ay back, I liked what I liked and being the sort of ::cough, cough:: self-contained child I was, I neither knew nor cared to what everyone else was listening. I remember what my first album was (Elvis' Greatest Hits) for which I begged and received as an 11th birthday gift. I also remember the very first album I bought with my very own money (Talking Heads' Life During Wartime) plus 45s such as "Pop Muzik" by M and "Good Girls Don't" by The Knack and "Good Boy" by The Neighborhoods. My musical tastes ran/run two separate streams. The sort of 1970s Big Rock (as opposed to "little rock" like Foreigner and Journey...yech.) and its ancestors going back to blues and rockabilly and country, and also New Wave and its mother source of ska and surf. The fact the boys prefer this to TFBIM's rather more common tastes is cause for concern for TFBIM. Life, as we have noted on this blog previously, is not fair.
So it is to this day, only now I can afford to pay for downloading all the stuff I was too broke to buy 25 years ago.
...and the beat goes on.
-J.
* That's no typo, that's just me being a smartass
** Which P.J. O'Rourke famously described as being "rhythm and blues for Caucasians with neither."
This was all prompted by the lovely and gracious Badger waxing wroth on the matter of James Blunt, to which I replied I had no idea WTF James Blunt is/was. Badger then said I'd recognize him because my ears would bleed were I to chance upon his music.
The problem with Badger's theory is that it takes little to cause my ears to bleed. Anyone who has ever showed up and performed on American Idle* would qualify. So would Barbra Streisand, even if she was a Goldwaterite instead of a Leninist. Peter Cetera (whose voice, in duet with La Streisand--singing the ouvre of Barry Manilow--graces the soundrtack of Hell) and Micheal MacDonald are two more. Whoever sang "Butterfly Kisses" yet another. Pretty much all disco**, almost all rap, and ¾ of country and countless ballads all qualify in the most effortless fashion. Folk music, as well, invariably causes torrents of blood to eject from my ears so I resemble Dracula's idea of a RainBird sprinkler. To fill in the gaps, almost anything to hit the top 10 between 1970-1979 would also easily cause aural hemorrhaging. Round it off with anything easy listening and you now have almost eleventy gazillion ways to kill me from the eardrum alone.
It's no so easy to describe the stuff I do like, although Badger has a better handle on that than most. Poppy and I are closer on matters of religion and politics than we are on music, which says a lot right there...although we have SO MUCH ELSE in common that this is merely an amusing sidebar to our pal-ship. At least we like the same operæ.
Even going wa-a-a-a-ay back, I liked what I liked and being the sort of ::cough, cough:: self-contained child I was, I neither knew nor cared to what everyone else was listening. I remember what my first album was (Elvis' Greatest Hits) for which I begged and received as an 11th birthday gift. I also remember the very first album I bought with my very own money (Talking Heads' Life During Wartime) plus 45s such as "Pop Muzik" by M and "Good Girls Don't" by The Knack and "Good Boy" by The Neighborhoods. My musical tastes ran/run two separate streams. The sort of 1970s Big Rock (as opposed to "little rock" like Foreigner and Journey...yech.) and its ancestors going back to blues and rockabilly and country, and also New Wave and its mother source of ska and surf. The fact the boys prefer this to TFBIM's rather more common tastes is cause for concern for TFBIM. Life, as we have noted on this blog previously, is not fair.
So it is to this day, only now I can afford to pay for downloading all the stuff I was too broke to buy 25 years ago.
...and the beat goes on.
-J.
* That's no typo, that's just me being a smartass
** Which P.J. O'Rourke famously described as being "rhythm and blues for Caucasians with neither."
Comments
Love the PJ O'Rourke quote.
-J.
* In all fairness to NPR, I do like Car Talk and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me but beyond that...
And by the way, go ahead and make bales of hay out of our political differences, but our religious beliefs are really not all that different. (Even if I did discover, by taking an Internet Quiz, that I'm actually a Seventh Day Adventist.)
As for our musical tastes ... there is a perfectly good reason they are so different; I know lots and lots and LOTS more about classical/serious music than you do. (I was thatclose to doubling my major, English/Music until I realized that I was going to have to take composition, and Homie don't do that.)
This does two things. It makes me powerfully allergic to fake profound pop music--all that idiotic, pretentious crappe that came out in the late 60s and prevailed until the Ramones and Talking Heads delivered us. It also gives me free reign to listen to as much idiotic pop stuff as I want. I don't need to, say, like my older brother, obsessively catalog my collection of rare blues recordings, or become an expert in 50's Jazz, or British Invasion (which I actually like a lot, but not to a geeky extent.) Because if I'm going to get all nerdy about music, it's more likely to be Chopin or Debussy.
So disco, She Blinded Me with Science, Cars, Beat on the Brat with a Baseball Bat--are all totally fine with me.
1- You know more than I do about serious/classical music. Maybe a LOT more, but certainly not lots and lots and LOTS more.
2- And we're not so apart theologically, true, but there is some measure of difference there.
3- You have (once or twice) said some things, in the context of politics, that made me giddy with the knowledge your Goldwater gene was just starting to bud. But I'll shut up about that, since I don't want to jinx it. But I fully expect you to--in ten years' time--to link arms with me in front of the IRS building, singing "We Shall Overcome." I have a dream, you know.
4- Back to music. I suspect the main thing is that you're more of a baby boom product than I am and your early years took place at a different point in time than mine.
5- Lastly, your weirdnesses are so similar to mine (certainly your tastes in film are well nigh impeccable, and we'll always have Harold Lloyd to thank for that) that any differences just lend a certain frisson to our friendship.
-J.
And speaking of theology, I will pray to St. Francis de Sales for a cure for your deafness. ;)