"The Eighties!  They Make My Brain Hurt!"

Okay, so Scott and I have very, very different tastes in music.  We both like rock and roll, but "rock and roll" covers a lot of stylistic territory.  It's a metagenre, an ubergenre which encompasses everything from the Beatles to Bob Dylan to Styx to Pink Floyd to Heart to Journey to the Doors.  It's a catch-all, really.

Anyway, Scott's tastes tend towards the '80s, when everything was slick and smooth and every single note was produced and redone until it was perfect.  That's what the '80s, as a musical decade, was about: getting every note perfect, getting the shine and sheen on the music so that it sparkled and shone and you didn't notice that the lyrics were pretty bland compared to what had gone before.  It was a case of style and form over content and meaning.  And that's fine--genre exercises and stylistic endeavours can be fun, and sometimes it's nice to listen to stuff that has absolutely no substance but which sounds very pretty and very glossy.  But that's about all Scott wants to listen to.

Myself, I've always been more about the substance and the content than the form.  That's why I can stand to listen to musicians like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison and Neil Young; guys who--though they had lots to say and could blend genres and styles and forms like mad geniuses--can't really sing to save their lives.  They're singer/songwriters, and the emphasis was always on the songwriter part of that description.  Besides, I tend to just like music that retains a bit of the rough edges, that keeps some of the rawness to the instrumentation and vocals.  It seems more real, more organic, more human.  Music is a human expression, after all.  That's why I've never been able to listen to most contemporary pop-rock--it's all too glossy, too overproduced and overwrought, until all the life and energy and meaning has been produced out of the music.  I'm not saying music needs to be sloppy, mind you--Dylan had some tight backing bands, Neil Young worked with the folk-rock gods Crosby, Stills, & Nash, and Van the Man has had some of the most consumate musicians to ever play working with him--but they all know how to keep enough of the raggedness in their music to keep it sounding like real people are playing the instruments.

Admittedly, I do like bands such as Radiohead, Pink Floyd, and the Flaming Lips--all of which create carefully thought-out, well-crafted songs--but the key thing about all three bands is that their best moments come when retain a certain organic quality to their music, pushing forward musical boundaries while remembering that it's people who're making the music.

Anyway, the whole point of this rant is that Scott's asked me to download some music for him to put together a CD, since he doesn't currently have much in the way of internet access (my folks figure there's no need to have an internet-ready computer at the house anymore since the kids are all gone).  So I've been having to deal with his taste in music.

What's worse, he's developed the opinion that anything by the artists he likes is good.  This often means their new albums.  Now, while some groups and musicians--folks like Dylan, Van, U2, and Bruce Springsteen--have managed to put out downright phenomenal albums lately, they are the exceptions to the rule rather than what should be expected of everyone.  Folks like Styx and Peter Frampton were good at their peeks, but their peeks occurred about twenty-five, thirty years ago.  Scott is absolutely in love with the latest Styx and Boston albums, and what I've heard of both just made me shake my head--they're trying to reignite that old flame of inspiration, to recapture the glory of their early days, and it's just not working.  They're working with the intent of making a "comeback," and this conscious effort to create something which will get them back in the good graces of the general public is preventing them from crafting good music.  Guys like Dylan and Van have been so successful lately (and by successful I mean they've created albums that are on par with their best work) because they haven't attempted to create music which is epochal or a "comeback" statement.  Ironically, because they haven't been attempting to craft commercial comebacks, they've done very well.

Of course, Scott thinks the new albums by his favorites are absolutely wonderful and on par with their best work, and musical taste is of course very subjective.  However, there are certain things which it is possible to be very objective and positive about--I'm positive there's no world in which the music Britney Spears is making will be popular a decade or two from now.  Already she's really become less a musical figure and more a celebrity, which is an entirely different animal (someone who creates music, a "musician," approaches music as something important in and of itself; a celebrity sees music, television, or motion pictures as a means to an end--celebrity status, pop culture icon status--and thus care very little about what they are making.  They're the ones we don't really care about after their fifteen minutes of fame are over).

All of this to say--I really don't care for the music he's making me download.  My sibling will pay for this in blood.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, "Helplessly Hoping"