As you know, your friendly local blogger is a bit of a music obsessive. The thing is this -- I stopped trying to stay current on music about 20 years ago. It became clear, even back then, that it was too much work and that, in the main, a lot of what was out there was not worth knowing. It didn't seem necessary to know the difference between Keith Sweat and Al B. Sure, or the subtle distinctions between Johnny Hates Jazz and the Information Society.
Now it's 20 years on. For the most part, I'm at the embarrassing point where I see a list of songs on the pop chart and I can't be sure which is the song title and which is the name of the band. And when I talked with the Stinger about it last night, it even got more embarrassing:
Mr. D: So, I'm trying to at least find out a little bit about some new music.
Stinger: Good for you. What have you listened to lately?
Mr. D: Well, I heard a song I liked from a band called Cake.
Stinger: Cake? Yeah, they're pretty good. They've been around for about 10 years, though.
Indeed they had. And the song that I liked by Cake apparently was recorded in 2001.
So my question is: have you reached the point where keeping up with the current music is no longer important to you? And if so, when did you reach that point?
And if you want to know what's hip now, you can always ask Stinger's buddy Amanda, the Holly Golightly of the local blogosphere (and I mean that as praise, by the way). I'm drawing a blank on most of her list, but I've at least heard of the Ting Tings.
5 comments:
There's not a single moment when you stop caring about new music, it's a long slow degeneration. The rule is: when you're 16 you know every song in the top 40. For every year after that you know one less.
(I just checked that now to see if my theory is correct - I knew 7 out of 40 which puts me a little ahead of the curve on musical cluelessness, but I think it's a pretty good rule of thumb)
i reached that point... now wait for it....
when i was 22!
too busy raising kids, working, etc to ever listen to a radio.
i finally took a breath around 1993 and found out i had missed several yrs of what was going on.
Heh, thanks for the shout-out. :)
And, that's one my favorite movies/actresses. The photo of Audrey and Grace Kelly that you posted a few days ago is amazing, isn't it?
I used to be pretty obsessive about music. Going back to junior high I listened to Casey Kasem on Sunday night religiously as he counted down America's Top 40, anxiously wondering how my favorite songs were going to do that week. In college I had a decent stereo and a little discretionary money so I set out to buy an album a week. My college had a student-run/jocked radio station that played a lot of new stuff in different genres and I developed a collection ranging from bluegrass to heavy metal, also acquiring some musical tastes from roommates who brought along Dylan, Kiss, John Prine and others.
Even after I got out of college I listened to "progressive" radio stations and stayed somewhat current. Most nights I played records to relax rather than watch TV, but the scene moved too fast for me and I fell behind. Others interests and priorities edged in and I hardly noticed how "out of it" I was getting.
Today the occasional hit song works its way into my consciousness but most of my radio listening is talk radio or sports. Still, some new, offbeat stuff creeps in, usually from TV. It was that iPod commercial last year that led me to Feist and a DVD episode of Dead Like Me led me to Metisse; both Feist and Metisse are now in "heavy rotation" with our whole family.
I haven't cared about the top 40 since 1986. Yuck.
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