My Music Taste Used To Suck

And yes, I do capitalize each word of my titles. Deal with it.

I can remember the first song I liked enough to know the name of. It was ‘Elevation’ by U2 and I loved that song when I was six.

The older you get, the more music you consume. The amount of music that you listen to, goes up until your late teens, then it plateaus off until your late 30’s, and it starts to drop again. I’m in the process of peaking my music absorption, finding about two bands every month. I have about 21 GB of music in my collection, but by most standards, that’s a pretty small amount. I had a roommate who could play music from his iTunes for 40 days, and you’d never hear the same song twice.

Like the title says, my music taste used to be terrible. I first started listening to music when my parents split up, I was around ten. My favourite song at the time was ‘Chop Suey’ By SOAD. I was a pretty fucking hardcore ten-year old. When I listened to it a few weeks back, I was shocked, it sucked, I listened to more music that I used to like. It all sucked. 

Back then, I was much angrier. But I don’t believe I was angry because I listened to that music, I listened to that music because I was angry. My father always used to tell me to not listen to that heavy metal crap, that it would rot my brain and turn me into a terrible person. That’s total bullshit. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. If anything, that abusively angry music was more of a release than anything. I couldn’t talk to anyone, I couldn’t blog, I was in a corner with no way out emotionally, and music was there. If I didn’t have that fucking awful music there for me, I might be a jerk today. We just don’t know.

Music changes how our brains work, it drowns out everything else when we don’t want to think, and gives us the inspiration to work when we want to. I’m writing this post while my dad is watching television, and thank god for music, or else I wouldn’t be able to write this post.

I listened to some awful music back then, and there are plenty of people who would say that the music I listen to now sucks too. But I like what I like, and chances are that soon, I’ll hate it too.

Nostalgia

Everybody knows the feeling. When you hear the song your parents always played, or you eat a cookie that tastes like the ones your grandmother used to make. Nostalgia brings you back to that time in your life, even if you don’t remember that time very well. The thing I find especially interesting is that nothing feels like it’s going to make you nostalgic while it’s happening. It’s like we only realize that some time in our life had a particular fingerprint on our memories after that time has long passed. We don’t usually know what stimulus going to make us nostalgic until it happens, and normally, it only happens for a few seconds.

I prefer to think of nostalgia of an emotional way of remembering something, not just a mechanical way. I can remember the layout of my childhood home, but I can’t remember how it felt to be there. If I was to go inside, I would remember, but I can’t. There are only things that remind me of how that time in my life felt. And that’s nostalgia.

Music is probably the most common thing that makes people nostalgic. Its pretty obvious, if you listen to a song a lot during a time in your life, every time you listen to that song afterwards, it’s going to remind you. Make you nostalgic. So, I have been in my hometown for the past eight months, and looking back, those eight months look really empty. But in six months, somehow, my memory will have labelled these past eight months with a specific set of emotions and buried them away. My subconscious will be doing this without my knowledge.

Now, I know I’m going to be leaving this town in a few weeks, so I’ve completely stopped listening to new music, instead, I’ve taken all the new artists and albums that I’ve downloaded, and put them into a playlist called ‘Post Nanaimo Music’. That way, when I do finally leave, the music that was in that playlist won’t remind me of this town, because I don’t want to be reminded of living here. I did this because I don’t want the songs to be ruined. I didn’t want my mind to connect this awesome music to this terrible town. And since I haven’t listened to it here, when I listen to it in a year it’ll remind me of backpacking through Guatemala, not sitting at home in my underwear.

Anything can give you nostalgia. Taste, smell, sight, sound. It helps us remember what our lives were like and who we used to be. And I love it.

-A

White Stripes, Black Keys, And The Identity Of Modern Rock

I’m not sure exactly how to start this post, so I’ll just lay out how I’m going to try to explain what I want to say. This post is about music. Specifically rock music. This post is my perspective on how it has changed through the last two decades of the 20th century and how that change has left rock as we know it today.

So first things first, what is rock? How can it be defined from any other genre of music? Let’s get Wikipedia’s opinion on this one. The wiki page on ‘Rock Music’ says this on the characteristics.

“The sound of rock is traditionally centered around the electric guitar, which emerged in its modern form in the 1950s with the popularization of rock and roll.”

Great, so we can confidently say that rock leans heavily on the Electric Guitar. Electric Bass is almost always involved, and the drums support the whole thing. Vocals, Electric Guitar, Bass, Drums. Cool. That seems like a good start. What else?

“Since the term rock began to be used in preference to rock and roll from the mid 1960s, it has often been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many characteristics, but from which it is often distanced by an emphasis on musicianship, live performance and a focus on serious and progressive themes as part of an ideology of authenticity that is frequently combined with an awareness of the genre’s history and development.”

Thanks for that run on sentence Wikipedia. Now we can say that combined with the vocal and instrumental pillars, rock is separate from pop because it is more self aware. And please note that when I refer to rock as an entity in itself, I mean the overall opinion of the artists who would categorize themselves as rock musicians. Everything seems pretty consistent so far. The identity of rock music is shaping up consistently.

“In the new millennium the term rock has sometimes been used as a blanket term including forms such as pop music, reggae music,soul music, and even hip hop, with which it has been influenced but often contrasted through much of its history.”

Wait what? Now we see an inconsistency with the wiki’s explanation of rock. How could one of the foundations of rock: it’s self identity that separates it from pop and any other music, become invalid? The line, it seems, has been blurred between pop and all the other genres. In popular culture, at least. I speak for myself and more than a few other people when I say that I’m not terribly happy about this. I mean, rock has a great identity, why does it have to be thrown in with the rest of the musical styles?

Rock music hasn’t meant pop music for a long time. One of the reasons that the line has been blurred between rock and pop is the appearance of digital technology in music. Synth has given us all the digital styles. Trance, house, and to a certain extent, pop. But it has also given us digitally altered rock. And I think it’s been this multi-use of synthesized music that has contributed to the lumping of rock together with all the other styles.

But, rock doesn’t have to be pop. Rock is rock. It wants to stay that way. This brings us to where the music stands today. The Black Keys, play rock music. The White Stripes, played rock music. Justin Beiber, does not play rock. What he makes isn’t even music. But I digress. To counter the piling of musical styles, rock has re-defined itself. The music as a genre still relies on the four pillars of the actual sound: Vocalist, Electric Guitar, Bass, Drums. But now the self image has changed to directly counter pop. In a way, rock is now pushing even harder to be separate from the swelling masses of pop players who rely more on autotuning than their own talent. So rock’s identity has become more solid. And, as a totally new pillar, the instruments are usually physical. No synth, no electronic faking.

A big flaw with this article is that I present what I’m trying to say as a black and white argument. Pop Vs. Rock. One versus the other. Good versus evil. And this couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is so much middle ground that it would be absurd to even say that there are definable sides. But for the sake of keeping my argument short. I lumped one half of the spectrum in with the other because I could and because I’m lazy. Hope you pardon the indiscretion.

In conclusion. Rock music has visibly re-defined itself in the past 15 years. It now continues down the path it has set for itself. Evolving constantly, breaking boundaries, and not being as stupid as pop.

-A