Left to my own devices, I tend to listen to older music which is arguably for older people. I like Classical music, especially from the late Classical through the Romantic periods. The more modern stuff is OK, but you have to pick and choose carefully. I also like a lot of old Jazz, up through the classic period of the middle to late 1960s. I also like modern recordings of modern groups that are stylistically similar to music like this.
This leaves me in a bit of a bind with respect to pop music. I don’t pay attention, yet I need a certain density of the stuff for car trips and whatnot. Well, with the aging of the Baby Boomers, I have found my happy medium, so to speak. I only buy pop music that I hear about on NPR.
This didn’t start as any conscious plan. I think I was in college when I just stopped having time to pay attention. The last contemporary band that I can remember following was Talking Heads, but really only up through their Little Creatures album. They had already long since peaked anyway. In graduate school, I bought primarily highbrow LP records of serious music. Pretty soon, I hadn’t bought a pop record in several years.
Over time, I noticed that occasionally NPR would do a story about some band somewhere, and by some miracle they could actually play music. For example:
- Laura Love
- Robinella and the CC String Band
- Camille
- Fountains of Wayne
- The Kashmere Stage Band
In retrospect, it was inevitable that NPR would become my pop music source. Unlike Jazz or Classical, I don’t have a compass for pop music. I don’t have a feel for the various performers, song writers, and performance styles. I don’t know what I like and don’t like. I also don’t want to have to “explore” and “discover” the acts I like on my own. I don’t have the patience to deal with Sturgeon’s law to find the occasional record that I can listen to. In other words, I want NPR to help me out in the pop music realm the same way others might want for Classical. I want them to digest the material for me and then spoon feed it to me in a series of small digestible bits.
They do this very well. From time to time, each of their news shows will profile some band. These interviews are usually boring and pointless because musicians play music, they do not speak intelligently on a wide range of subjects. In between the boring interview bits, they will play clips from the record. If I can stand to listen to the all of the clips in the story, there is a good chance the record will be good. This happens maybe one time in ten. For some reason most band profiles you hear on the radio are breathless interviews with artists of oh-so-deep integrity who unfortunately can’t play an instrument or sing in tune.
However, over the last few years, the hit ratio seems to be increasing. This makes sense. Since NPR is run by old people, they have started covering more and more records that are actually good! The longer they go, the older they will get. Just this week the morning show ran an extended interview with the son of George Martin, Giles. The subject? The soundtrack for a Las Vegas circus show featuring mashups of original Beatles songs mixed and merged and mashed together from digital versions of the original four track tapes. Of course I had to buy that. Who can resist such a thing.
You can do a bit better on NPR by ignoring the bands they explicitly recommend, which tend towards the aggressively mediocre.
Instead, listen to the interstitial music on This American Life or Marketplace. When you hear a piece there that you like, look it up on their web site. It’s almost always better than the bands they profile.
That technique recently lead me to this song by Holly Golightly.
I don’t “get” Camille. My sister was fawning over her, but all I got was that she was angry and probably didn’t shave her legs. I wasn’t clear on how these attributes had anything to do with her music.
No doubt I probably like the Camille record because I can’t understand the words, so they are much more interesting.
Ah, Fountains of Wayne. I like them because they sound a bit like the college bands I heard as an undergrad. Not exactly a surprise though….two of them (Chris and Adam) were a year behind me at Williams and had a great band even then.
You might try listening to Morning Becomes Eclectic at KCRW.com. It’s a music show DJ’d by Nic Harcourt at KCRW, a public radio station in Santa Monica, California. I’m from Portland, OR, I got turned onto them listening to a live set online from The Shins a few years back and have since discovered a lot more music there. They have a syndicated weekend show that is a two hour mix from the week called Sounds Eclectic that airs on some public radio stations.
My recent method is to buy things that get high ratings at http://www.metacritic.com. If reviewers universally like a record and describe it in a way that sounds like what I like, I’ll probably like it. I’ve been buying a lot of CDs by artists I’ve never heard lately, with surprisingly good results.