Random Notes I Made on Music While Drunk

First in a series? I dunno. I’m just going through old journals and picking up stuff. Also, scraps of paper with bold proclamations boldly scribbled in multi-colored felt-tip markers, from back in the day when I took more from the beer than it did me.

I used to be dead-set against the idea of death camps. Reading music magazines in the mid- to late-1990s cured me of that sentiment. To blazes with any given yappy little nuisance insisting I trash all of my lifetime favorites in deference to the Almighty New Thing Ascendant, in this case, the 10,000 names of electronica, now EDM, soon to become synthwave. Ten years earlier I was hating the punks for that same eliminationist Year Zero attitude. All such people deserve a “Holiday in Cambodia.” 

Seriously, how about I like what I like, and let me make up my own mind on whether I like this stuff you like? We could agree to disagree. The best music, like the best comfort facilities, is always in the privacy of your own home.

I’ve noticed the above sentiment is still alien to people even older than my developmentally arrested self. The ride never stops.

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I realize most people can’t or won’t remember it as such but post-Nirvana radio was a freaking joy to listen to in the Clinton years. It was a Silver Age of Popular Radio, much like the Golden Age of the mid-1970s, when you could hear a song representing any given popular genre. Grunge, power pop, acoustic pop, diva singers, synth bands, and even the big band/swing revival and the Latin-tinged stuff all over 1999, closing out a decade that started with a surge in New Age ambient pop and Gregorian chants. It was all there.

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The guy who sang lead for the 70s R&B group The Spinners was the William Shatner of R&B singers. This occurs to me while listening to “Then Came You,” the collaboration they did with Dionne Warwick in 1975. It’s not the cadence, it’s the attitude. It takes a certain type to pull it off.

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The Cardigans’ “Cloudy Sky” from Emmerdale recalls Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia.” Nice trick for this Swedish power pop outfit.

I would know something about Frank Zappa. Among others.

Returning to the present day, I’m enjoying my new music setup. It’s quite something to be able to throw complete albums at a playlist—a three terabyte hard drive provides options a single gigabyte MiniDisc cannot— and decide which of the deep cuts are just too awful to be borne. In some cases, I’ve left off the obvious hits, along with a lot of songs I’ve been listening to for years and years and needed a break from years ago already, lest I begin to hate them.

I’m hearing new songs by old favorites, and it turns out the best of these old favorites can’t go wrong. It’s energizing to be excited about music again after so long. I might have to write some more on this later.

Where two complete albums by 1970s’ outift Big Star meet the nigh-complete discography of Cocteau Twins. (Cocteau Twins’ first album is just too hard on the ears.)