My name is Ed, and I am addicted to music.
(You can do the whole “Hi Ed” thing if you happen to think alcoholism is funny. It certainly wasn’t funny for my uncle. But fine. I’ll wait …)
OK, thanks.
I am a voracious consumer of many things (pancake batter in spray form, for example) – but in particular, of music. I have more than 1,100 CDs and around 23,000 songs on an oversized hard drive at home; it’s simply too much to fit on any of Apple’s various iPods, because most of Steve Job’s target market isn’t clinically insane.
My appetite for music (and Cheetos and excessive self-doubt) has defined me since my teens. You know when you ask someone who doesn’t really like music what kind of music they like, and they say, “Oh, I listen to everything?” I truly believed that I was the exception. I really do like everyting.
(Sure, I tend to gravitate toward the jangly, guitar-driven rock of the Beatles, Byrds, R.E.M., Wilco, etc. The common denominator? Catchy, jangly music by white people, for white people.)
But … I do have a lot of jazz and enjoy the Parliament-Funkadelic (I saw P-Funk in 1999 and left after three hours; as far as I know, George Clinton is still on the Roxy stage a decade hence doing another encore) and James Brown. I like some hip-hop (although I admit my frame of reference is pretty much 1986-1991), classic and alt-country … everything except opera and … well, opera.
So a real-world, hardware challenge ultimately forced me into an existential argument — one that questioned most of my suppositions.
With so much music, I really struggle with how to rotate songs onto the limited space on my iPhone. I wanted to make a “Top 20” list of my “go-to” that I would always have handy on the iPhone. The criteria for selection was relatively short: the song had to be awesome, and yes, it had to pass my pretentious “inner-aging-hipster’s limitless desire for acceptance by some vague group of like-minded aging hipsters ‘street cred’ test.” (By the way, no one does that better than Greg Kot and Jim DeRegattis, whom I often daydream are my best friends, over at PRI’s “Sound Opinions” ).)
So after some false starts and an initial Top 20 list that featured 130 songs, I finalized my list.
And it goes a little something like this, hit it!
(Author’s note: that introduction will be the funkiest part of this list)
“Alternative Ulster,” Stiff Little Fingers
“Autumn Sweater,” Yo La Tengo
“Blue Train,” John Coltrane (1)
“Can’t Truss It,” Public Enemy (2)
“A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke (3)
“Cold Sweat, Pts. 1 & 2,” James Brown (4)
“The Concept,” Teenage Fanclub
“Dancing Queen,” Abba
“Here Comes Your Man,” The Pixies
“Higher Ground,” The Feelies (5)
“In My Life,” The Beatles
“Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan
“My Life Is Right,” Big Star
“Nightshift,” The Commodores (6)
“Pot Kettle Black,” Wilco
“Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan
“Teenage Kicks,” The Undertones
“To Love Somebody,” Bee Gees
“Train In Vain (Stand By Me),” The Clash
“Turn! Turn! Turn!,” The Byrds
“4th of July,” X
Footnoes:
(1)OK, I admit. I added this song to add some stylistic and well, racial diversity. Ultimately, I had to be true to myself and remove it. When I called myself on it.
(2)Hip-hop!
(3)Sam Cooke was black. Just sayin’.
(4)James Brown, also black.
(5)This is the song that replaced “Blue Train.” The Feelies are, well, white and jangly.
(6)The Commodores were black, though.
I was very proud of my list. Since no one else really cares, I had an internal dialogue with what I thought was my inner hipster but ended up being a more cynical part of my subconscious. I took the liberty of transcribing the conversation (as my subconscious is quite litigious):
Me: “Wow, what a cool list. So eclectic.”
Subconscious: “Eclectic? Seriously?”
Me: “Come on. I like everything. Right?”
(Taking the liberty to personify my subconscious for the purpose of completing this blog entry, its look of mild bemusement led me to believe that it was not buying it.)
So I made an effort to put my 20 into buckets on the spot. Ideally I’d have 20 songs, 20 buckets.
Ultimately, I fell a little short.
Me: “OK, Yo La Tengo. Hmm, jangly alterna-hipster. Teenage Fanclub … OK, well, that’s the same. The Byrds … ok, jangly. X … guitar-driven, hooky, OK, pretty similar. Pixies … hmm, it’s different but the same. Stiff Little Fingers and Undertones are … OK, thematically simlar to everything else but stylistically … slightly different.. OK, wait, Abba is disco! That’s different! So are the Bee Gees!”
Subconscious: “Bee Gees and Abba are in the same bucket.”
Me: “No! This is the pre-disco, chamber-pop Bee Gees of the late 1960’s. Which puts them in the same bucket as The Beatles, well and ultimately Dylan.”
Me: “Also, as you can tell by my carefully-crafted footnotes, Subconscious, Sam Cooke, James Brown, The Commodores and Public Enemy are black!”
Subconscious: “You’ve been wearing a v-neck sweater backwards for the last two hours.”
Stopping to remove my sweater and turn it around (it did seem awfully revealing on my back), I stepped back for an assessment. My subconscious was calling me out on something I had never had to defend (the music, not the sweater, which was indefensible), mostly because I surrounded myself with like-minded musical hipster wannabes who speciously claimed eclecticism.
My musical house of cards was collapsing and there was nothing I could do to effectively argue my case to myself. I really was my own worst critic.
By the end of the argument I was a quivering mass that ultimately using affirmative action to promote the diversity in my musical tastes. Sam Cooke became the Jackie Robinson of my Top 20. If I had a black woman in there (or, for that matter, any woman), she would be the Rosa Parks (or, um, Geraldine Ferraro?).
So, in the weeks hence, four things have happened:
- I’ve ultimately accepted that I like vast quantities of ultimately similar-sounding music. And I’m OK with that.
- That said, I’ve tried to push myself to expand my musical boundaries.
- I put sticky notes with “front” on my sweaters when they come back from the cleaners.
- I really hate my subconscious.
I am reminded of a PSA I saw when I was a kid in which a martian who eats only candy bars suddenly tries Earth fruit. He finds it “yummy and not bad,” and exclaims that “by only eating candy bars, I don’t know what I’ve missed.” In this case, the jangle-pop of R.E.M. and the Feelies are the candy bars, and some recent additions to my collection (Lady Gaga, Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astake (admittedly driven by a positive review in Pitchfork) and a Hank William Sr. retrospective) are my Earth fruit.
(Full disclosure: I have listened to Ms. Gaga’s The Fame Monster a lot the last few days. Usually after I finish it, I immediately throw on something like R.E.M.’s Murmur or an old Elvis Costello album just in case the street cred police are nearby. I’m making progress, but very, very slowly).
