Feeling Out of the Loop

As my readers know I’m a lifelong music fanatic and to this day I’m still trying to keep my finger on the pulse of the latest and greatest.  On the one hand, with the advent of YouTube and Spotify, it’s never been easier to indulge in this practice.  On the other hand, using these tools brings so much disappointment, so much faster than before!

Don’t get me wrong, there has always been musical disappointment in my life, this isn’t really anything new.  I can remember hearing a song on the radio and being immediately hooked by it.  Waiting days to hear it again.  Maybe a couple weeks goes by, and a few more listens before you even find out who the artist is, because the DJ finally said the name over the air.  Now you’re a few weeks in, you’ve got this great new song stuck in your head, you finally know who the artist/band is, so you head down to your local record store to snatch it up, only to find they don’t have it in stock.  Maybe the album hasn’t been released yet, maybe they only had a few copies and it’s sold out so you have to wait a few more weeks.  The anticipation builds and builds.  You find yourself wishing they’d play it on the radio again, preferably when you’re at home so you can tape it from the radio to have something to tide you over until you can get your paws on the actual album.  Then finally, FINALLY, after weeks of waiting and searching and waiting some more you finally find it in a store, slap down your hard-earned cash and now you’ve got your hands on the record.  You race home to drop in on your turntable and listen to every song, every note, while devouring the album’s liner notes to find out everything you can about this new band…and after all that, it turns out the song from the radio, the song you love, is the ONLY good song on the record!  Ugh!  So much build up, so much excitement, and it all comes crashing down…  It’s happened to me more than a few times, and the disappointment is great, but at the same time you’ve had an adventure, maybe spent time with your buddies trying to track it down.  Maybe you got to talk to the cute girl working at the record store…  It was all part of the game.  And even if the record kinda sucked, you still had that one great song.  The thrill of the hunt and whatnot…  And, fortunately, the opposite was often true.  You’d hear “that song”, go through all the rigamarole and find out the album is astounding.  Sonic euphoria, from start to finish.  And those moments my friends, made up for the few clunkers over the years.

But nowadays, things are much different.  I still listen to “terrestrial radio” from time to time, but 99.9% of what I hear are the old familiar tunes.  It’s been well over a decade since I’ve been turned on to a new band from the radio.  I read different blogs that have a focus on music, I read a ton of articles from various musical publications to try and suss out what’s new and exciting.  My wife and daughter are both music fans and I always take suggestions from them.  And of course there is the almighty algorithm that knows what we’ve listened to before and makes suggestions as to what we might like… Nine times outta ten it’s not something I like, but every once in a while the algorithm strikes gold for me.  And lately – say over the last 18 months – I’ve been reading a lot of threads on Reddit that are music-related (Side note – I can’t really “endorse” Reddit, there is so much on there that sickens me, but if you stay away from politics and “social issues”, there is actually a lot of entertaining and/or useful stuff there.  All the threads I follow are either music, automotive or local-to-me stuff and I studiously avoid the rest of the bile…). Anyhow, I keep my eyes peeled for new bands that get a lot of notice and once I see a certain band or song mentioned more than a few times, I’ll go check them out for myself.

Now, I recognize that I’m a “boring old man”, and not everything is going to be to my liking.  And frankly, being more from the alternative/punk world of music, I know there is going to be a lot of stuff that simply doesn’t do it for me.  And that’s fine.  But I’m also astute enough (as far as music is concerned at least) to pick up on things that are special, or impressive, or dare I say groundbreaking that leads to my understanding of why a certain artist or band is gaining notoriety. 

A great example of this is the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.  If you were to believe the folks that post on Reddit, they are hands down the greatest band to ever pick up instruments.  I have seen dozens upon dozens of posts extolling the virtues of this band, recommending them to anyone that has ears.  Seriously, their fan base is RABID and all in.  So naturally, I had to check them out.  And while the music was not MY thing, I completely understand why a lot of people have gone mildly insane over them.  Those guys can play!  The music is quirky, kinda jam band meets jazz combo, meets psychedelic, with a little Zappa thrown in.  It’s weird, it sounds like nobody else I’ve heard and I totally get it.  I just don’t find myself sitting around listening to that style of music.  I would however go see them live, I’m sure it’s an experience.  And I’m thrilled that such a band exists in a world full of computerized, boring, unadventurous music.  I hope that they achieve massive success and have a long, fruitful career.  I sincerely mean that, even though I will rarely listen to them.

On the other hand, there is a relatively new band that I swear I see their name daily, a band called Geese.  So after seeing them mentioned so many times for several months straight, I decided I needed to check them out.  And I’m left shaking my head in disbelief.  THIS?  This is what has everyone in a tizzy these days?  I honestly can’t think of a positive thing to say about them, and yet the “general public” hails them as the greatest band since the Beatles.  I simply don’t get it.  To me, calling them mediocre would be giving them more credit than they deserve.  I went through their Top 10 songs on Spotify, each one of which has well over 5 million streams (one of them was over 20 million!) and I couldn’t get through more than a minute of any of them.  Just messy, atonal dreck as far as I’m concerned.  And yet, they are massively popular right now. 

Then I jumped over to a song by Kendrick Lamar.  I’ve known his name for a long time, I’ve heard him featured on other hip-hop artist’s tracks, and to me it was just… M’eh.  Not horrible, but nothing special.  But again, he’s hugely popular.  Most of the kids my wife and daughter teach LOVE him.  So anyways, I’m reading this gushing review of this one particular song, how it’s so amazing that the listener (and writer of that piece) is now inspired to seek out music in a whole other genre than hip hop, because this song just broke down barriers and made something completely new and ground breaking.  So I’m thinking, OK, he’s been around a while, perhaps he’s grown as an artist, this sounds like something I need to hear.  Uh, no.  It was so flippin’ boring I couldn’t believe my ears.  I’ve heard that “same” track a hundred times, and 20 of them did it better.  There was nothing ground breaking.  Stylistically it was the same regurgitated, uninspired nonsense that hip hop has devolved into over the last 2 decades.  It was the Toyota Corolla of hip hop tracks. 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Hip hop is NOT my main thing, I’m not nearly as well versed in that genre as I am in several others, but I do have a fair amount of it in my CD/record collection.  I’ve been a drummer for a hip hop group, I’ve done recording sessions for another hip hop group, I would say that yes indeed, this late-50’s Northern Cali Anglo is indeed a fan of hip hop.  But a lot of the very popular, successful hip hop artists leave me scratching my head.  Jay-Z is arguably the most successful artist in the genre of all time, and I cannot stand his music.  (FWIW, I can’t stand his wife’s music either!)  I think Tupac is highly overrated.  There are a great many artists that have become wildly successful that I think are terrible.  This is nothing new.  But it got me to thinking, is today’s music so dull because the kids and 20-somethings that are making today’s music had such terrible music to emulate and be inspired by? 

I could be wrong, but it seems like the bands of the 60’s took their influences of say, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly and the like, and pushed the boundaries into something wholly different and dare I say, better.  If you listen to early Beatles or the Who, their music isn’t that far removed from “rock around the clock” type of tunes, but by the end of their respective run, they were putting out records that would’ve been unimaginable to Bill Haley and his cohorts.  Or take the riff-heavy classic rock of Montrose and Deep Purple, add in some punk ethos and swagger and you get Soundgarden or Alice in Chains.  Of course there were always middle-of-the-road bands that did their thing, but weren’t pushing the boundaries – say Foreigner or April Wine for example, but they still had talented musicians and solid songwriting and could put out a good, cheap thrill of a song on the regular.  Nowadays, not so much.

I know for a fact that people get caught up in the era of music that defined their teen years.  It’s scientifically proven.  And I absolutely love the music of my generation, it will always and forever be special to me.  But I kept gleaning onto new stuff for decades after my school years and hoped to do so forever, it just seems that music has lost a big part of what made it special over the last decade.  Not that I haven’t discovered some great new bands in the last decade, I absolutely have and I am grateful for it!  It’s just that the music that is getting so much attention these days would never have even seen the light of day back in the 80’s or 90’s.  Musically, we seem to be in the Cream-of-Wheat era… Bland, bland, bland…

Music used to be exciting, sexy, somewhat dangerous maybe, it made you FEEL something.  Most of today’s music just makes me feel bored.  I’m excited by the fact that post-Covid people seemed to regain some interest in guitars and drums and actual instruments as opposed to computers, but we’ve lost that “it” factor for the most part.  I hope this latest generation that is starting to put out records is just another starting point, and we see a resurgence of daring, exciting music.  I’m encouraged by a lot of youngsters making “reaction” videos to classic rock and such, they seem genuinely blown away by much of what we took for granted growing up because it was as close as the FM dial on the radio.  All day, every day.  Will we ever see another band like the Who, or U2, Primus, or 311?  Bands that took the past and all their influences, threw it in a blender and came up with something wholly unique and mesmerizing?  I certainly hope so!  It’s ironic that in an age where recording and releasing music has never been easier,  when the Gatekeepers of the past are long gone, that musicianship and songwriting are at such a low point.  If nothing else today’s artists need to pick it up to inspire those coming up behind them.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with all this.  This piece kinda took a turn, and turned into a tangent with no real direction or resolution.  I guess I should just consider it an “old man yells at clouds” post.  If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you.  Please leave a comment with a band/artist/song from the last decade that knocked your socks off.  I could use some inspiration!

Thanks for stopping by!