Who am I?

First, who I am not: I am not a professional musician. I never played in a rock band, other than in an extremely amateur appearance in a small college talent show, in which we played two songs (“Caribou” and “Where is My Mind?” by the Pixies) and perhaps one other that I’ve forgotten.

That said, I’m not completely musically illiterate. I played trombone in my high school band, took guitar and bass lessons briefly in college, and took a music history class there as well.

I do have an MFA in Creative Writing, but I was more of a fiction writer than a poet, and I don’t pay much attention to rock lyrics anyway, unless the music pulls me in first.

So what gives me the qualifications to be a good judge of music? Nothing special. I’ve just spent a lifetime listening to music of almost all genres, at one point or another, and considering what I’ve heard. I seek out new types of musical expression, and when I began this project I was determined to go back to discover older music I missed (or missed out on) the first time around.

Music And Me, Through The Years

I was born in the late ‘60s, and I was eight years old when I convinced my parents to buy me my first two “adult” pop albums—both by KC & The Sunshine Band, one with a black cover, the other white. I was listening to pop radio at that time, and dutifully tuned in to Kasey Casem’s weekly Top 40 countdown. The first album I bought with my own money was Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. Elton John and Billy Joel were other favorites, and I remember having a few K-Tel compilations of recent pop hits.

As a kid, my tastes were pretty conventional. My experience as an adult teaching and raising children is that children are eager to learn the basic structures of the various art forms, and they are naturally attracted to fairly straightforward stuff. Later, as they get older, their tastes evolve in that they look toward things that stretch boundaries. (Although it’s fair to say that some people never really emerge from that early, more conventional stage.)

In seventh grade, I made the switch from hits-based pop radio to album-oriented rock radio, possibly prompted by a boy at school who made fun of me for not knowing who the Beatles were. Entering high school, I was listening to a lot of classic rock, some of it with a prog rock bent. By the time I finished high school in the mid-‘90s, I was already into what was then called college radio, which later morphed into alternative rock and then indie.

My aesthetic direction was mostly formed at this point, although it was expanded and enriched fairly quickly by rap music and even more discordant rock, and later with a healthy dose of electronic sounds in the mid-‘90s. I actively sought out new musical horizons, doing some fairly thorough research into classical music and world music, buying what I could find. I’m a big fan of jazz, especially from the late-’50s through the ’60s.

I imagine kids nowadays have a much more diverse early experience with music—back in the day, when there were no iTunes or Spotify or YouTube or even MTV, when there were the radio and the record store and not much else, when there were very few music publications past Rolling Stone, the chance a kid might be exposed to a wide range of different music was pretty rare. Now, I imagine there’s many a kid growing up with more open ears than mine were at the time.

Regardless, I hope today’s youngsters can enjoy this website, because (although I’m partly doing it just for me) this blog and the playlists I link to are primarily for you. I hope to familiarize a new generation with the diverse scope of music that led up to the current moment, which has taken me the large part of a lifetime to come to know.

Music Journalism, My Main Source of Music Info

While in high school, my major source of music other than radio was my peers—my friends, sure, but as my tastes were often a little more off-the-beaten-track than theirs, I also sought out opinions from classmates whose tastes were a little more “out there.” In college, I encountered an even broader variety of music though the diverse range of people I met there.

But when one’s university years are over, and one’s network of friends starts to shift and shrink, one’s sources of new music start to falter, especially when the concerns of starting and raising a family take up so much time and energy.  What’s more, I rarely listened to the radio past the mid-‘90s, and I was only a sporadic viewer of MTV, having developed a healthy skepticism of the medium. (The best songs often have lame videos, or none at all, and many a terrific video features a fairly ordinary song.) So I don’t find radio or video to be a reliable primary source of music information, and haven’t for some time.

As a result, the role of music criticism/journalism in my life as the primary source of music information has steadily grown.  At some point in high school I discovered music criticism as a concept, and I used to go to a local bookstore with paper and pencil in hand to browse through its copy of The Rolling Stone Record Guide. I discovered quite a bit of classic and contemporary rock that was too edgy for radio in this way. Later, I subscribed to the magazine itself. In late 1987, the magazine published a list of the best 100 albums of the past 20 years; for me, this was a watershed moment. I’d never seen a list like it before. I think I had about forty of the albums already, but within a year I had almost ninety of them.

By the time I’d graduated from college, though, I’d decided that Rolling Stone was pretty lame, and had switched my allegiance (and subscription) to SPIN magazine, which became the standard-bearer for me throughout the ‘90s. (A brief look at end-of-year lists from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s bears out this judgment. Bands that were featured on SPIN’s lists would crop up an album or two later on similar lists from Rolling Stone or the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll.)

Later, I started picking up end-of-year issues of British magazines, too. At the dawn of the new century, online publications like Pitchfork started to overshadow print magazines. Nowadays there is a plethora of musical opinion out there at the click of your mouse button or trackpad. There are several websites that I’ve found to be great sources of new music.

This website, then, is my attempt to add my voice to the crowd now out there.  My commentary and playlists will be a great way to explore the history of popular music, in all its diversity.  I hope you find value in my contributions.