I used to think of myself as a music fan. I liked finding it, buying it, listening to it. But being with Joe has shown me that I’m not a fan at all, and that I actually find most music abhorrent. Joe buys albums all the time. Every Tuesday he knows what’s going to be released and he gets it and loads it onto his iPod the same night. He likes owning the actual CD, adding it to his physical collection. He gives every album a chance, listening to it several times all the way through, learning the lyrics, and waiting for songs to grow on him.
Me, I hate albums. I’ve always hated buying a CD only to discover it has eight bad songs and only two good ones. I don’t have patience for mediocre shit! But I love songs. Individual songs, liberated from their track order, are as perfect as origami swans. There are songs I want to wrap around myself like a blanket. The right song at the right time can knock you on your ass. What I want is a homing device that will scan every new album, find only the individual songs I’ll love, and put them onto my iPod shuffle so I can listen to a stream of totally unrelated, yet equally kickass, songs.
So I don’t listen to a lot of new music. It filters into my life via the radio, and Joe is very good at identifying songs that I’ll like—almost like the homing device, but his expertise pretty much only covers the alt-rock genre—but generally I dig backwards to find stuff to listen to. I’m listening to the Yardbirds or Letters to Cleo or Simon & Garfunkel when everyone else is listening to My Chemical Romance. Actually, is anyone listening to them? They suck.
I love covers. More bands should do them. The fact that covers exist give people a chance to actually enjoy Bob Dylan songs. Poor Bob: brilliantly talented songwriter, sings like he’s having an asthma attack. But when other artists care and nurture his creations, they come to life. Hendrix was meant to own “All Along the Watchtower.” I think there are a lot of songs that are meant to be adopted by other performers. I’ll often hear a song and go, “This is pretty good, but it would really kick ass if __________ did it.” Of course I can’t think of any right now. But a good cover definitely does it for me.
And I love greatest hits collections. Of course I do. Cut through all the bullshit and give me your ten or twenty best songs. I especially like them when it comes to an older band that already has a giant body of work and I have no idea where to begin. Like when I wanted to discover Led Zeppelin. I bought two albums (Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy), was completely disappointed, and could never appreciate them until Early Days and Latter Days came out. Yes, it does bug me that there are songs out there that I’d absolutely love that I’ll probably never hear because I won’t bother to go any deeper than an artist’s radio singles, but since that’s a case of not knowing what I’m missing, I can live with it.
A couple of things keep me from giving up on music altogether. The first is that individuals are still writing good songs. I wish they could find me instead of me finding them, but they’re out there. The second is that the past will continue to influence the future, and derivation doesn’t necessarily mean rip-off. Consider that in 1966, sixteen-year-old Michael Brown of the band The Left Banke wrote “Walk Away Renee.” The song inspired Tom Scholz of the band Boston to spend five years in the 1970s writing “More Than a Feeling.” Years later, Kurt Cobain used the guitar riff from "More Than a Feeling" as a basis for “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Isn’t that fucking awesome? It helps that I love all three of those songs, but it’s just so cool that such a sad, lovely ballad could provide the inspiration for a classic rock song, and that the classic rock song could inspire a punk-pop satire.
Me, I hate albums. I’ve always hated buying a CD only to discover it has eight bad songs and only two good ones. I don’t have patience for mediocre shit! But I love songs. Individual songs, liberated from their track order, are as perfect as origami swans. There are songs I want to wrap around myself like a blanket. The right song at the right time can knock you on your ass. What I want is a homing device that will scan every new album, find only the individual songs I’ll love, and put them onto my iPod shuffle so I can listen to a stream of totally unrelated, yet equally kickass, songs.
So I don’t listen to a lot of new music. It filters into my life via the radio, and Joe is very good at identifying songs that I’ll like—almost like the homing device, but his expertise pretty much only covers the alt-rock genre—but generally I dig backwards to find stuff to listen to. I’m listening to the Yardbirds or Letters to Cleo or Simon & Garfunkel when everyone else is listening to My Chemical Romance. Actually, is anyone listening to them? They suck.
I love covers. More bands should do them. The fact that covers exist give people a chance to actually enjoy Bob Dylan songs. Poor Bob: brilliantly talented songwriter, sings like he’s having an asthma attack. But when other artists care and nurture his creations, they come to life. Hendrix was meant to own “All Along the Watchtower.” I think there are a lot of songs that are meant to be adopted by other performers. I’ll often hear a song and go, “This is pretty good, but it would really kick ass if __________ did it.” Of course I can’t think of any right now. But a good cover definitely does it for me.
And I love greatest hits collections. Of course I do. Cut through all the bullshit and give me your ten or twenty best songs. I especially like them when it comes to an older band that already has a giant body of work and I have no idea where to begin. Like when I wanted to discover Led Zeppelin. I bought two albums (Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy), was completely disappointed, and could never appreciate them until Early Days and Latter Days came out. Yes, it does bug me that there are songs out there that I’d absolutely love that I’ll probably never hear because I won’t bother to go any deeper than an artist’s radio singles, but since that’s a case of not knowing what I’m missing, I can live with it.
A couple of things keep me from giving up on music altogether. The first is that individuals are still writing good songs. I wish they could find me instead of me finding them, but they’re out there. The second is that the past will continue to influence the future, and derivation doesn’t necessarily mean rip-off. Consider that in 1966, sixteen-year-old Michael Brown of the band The Left Banke wrote “Walk Away Renee.” The song inspired Tom Scholz of the band Boston to spend five years in the 1970s writing “More Than a Feeling.” Years later, Kurt Cobain used the guitar riff from "More Than a Feeling" as a basis for “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Isn’t that fucking awesome? It helps that I love all three of those songs, but it’s just so cool that such a sad, lovely ballad could provide the inspiration for a classic rock song, and that the classic rock song could inspire a punk-pop satire.
4 Comments:
A good example of the cover being better than the first is "Hurt", originally by Nine Inch Nails, but much better by Johnny Cash.
I actually don't typically like covers, for whatever reason. But it's funny you'd bring this up because lately I've been getting away from songs and back into albums. Was a vaguer sentiment ever uttered? "Yeah, man, you know what I've been digging lately? CDs."
Right on, Killer. Johnny Cash gave that song infinitely more weight, timbre and meaning than NIN could. When Johnny sings it, he sings of a life throbbing like an old war wound. When Trent sings it, he sings of a seventeen year old boy experimenting with eyeliner and razor blades.
Red: I'd like to get into albums. I get that artists who give a damn put their songs in a certain order for a reason. Maybe that's the distinction: good albums should be honored as a whole, and crappy albums full of overproduced filler should be ground into asphalt.
I don't know if I'm honoring them by stealing the entire album on LimeWire, but hey, it's a nice idea, at least.
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