Permit me to gather wool for a minute.
OK, so I’m a snobby underground music geek from way back. Ever since punk (in its first iteration) ruled the underground scene, and hip-hop was in its earliest stages, I’ve been interested in all that music which nobody around me ever seemed to know even existed. This, of course, was part of its charm.
Anyway, I was listening when punk tailed off into new wave crap, which spawned “alternative music” and “no wave” later in the '80’s. Loved it. I was listening when rap had its first crisis with pop music and subsequently spawned reality rap, hardcore, and all the various flavors of “alternative rap” that more or less endure today. Somewhere in the morass of the darkest period of the West Coast Gangsta Rap thing (I believe it was in the middle of a Mac-10 video, to be honest,) I let my attention wander, and the next thing I knew, 15 years had passed, and the thread had been lost.
Anyhow, I was all into artsy music. I loved Sonic Youth and Pixies and Soundgarden and Ministry. The Reivers, Sugarcubes, Nick Cave. Tom Waits, The Cure, Gang of Four. The Fall, the Clash, Wire, Lloyd Cole. MTV’s “120 Minutes” was actually playing a lot of really good music, and alternative music was really alternative…there was so much good stuff out there to mine.
Well, sir, somewhere in there, alternative became Alternative…as in, a genre…and it all went to hell. Every redneck bubba with a mullet was listening to Jane’s Addiction and Red Hot Chili Peppers and Concrete Blonde and Fishbone, and before you know it, Nirvana (whom I’d heard a few years before, while working as a college radio DJ - is there any purer geekery? - and about whom at the time I thought, “forever relegated to 7-inch”) was the biggest goddamn band since the Beatles. Never saw that one coming. To this day, I swear I suspected Nirvana would hold a place right next to Tad and The Dwarves’ “Blood, Guts, and Pussy”…that is to say, only geeks would ever know they existed. Better for Kurt if that had been the case.
Sometime when all that was changing for the worse, I started a typically comprehensive flirtation with heavy metal. It seemed there was at least a little mystery left in it, even though Winger and Skid Row were valiantly attempting to beat it to death (I didn’t realize at the time that they had long since succeeded.) I tried all the various flavors. I got into all the '70’s and '80’s stuff. I studiously absorbed Maiden and Priest and Sabbath (plus all their various connections…Ozzy, Rhoades, Dio, etc.), Obsessed, Mercyful Fate, Motorhead, Venom, yadda yadda, yadda. I tried artsy metal. You know, Rush, Dream Theater, etc. I went back and listened to a lot of Uriah Heep and Aphrodite’s Child. I listened to Death Metal when it was strictly a regional Florida thing.
Ultimately, I think it was Black Sabbath who led to my musical taste completely folding in upon itself. While I listened to a lot of heavy metal, I came slowly to realize that there hasn’t ever been a heavy metal band who has ever done a goddamned thing that Black Sabbath hadn’t done before…and better. Add to that the fact that I was reading a lot about the band at the time, and how obsessed they were(hell, everybody was) with American blues music. I realized suddenly that Black Sabbath had never done a goddamned thing that some wailing blues musician from the Delta with an acoustic guitar hadn’t done before.
Besides, Jeff Buckley had died, and things were looking grim indeed.
I don’t want to give you the impression that I had never istened to blues. I had. Quite a bit. However, sometime after Alternative imploded and before another form of underground took hold, I dove headfirst into American folk music. Not 60’s folk revival music. Never could stand that stuff. Way too sickly sweet and vaguely false sounding to me (except for Dylan :)). No sir, I started digging. I was neck deep in roots country, jazz, and blues for a very long time. The trouble with that, of course, is that American roots music is a very deep, pleasant hole. There’s massive amounts of it out there, and you can easily get tempted down a million divergent paths…Delta blues? Chicago? St. Louis? New Orleans roots music? KC blues? West Coast? New York jazz? West Coast jazz? soul? R&B? Memphis? Alternative country? Bluegrass? North Mississippi Hill Country blues? I’ll be immodest for a second and guess that I’ve heard music by pretty much every obscure Delta musician who ever journeyed up to Memphis from Panther Burn, MS, cut a track one night, and got shot dead the next by a jealous husband. Anthology of American Folk Music? Yup. Lomax recordings? Yup. Both of them. Courlander recordings? Yup. If you follow all the threads, you can wake up 50 years later listening to 1950’s Parisian nightclub jazz and wonder what the fuck happened to most of your life.
Aaaaaaaaanyway, the point of all this is that somewhere in there, between Junior Kimbrough and Junior Brown, I lost the thread of underground music. The ska craze came and went. I didn’t notice, and Indy rock blossomed and died. I got introduced to Magnetic Fields, Built to Spill, and Ween in there somewhere. I was mildly interested in Beck. But frankly, Hank Williams and R.L. Burnside seemed much more fascinating. Besides, y’know, I’m getting old and broke down, and blues and country just seem to go so well with aging.
I’m still not sure just what the hell “Emo” is.
Well, I recently decided that I’ve become way too snobbish and insular, and that I’m probably missing out on tons and tons of good music. Besides, I was starting to smell a little dusty. So I sought out my fiancee’s little brother, who is a rather cool, hip kid, and asked him for recommendations. He happily complied, since he’s a music geek, and gave me a stack of music to listen to…including a bunch of really great newish hip hop, which, to my delight, is absolutely stellar. Aesop Rock (wow!), Handsome Boy Modeling School, Goodie Mob, Cee Lo Green, Kool Keith.
Fuckin’ A. This is great stuff.
But he also loaned me a little album called “The Sophtware Slump,” by Granddaddy. Never heard of them.
Wow. Just…wow. Holy shit. It sounds like Wire crossed with the Beatles. How the hell have I not heard of this band? I have been playing this sumbitch nonstop for a month, and it just gets better. They have more music out there, right? Anything I should look for in particular, or is just any old thing good?
Anyway, I feel like I’ve gotte a breath of fresh air, and suddenly, the music scene looks a lot better to me.
So, any more recommendations? Anybody more hip than an out-of-touch 33-year-old biologist have anything to suggest that I simply must hear?
