There was a headline that popped up in my Facebook feed the other day, something about how the average American stops listening to “new music” when they reach the Christlike age of 33. Without thinking too much about that—or even reading the survey the story was based on—I felt that was about right. By the time we’re 33, we’ve heard a lot of noise. Most of my friends still listen primarily to music they were familiar with in their 20s and early 30s.
I might be guilty of that as well. Though I still listen to a handful of new albums every week, in the evenings when I pour a glass a bourbon and put on iTunes I generally default to a handful of artists. I play Richard Thompson and Miles Davis, Lucinda Williams and Rosanne Cash, Ray Davies and Chrissie Hynde, sometimes Elvis Costello or Bob Dylan if I’m alone. Sometimes Brubeck. Sometimes Leonard Cohen. The Drive-By Truckers are in the rota, but if I’m honest most of the music I listen to now I probably heard before I turned 33.
I don’t know exactly what I think about that, other than I know you have to work to remain engaged with the culture, and that all of us are probably susceptible to becoming comfortable. There are lots of things I’ve quit over the years for the simple reason that I found other things to do. I don’t play basketball anymore, I don’t much like to stay out half the night in clubs. I don’t want to drive 12 hours straight to see a show. Those are personal decisions; I don’t necessarily think it’s stupid to do any of those things.
I just don’t want to do them. Not anymore.
Still, I don’t want to foreclose the possibility of discovery, so I continue to listen for new stuff. Part of the modern condition is that the new is easily discoverable—the new is constantly being flung at us by would-be tastemakers and a thousand delivery channels. And the new is not even necessarily new, it’s just new to us. Driving around, I can listen to the Outlaw Country channel curated by Steven Van Zandt on satellite radio and hear stuff I’ve never heard, and I would have considered myself pretty well-versed in the traditions of Guy Clark and Joe Ely. I wouldn’t have thought I could be surprised but I still am, by music that came out 40 years ago or longer.
While it’s simply wrong to argue that the digitization of recorded music has made everything available—most of the records people made over the years still haven’t been converted to a string of ones and zeros and archived on a server for anyone with a certain wherewithal to pull down; a lot of that stuff is gone forever—it is both liberating and disconcerting to realize that your record collection has been rendered moot. I still keep about 10,000 CDs in a rack in a room in my house, but less and less often do I find myself going into that room to pull a hard copy. I can imagine a day when my music might live in a brick on my desk, or on a cloud.
I am attracted to the tangible, and though I’m not a vinyl fetishist I understand the attraction of having walls of LPs. But having a lot of records (or CDs) is really just a lifestyle statement. (As for as the debate over whether vinyl records are sonically superior, I’m like the pulpit-seeking preacher: I can preach it round or I can preach it flat. There’s something to the feel and warmth of vinyl, but digital reproduction is potentially better than analog. You can legitimately prefer vinyl, but you can’t seriously argue its higher fidelity.)
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I understand that there are people who treat music as disposable, and that’s probably a healthy way to look at it. I’m more bothered by the stickiness of a certain kind of pop—it’s disconcerting to me that a 16-year-old can have Led Zeppelin as a favorite band or that the Kinks might be a kind of hipster affectation. I think young people ought to be more serious about frivolous things, that they ought to believe, as we did, that there’s a genuine power available in shaking the air. Give me that old-time religion, I guess.
On the other hand, that may be a sucker’s game. Looking around the office, it’s obvious people care more about reality-show pop and awards-show scandal than what I call rock ’n’ roll. And most of the new music I hear is faint and derivative, cooing fashion models and disaffected chic. Same as it ever was, I guess, only the major record companies don’t bother with developing artists. The good news is anyone with a computer can put out a CD now. The bad news is there’s even less money in it than there used to be.
So in a way, from my particular position of privilege, it feels like the end of history. I’ve spent a lot of my life writing about and arguing over what pop music can and should mean, and I’m hardly ready to admit that it means nothing. But, like Johnny Rotten asked, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Maybe you have to invest your faith somewhere and live with the paltry returns. The truth is, I still get thrilled by certain chord progressions, by the chime and tick of some records. I know there’s often a cynical, manipulative intelligence behind the music, I know that often what sounds like passion is just play-acting, that rock bands are really just a way to market beer, but I still believe.
And I take some pride in believing my tastes haven’t calcified, that there are still fresh avenues to delight available to me. I still love my work.
Criticism is not about advertising how smart you are and what fine taste you have. It’s not even about arguing there’s something more fulfilling to listen to Howlin’ Wolf as opposed to Sia. It’s about considering how you receive and experience this stuff that has the power to move you to tears and make you want to strip off your clothes and wail at the moon. It’s about discovery.
That’s not to say we can’t be discerning and differentiate between qualities of experience—we can, and we should—but the point is that we have in us the capacity to be moved in profound ways. And artists have the capacity within themselves to create the stuff that moves us.
I understand that the usual way to treat the artifacts of pop culture is as product. So the critic serves as consumer watchdog—don’t spend your money on this movie or that CD, buy this ticket or go to this concert instead. That’s part of the gig, why we put grades on movie reviews, why shorthand snark and irony have become the dominant genes in the opinion journalism racket.
But it’s better to consider than snark; cynicism may be lingua franca of our age but it’s a lazy way of thinking. Sometimes it’s justified, but it shouldn’t be the default response. A critic shouldn’t foreclose any opportunity for rapture by prejudging the considered work. A critic should pay attention.
I want to come out for paying attention, to listening to the new, and what’s only new to you. To the alien, the foreign, to whatever takes you out of your comfort zone. I’m for not giving up. Not at 33. Not ever.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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