OPINION

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Hear the year


T Bone Burnett once said it all went wrong when the record companies figured out how to sell music to people who didn't really like music.

People have tried to commoditize music since before we figured out how to trap a performance on acetate. Chuck Berry had a target demographic in mind when he wrote those paeans to deferred adulthood; his own experience had little to do with what he was singing about.

There have always been cynics in rock 'n' roll, the starmakers and the Svengalis and the pushers of the next big thing. An artful swindle can pass for art itself if we all clap hard and believe in fairies.

I've always been a sucker for the sincere, which limits my ability to enjoy a lot of the music people think is great. Megan Thee Stallion and GWAR fall outside my orbit, and I don't feel compelled to keep up with "the industry."

I followed pop music closely for about 30 years, but look at Rolling Stone's or NPR's or Pitchfork's or Paste's year-end best of lists and see only a few albums I can claim genuine familiarity with. My feeling is that if I give anything the proper attention--the deep hearing that any would-be artist deserves--I would at least come away feeling some empathy for that would-be artist.

Because it's hard to do meaningful work, and every sincere effort is worth respecting, even if the end result feels derivative or awkward or poorly realized.

They say taste calcifies as we grow older, that after a certain point we have all the music we need and don't feel compelled to seek out anything new or challenging. That's why classic rock lingers, and why most of the records that I write about these days are re-issues.

Much of this year was spent listening to albums that originally came out in 1971, like Joni Mitchell's "Blue," Nick Drake's "Bryter Layter," Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "4 Way Street" and Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells a Story."

Every week some publicist sends a link to download a 50th-anniversary deluxe edition of some classic rock album. My iTunes library (an antiquated technology) shows 55 tracks associated with Yusuf/Cat Stevens' 1971 album "Teaser and the Firecat" (which originally consisted of 10 songs, including "Morning Has Broken," with an uncredited piano performance by Rick Wakeman, "Moonshadow" and "Peace Train").

I downloaded 128 tracks associated with the soundtrack for Frank Zappa's movie "200 Motels," which wasn't everything offered. The original soundtrack was a double album with 34 original tracks. (I never got around to listening to all of them; I've never been enamored of his music. Again, I'm a sucker for the sincere.)

And it's not just 1971--U2's "Achtung Baby" came out 30 years ago (50 new tracks added to my library) and one of my favorite R.E.M. albums, "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" (the band's final recording to feature drummer Bill Berry), a celebration of its 25th anniversary with a modest two-CD set, the second disc consisting of mostly live recorded bonus material (versions of Jimmy Webb's "Wichita Lineman" and The Troggs' "Love Is All Around" were the most interesting). Bruce Springsteen's 1979 No-Nukes concert at the Madison Square Garden has finally been released on CD and Blu-ray.

[PLAYLIST: For those of you who use Spotify » arkansasonline.com/1219spotify/]

Then there's Taylor Swift's ongoing rerecording project by which she means to reclaim the songs on her first six albums, the masters of which now belong to her nemesis, impresario Scooter Braun.

But I do listen to new music. As a young man, I felt entitled to hate any sound that did not immediately engage or comfort me. But these days I like most things, or at least acknowledge their right to exist.

K-Pop does not bother me; does your conscience bother you?

. . .

Still, music is like beer: most of the better stuff is locally crafted and distributed. The big national brands are blander and sweeter and less complicated. There is a great deal of corporate compromise in the biggest pop albums--when you're aiming to sell billions and billions it's only natural that you leaven your product with sweeteners and Auto-Tune. You'll take the state-of-the-art bass sound and the hip-hop break the kids like. You'll lean into the formula. You'd better; there are bills to pay.

But I'm more attuned to stuff that's closer to the ground, like Little Rock-based Joe and the Feels' record "Unsupervised," which has been part of my listening diet since it came out in March. It's familiar stuff, kind of a post-college rock amalgam of blues-based styles. You could call it Americana or pop or dad rock or any number of things, but it's smart and modest, wised-up in a way most of us get when we realize the chances of actually winning one of those lottery games are pretty slim.

Lead singer-guitarist-songwriter Joe Yoder spent some time chasing dreams around the country in vans before coming home to be a social worker and have a family and a yard. He connected professionally with Dave Hoffpauir, a remarkable drummer who works in the health-care field (and a former and possibly future musical collaborator of mine), and they began talking music together. They recruited lead guitarist Andy Warr of Brother Andy and His Big Damn Mouth, psychiatrist Steve Blevins on bass and radiologist Gaines Fricke on keyboards and, just as the pandemic descended, started recording music.

They've played a couple of live shows, but we're still in pandemic mode around our house so I've only heard the record, which is wistful and occasionally tough and thoroughly grown up, rooted in the transient glories of everyday existence.

Produced by Jason Weinheimer of Fellowship Hall Sound--whose quasi-band the Libras released the remarkable "Faded" in February--it's both distillation and summation of the Hillcrest-Capitol View sound, a tender and bemused careerist skeptical approach to rock 'n' roll that's informed by '80s indie bands like the Replacements, Fugazi-style hardcore, Big Star and Jim Dickinson that hits a sweet spot.

"Unsupervised" and "Faded" are the only reasons I regret having given up voting in the various year-end polls of rock critics--every year there was a record, maybe by the Gourds or Ho-Hum, I'd stick on my ballot so they would show up at the bottom of the long list of records receiving votes, so my real-life Top 10 would be represented.

I can appreciate Adele, Gracie Abrams, Olivia Rodrigo, noisy hip-hop and atonal experimentalism, but my heart belongs to a certain kind of curated singer-songwriterism. I listen to a lot of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, whose only 2021 album was "Georgia Blue," a collection of covers of songs by Georgia-associated artists he delivered after promising to do so if the state elected two Democrats to the U.S. Senate in 2020. (He's promised to do a similar Texas album if Beto O'Rourke prevails in his effort to become governor of Texas.)

I was floored by James McMurtry's "The Horses and the Hounds," which might be every bit as good as 2015's "Complicated Game." Currently I'm rooting around in Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's just-released "Raise The Roof," a sequel to their 2007 release "Raising Sand." (Both were produced by T Bone Burnett, an artist who I would follow just about anywhere.)

I paid a lot of attention to North Little Rock's Brian Nahlen's live-streams and am looking forward to Billy Jeter's new album, due out in March. Erin Enderlin and Bonnie Montgomery are due for new records.

But there's a reason they're recorded: We can have it any time, and any time we have it, it can feel fresh and maybe even new. It really doesn't make any difference when music was recorded or first sent to market, it's more about the listener's experience of them. So I don't see any problem with teenagers discovering Led Zeppelin or languishing in Peter Jackson's documentary project "The Beatles: Get Back."

Some records remake their own moment of realization every time they fall on receptive years.

. . .

There has always been a visual component to the cultural practice we call rock 'n' roll (that's why the Beatles presented in collarless suits and the Rolling Stones in ratty sweaters and ill-fitting jackets). But I grew up listening to records, to utilitarian vinyl before it became a fetish item, and aside from the album jacket and the liner notes, there wasn't much to look at.

My early experience at actually listening to music, rather than just being in a room with a radio or television on, usually involved sitting in my bedroom with headphones on, often in the dark and sometimes with eyes closed.

These days, most of my listening is causal--Spotify streamed through my television's sound system or a Harman/Kardon Bluetooth speaker. For professional listening I have returned to headphones.

Partly this is because it's the only way I can really hear anything now; a couple of weeks ago, at my wife's insistence, I got my hearing checked.

The results were expected: moderate high frequency hearing loss, so common and minor that most people who experience it accept it as a natural part of the aging process. We can't run as fast when we get older, we can't jump as high, and we can't hear as well.

I don't feel terribly put out by my disability; back in the pre-pandemic days when we used to go to restaurants and parties I would sometimes have trouble following conversations.

My audiologist explained that's because I tend to hear consonants better than vowels. Consonants are generally lower tones than vowels, and I hear bass frequencies fairly well. But higher-pitched vowels slide away into the ether, so my brain has to take a minute to manufacture what sense I can from the available cues. It can seem as though I'm not paying attention.

But there's another thing about my hearing loss. We play a lot of music in our house, but to really hear it I have to turn it up to a level where it's uncomfortable for others. So we keep it down to what seems to me a low burble. I don't mind this much; most of what we play in the evening or in the car is music that's familiar, songs we know by heart. I don't really hear them, but I feel the beat and assemble the rest around that.

It's not just that I can turn the volume up in the headphones, my audiologist explains, it's that the higher frequencies are more proximate to my ears--there's less physical space for them to transverse and be dispersed into. I hear the textures, the details, the overtones and the sympathetic resonances that are denied me in other situations. But the downside is that headphones are by their very nature isolating, removing one from the optimal musical experience, which is communal.

Or is it? I spent long stretches of my life going to concerts. I saw everybody from the Who to Parker Millsap twice. For a time, Juanita's dressing room was the hallway outside my office. Sometimes I feel like I don't need to see anyone live again.

But we did venture out in the pandemic to have our faith refreshed by a show. We haven't been to many these past 20 months or so. A couple of times we have wandered to downtown Argenta to hear local musicians playing; early in the pandemic we sat on a Hillcrest curb and listened to our friend Jim Hathaway play on his front porch (someone, maybe Dave Hoffpauir, needs to convince him to do an album); and we saw Lucinda Williams and Jason Isbell at the outdoor First Security Amphitheater.

A few other times we were tempted, but we've been cautious (and lucky) throughout this siege and don't want to let down our guard too soon. One day we'll be back to watch a rock band in a small club, but maybe not this week.

I still have my records.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com


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