Music Matters - The 30 Day Song Challenge

'Flash' by Queen - the first single I ever owned.

I’ve consciously avoided blogging much about music so far.  This isn’t because I’m not interested in it or that I’m not as opinionated about it as anything else.  Quite the contrary really, it’s the one art form that I care the most about and the one that I really couldn’t do without.  There’s something about music that can touch us and move us like nothing else. From unborn babies able to response Mozart in the womb, to toddlers dancing along to music on the TV or the radio, through to a singer in an old folk’s home with an audience sitting back, eyes closed, letting the music transport them someplace else.  It’s the art form that we will fall for first of all and it’ll probably be the last one to leave us. 

Music is so personal too.   When we meet someone we really like, we make them a mix-tape of songs that really matter to us.  And when that someone we really like ups and goes, it’s music we turn to for consolation, understanding or just catharsis.  People can dislike a book I love or hate a film I rave about or dismiss my taste in art as rubbish and I wouldn’t take it personally.  But if someone scoffs at a band I like or a song that’s really moved me, then it’s a little upsetting on a personal level and makes me feel very defensive.

It’s also relatively easy to discuss a book, film, art exhibition or play.  We can talk about plot, character, performances, style, influences, technical merit and a whole string of other attributes that the piece has and use a common vocabulary for this discussion.  Music’s different though.  It’s often impossible to explain why we find something so moving or why we fall in love with a band.  Technical merit is usually really important in books, films and plays but you can hear a simple song, sung by a so-so singer and it can really move you.  Other times you hear something that’s technically slick with a fantastic vocal and be left cold.  There are genres of music that I don’t much like, but can still produce something to make me stop and listen and think again.  Music can always surprise you.

All that said, I’d still like to try to write something about the bands and songs I like.  So I thought I’d take on the ’30 song challenge’ that seems to be sweeping Facebook at the moment.  Because it’s all about personal musical taste then I’m not obliged to be objective and you’re not obliged to agree or justify your hating of my favourite songs.  I’ll begin tomorrow and post one a day throughout April.  Bet you can’t wait...

David Millington

31st March 2011

Nottingham

Song List

Day 01 - your favorite song
Day 02 - your least favorite song
Day 03 - a song that makes you happy
Day 04 - a song that makes you sad
Day 05 - a song that reminds you of someone
Day 06 - a song that reminds you of somewhere
Day 07 - a song that reminds you of a certain event
Day 08 - a song that you know all the words to
Day 09 - a song that you can dance to
Day 10 - a song that makes you fall asleep
Day 11 - a song from your favorite band
Day 12 - a song from a band you hate
Day 13 - a song that is a guilty pleasure
Day 14 - a song that no one would expect you to love
Day 15 - a song that describes you
Day 16 - a song that you used to love but now hate
Day 17 - a song that you hear often on the radio
Day 18 - a song that you wish you heard on the radio
Day 19 - a song from your favorite album
Day 20 - a song that you listen to when you’re angry
Day 21 - a song that you listen to when you’re happy
Day 22 - a song that you listen to when you’re sad
Day 23 - a song that you want to play at your wedding
Day 24 - a song that you want to play at your funeral
Day 25 - a song that makes you laugh
Day 26 - a song that you can play on an instrument
Day 27 - a song that you wish you could play
Day 28 - a song that makes you feel guilty
Day 29 - a song from your childhood
Day 30 - your favorite song at this time last year

Lost in Music – Part Two

<<Continued from Part One>>

There does seem to be a respect and an acceptance towards older music that didn’t really exist when I was a teenager.  I’ll cite the club night, held at the Bodega (aka The Social) in Nottingham last week, where they played Radiohead’s entire back catalogue, from the 'Drill' EP to 'The King of Limbs' from start to finish.  Now I admire Radiohead hugely, they’re probably as significant a band as there’s ever been, I’ve even got a white label of the Drill EP kicking around somewhere, but I can’t imagine I would have been interested in listening to the entire works of any band in my time at Uni, even if there had been a band who were still respected by the critics after 18 years of producing music.  I’d have been contemptuous of this ‘music by old people and for old people’ and would have wanted to hear something with a bit more attitude and that spoke to me more directly.

Maybe it’s because the ripples of punk were still being felt through the guitar music scene, even if they did take a while to reach all way through that terrible 80’s hair metal to give us grunge.  Maybe it’s because the hip-hop crossover happened.  Maybe it’s because of the rise of electronic music, sampling and dance that continued through the 80’s and kept things interesting and fresh meaning no-one had the time or inclination to delve much into the past.  Probably it’s because with the creation of the web and then Napster, iTunes and Youtube, everything is available and free(ish).  Probably also the huge number of festivals that have sprung up in the last 10 years, with their seemingly endless appetite for performers, keep old bands going past their sell by date.  I expect it’s also because of all the Gen-X (people born between ‘61 and ’71 by the way – this tends to be misquoted all the time – go and read the book if you don’t believe me, although Coupland has written better since) and Gen-Y people who are still going to gigs.  Bands don’t get to die out so much these days.

Looking at my record collection (now there’s an old school term!) there’s actually very little from the 60’s and 70’s and what I do have was added relatively late as I earned relatively more money and so could afford to buy a few selected ‘Old School’ classics.  There’s only really been Dylan since I was a teenager, mostly his folk period.   I added a load of soul/funk compilations since,  as well as various classic 70’s soul albums (recorded between the commercial straightjackets of the 60’s and 80’s).  I’ve a couple of dozen ‘cool Jazz’ recordings and a decent scattering of ‘classic’ albums (Big Star, The Who, Love, The Doors, Pistols, Marvin Gaye, Gram Parsons, Scott Walker – the usual suspects) that I don’t much listen to.  Nick Drake would probably be the person I come back to the most and who’s been with me for the longest, but then his late fame and relative obscurity have kept him fresh in a way that very few artists can be.

I don’t know if I think that this respect for the past is a good thing or not.  It is probably the best time ever to be a music fan.  Everything is more accessible and cheaper than it’s ever been.  There are more genres than ever before and lots happening in these genres.  I’m lucky enough to live in Nottingham which has some excellent live venues and club nights (I’m looking at the Boedga and Sounddism in particular here) and you could easily go to a couple of worthwhile gigs a week, usually more.  While the record shops have mostly died (hang in there Fopp!), it’s all there on the web to download at the touch of a button, much of it free to at least sample.

And yet something seems to me to have been lost.  Once upon a time, if someone had heard of a band, it meant that they’d worked hard to find out about them.  We heard our music on John Peel, or via crackly mix tapes passed from person to person, or playing on the stereo in the cool record shop.  You needed to know the cool kids at school to find out what they were listening to (some of them even knew students  *gasp*).  You saw the occasional handwritten fanzine.  You poured over the NME each week to find out what was happening.  An Indie Band scraping into the top 40 felt like a personal triumph.  I’d listen at the radio each week to hear if The Wonderstuff or Northside or Morrissey had made it, like a football fan listening to the final scores at Saturday tea-time.  If you saw someone in a cool band t-shirt you knew they were a fan and not just some hipster, they’d have to have bought it from a gig as there’d be no-where else to buy it.  You knew they were one of your tribe.  It wasn’t an easy tribe to be in but it was worth the effort for the sheer pleasure of the music.  And because in those days it was the only tribe we had, at least in my provincial town and lots of others like it. 

I suppose that really the only thing that’s been lost is the exclusivity.  The snob value.  The knowing that you know best.  The huge musical currency that used to belong to me, that I built up over years and years has been devalued.  The records that I painstakingly researched, saved for, tracked down and treasured are now available to anyone with a computer and a few hours of free time.  We cheered each little victory when a song or band crossed over, made endless mixtapes for friends to bring them into our gang, argued passionately (and no doubt arrogantly and annoyingly) at parties about why our bands were better.  And now everyone's 'got' them, we feel a little lost and cheated.  We thought it'd make everyone else in the world more like us, whereas they took our bands and carried on as before.  Watching them in bland arenas instead of sticky floored clubs, clutching popcorn, cokes and hotdogs.  Talking through the songs rather than hanging on every word.

It’s not much to mourn really is it? My tribe is now huge and open to all.  It should be a cause for celebration.  And it is. I’m really pleased that the records I love and loved are there for everyone to share.  I wouldn’t turn back the clock or have it any other way.  But I do sometimes feel a little lost amidst all these people.  And the music.  So much damn music, stretching away back for 50 years and ahead for as far as I can see.  How will we ever have time to listen to it all? And I do still want to listen to it all, as much as I ever did.  ‘Lost in music, caught in a trap’ indeed.

And if you only listen to one link from this post and the last and you don’t already know him – make it Nick Drake.

David Millington

February 28^th 2011

Nottingham

Lost in Music – Part One

Sometime in 1999, there was one of those emails floating around the office I worked in.  One of those emails that contained jokes or funny pictures of cats or Darwin Award winners, the ones that we don’t get anymore since Facebook appeared.  This particular email contained a bunch of amazing facts about the millennium, one of which was that first year university students would only have been 8 years old when the Stone Roses debut album came out.  In the office this did give us pause for thought.  A generation had grown up and gone to college who probably had no idea how important that album had been to my generation and who had a relationship with it that was, at best, the same as my relationship to Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, a record I loved but could never really ‘get’ as I’d never heard it in context.  It was a snapshot of a time I only dimly remembered and of a scene I had no experience of.

(I’ve linked a load of videos into this bit.  Don’t worry about watching them, they’re there as a sort of series of footnotes, you don’t need to listen if you don’t want to.  But you should, because they’re brilliant! Except for Al Martineau.)

Of course 11 years further on and this year’s graduating students, never mind undergraduates, weren’t even born when the ‘The Roses’ album first made it’s impression on a generation of indie kids.  That’s an even more sobering thought.  Putting that into my own timeframe, the genres of glam, punk, disco, krautrock, prog, hip-hop, new wave and dance were all ‘invented’ or at least popularised after I was born.

Going back 10 years before I appeared and the Beatles and Stones hadn’t released a record.  Bob Dylan was playing the folk clubs in Greenwich Village having just released his first album.  Go back another 10 years and it’s the first year that the Top 10 (Top 12 as it turns out) was even recorded.  The people having the most hits were Bing Crosbie and Vera Lynn.  The first recorded Number One is ‘Here in my Heart’ by Al Martineau (have a listen – yikes!).  It was a very different world.  Rock and Roll was still two years away in the form of Bill Haley and the Comets ‘Rock Around the Clock’ which sold 15 million copies around the world and kicked the whole shebang into commercial life.*

I re-watched a film called ‘Almost Famous’ a few months ago.  If you don’t know it, it’s a Cameron Crowe movie, heavily autobiographical, set in 1973 about a teenager who blags himself a job as a music journalist following a band, which are on the point of breaking through, as they tour around the States.  It won an Oscar for best screenplay and Kate Hudson showed she’s a damn good actress before going on to appear in a seemingly endless stream of terrible rom-coms.  I digress.  In the film there’s an old, wise, journalist who acts as a mentor to the young hero.  What struck me was that from Bill Haley to the setting of the film, only 19 years have passed and that this is all them music that this old sage will know about.  That’s like the film being set now and no music existing before 1992.  It really brought home to me just how much of what we should probably term ‘pop music’ was made in my lifetime and how much of it I can remember first hand, certainly compared to the bright young things I stand alongside at gigs.

I wonder about the relationship that people have with music that comes from a time that they don’t remember.  I get a sense of ‘now’ from music that’s been freshly made and even listening to stuff I first heard twenty years ago I can still remember how it made me feel back then.  It still has some of that newness.  That connection back seems important in the way I relate to the songs.  It always feels very personal, even if the person I was has gone, leaving only me.

A lot of music I hear now will be made by people of a different generation who have grown up in a world that’s moved on from my growing up in the 70’s and 80’s.  It might be music by and of people living in a culture and from a background of which I have no firsthand experience and no real understanding, like West Coast Hip-hop or Americana.   That doesn’t seem to matter.  It’s enough that they’re living in a world that I understand and that we’re all experiencing something of the zeitgeist together.  Does this matter to other people?  Is there something important about listening to new music as it appears or is living in a world of old songs fine too?  I’ve not come to any conclusions.  Feel free to let me know what you think.

<<End of Part 1 – I’ll pop part 2 up later this week>>

David Millington

February 28^th 2011

Nottingham

* - And I’m not citing any of these records as era defining or ‘classic’, they’re just examples of what was going on at given points in time and records I like.