Expose Yourself: Picking Up On New Sounds

One of the problems I’m discovering as I get older is that, like my joints, my taste in stuff requires more and more effort to stay limber; this is best illustrated in terms of music. Every generation inevitably finds itself becoming the outdated demographic sooner or later.

By the time you’re in your early thirties you are no longer culturally relevant. You are no longer part of the Youth Culture, which is both a good and a bad thing in ways both subtle and blunt. The radio stations aren’t playing music you can relate to, it all starts sounding the same and noisesome to boot. Then they start selling cars and luxury items with the beloved music of your youth. The wife and I almost shat ourselves the first time we saw a Carnival Cruise commercial featuring the music of Iggy Pop. Did it make us want to go on a cruise more than otherwise, or did it make us sick to our stomachs that one of the paragons of the counterculture had finally become so unbearably mainstream? I think you can guess. As bitchy as that is, though, the sadder day is when we find we no longer recognize the music they’re selling us crap with. And that day is coming fast.

Staying hip and on edge is becoming a chore, one very nearly worth abandoning. Too much of what is ‘current’ sounds the same, and I feel like a crotchety old fart when I say that bands such as Blink-182, Sum 41, Good Charlotte, AFI, All American Rejects, Fall Out Boy, regardless of how they put together their outward appearance, all sound totally identical to my ears.

Stick with me, this rant is actually going somewhere.

It’d be very easy to stick with what I already like and insulate myself against that racket, but fuck that! I’ve always loved discovering new great music, I always will, and there are some great new sounds to champion coming out all the time. But as I’m no longer part of the mainstream demographic, sussing out the original and innovative and good from the trite and commercial is ever the more and more challenging. So many of the old sources have dried up; though most of the new bands that have played there for the last twenty years have largely been crap, the closing of CBGB’s last year was rather symbolic in this regard.

But music culture in this age is a hydra; as one old analog head falls, it seems that two digital heads emerge to replace it. And some of the new sources for exposure are surprising.

A relevant example: I’m one of those douchebags who likes to annoy people by having a ringback on my phone. For the last few months I’ve had the theme from TV’s Bewitched on there. My family and friends are sick of it, I’m sure. Last night I decided it was time to switch to something different and I went on the Verizon Wireless site to hunt for the new. I decided to me merciful and pick The Girl From Ipanema, largely due to my old post on the matter. Alas, it isn’t available. So I sniffed around for something else and eventually wound up sifting through the options in the Alternative genre.

How fucking lame is this? Arguably, if a band has the commercial backing to receive placement slots on Verizon Wireless’ media library, it’s hardly countercultural or even cutting edge, but nevertheless, though this source I found a rather surprising number of new bands (or new to me, anyway) that I now want to follow up on. Perhaps I would have learned about The Horrors another way, I have heard the name mentioned somewhere recently, but had I not I might not have clicked on one of their samples. Loved ‘em, sicced a friend in LA on their live gig tonight. Similarly, when I checked out a ringback from The Klaxons I was immediately struck by their structural innovation and unique approach, immediately sought out their twisted little website. Hell, I was listening to some Apples In Stereo for the first time last night because of this, and then Joel posts an aside about the very band the next day.

Today there are a fuckzillion different ways to get the new sounds online. The Music Genome’s Pandora radio project is getting sharper every day at pairing up new stuff to the old stuff you already like; Last.FM is a member-driven resource for music exposure and taste sharing, kind of community oriented but more about the music than the individual. Then there is the ethically-challenged method I’ve been using for a few years now: Soulseek is a wonderful peer-to-peer file trading service that I use almost daily. Quite often I’ll find a user who has a great upload rate and browse through his library; if he has stuff I know I already like, I’ll try out a couple of bands I’ve barely or never heard of just to see if I like them too. As often as not, I’ll discover something really cool and then pass it on to others. Viral marketing at its most basic.

Surely you folks can chime in at this point and contribute some of the ways you’re discovering new music. As fun as it is to discover stuff on my own, I still trust word of mouth over any other resource.