Radio flyer

My Little Bro was briefly in a band back in the early years of the previous decade, and while their career may have been short I still count it as legit because they did manage to secure a plurality of paying gigs (which is infinitely more than I can say for myself). The other three guys in that band, along with a fourth friend who acted as their unofficial promoter and roadie, were all at Little Bro’s bachelor party, and during a long stretch of sitting around and shooting the breeze over beers we got to talking some about music.

(Yes, I’m talking about this past weekend’s bachelor party two days in a row, but that really shouldn’t be too surprising since it involved me going somewhere off the beaten path, hanging out with people I too-rarely or altogether-never hang out with, and doing things not generally the norm in my creature-of-habit routine. Clearly this makes for dense fodder for the ol’ blog, even if I leave out the more salacious elements of the weekend. Which I will.)

I mentioned to my brother that on the car ride up to NJ I had listened to a CD he had introduced to me (Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy by The Refreshments) many years ago, and the age of said CD led fairly naturally (I thought) into a question about discovering new music. As in, how does one go about finding out about new music? I used to listen to a local radio station that more than occasionally brought to my attention acts I had never heard of, either because the bands themselves were new or because my musical knowledge is really pretty shallow. But that radio station no longer exists and now, AARP help me, I mainly listen to public radio news or satellite radio 80’s and 90’s stations. Little Bro had a ready answer to my question, but unfortunately it was less than optimally helpful: he admitted that he finds out about new music from his friends.

So I turned to my brother’s friend who played bass in their band and asked him what his source was, and he said he would flip through music industry mags now and then, mostly looking for band names he would recognize to see if they had new albums out or on the way, which was not exactly the same thing as what I was going after, but then we started talking about satellite radio again and the dilution of quality after the Sirius-XM merger, and the conversation just wandered off into different territory from there.

But still, I was somewhat envious (in a very narrow and specific way) of my brother for knowing and keeping in touch with so many people whose primary passionate hobby is music, with entertainment consumption habits to match. By contrast, I feel like most if not all of my friends are content to listen to the same music they discovered in high school or college for the rest of their lives, if they listen to any in the first place.

Really, though, it all comes down to the eternal lament about the number of hours in the day. My friends may not be remotely interested in the slow extinction of album rock or discovering the next genius of eight-bar pop, but they love comics and movies and RPGs as much as I do or in some cases more, and we certainly make the most of sharing those interests, and I’m happy for that. But no one can possibly be into everything. Even though I often wish I could be.

When I was in school I played an instrument in various ensembles and messed around pretending to be in a garage band with some friends (unlike Little Bro, we never had a gig to speak of) and music just felt like a very large part of my life, both new discoveries and old favorites. To be fair, when you’re 13 you can still potentially count “Tommy” by The Who as a new discovery, although eventually you’re going to work your way through most of the past and claim all the classics you want as your own. But in recent years music has just taken a nosedive on my priority list, while other forms have stayed more or less constant. And when the pop-culture tides are at low ebb because I’m consumed with a new job or a new house or a new baby or whatever, music is the last thing to get addressed, if ever (and, honestly, probably not). I’ll obsess over ways to find a new comic book shop near my new workplace, or put a lot of brainpower into figuring out what’s on tv at midnight that’s worth catching up on if I’m going to be rocking a baby back to sleep after a feeding anyway, but the fact that I’m current-music illiterate gets a disappointed mental shrug at most. At my most frazzled I’ve at least always had a fingernail digging into some corner of the movie or tv or comics worlds, and I can figure out a way to increase my grip. But with music I don’t even really have a starting point. It has become one of those things I would focus on if I had more time, the kind of time you imagine will be yours when you win the lottery or retire (or both). But I have to be selective with my time and energy.

Most of the time, anyway. Obviously one CD was not enough to fill the hours required to drive from VA to NJ. Six CDs might have done it, but after I left the house I found that the six CDs I actually had in the car were an extremely odd bunch and I was only in the mood for a couple of them. So I let my radio scan for stations and stopped a few times when I recognized something good. I also stopped a few times when I heard something unfamiliar that caught my interest.


So have you heard of this band Boys Like Girls? Yeah, neither had I, but they have this song called “Love Drunk” which is … man, I’m bad at this. One reason why I don’t do something utterly logical like read more about music to keep up with it is because I lack a working vocabulary for it, and I find the listening experience too subjective to translate into other people’s words (or something like that). Anyway, the band slots into the pop-punk genre, although it’s pretty much all the way to the pop end of that continuum. “Love Drunk” got my attention while randomly station-surfing because it is so insistently, calculatingly poppy that it almost defies belief. I had to stop and listen until I figured out where and how the irony was going to come in. Then it slowly dawned on me how a song which contains the line “I used to be love drunk, but now I’m hungover” just might possibly be not so much an honest artistic statement as an attempt to ride the coattails of a movie like, say, The Hangover. I’m pretty sure the song had both auto-tune at one point and a chorus of male-cheerleader-esque “hey! hey!”s in the background at another, which … I mean, seriously. COME ON. There’s no such thing as an inherently bad musical motif, but there’s ways to incorporate them earnestly and ways to incorporate them knowingly, and then there’s way to just pile them on cynically. I was formulating this opinion and thinking “All this song needs is a totally pointless key change after the bridge …”

When the key change came I just about died laughing, but fortunately managed to keep from crashing my car. And this is why I envy my brother’s personal network of musicians for recommendations over my own random sampling methods. Sturgeon’s Second Law in full effect.