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Extremely belated Christmas music review
Dec. 28th, 2003 10:26 amI am doomed to love everything that John Flansburgh is ever involved with. I'd been slowly getting around to listening to the Mono Puff album "It's Fun to Steal" for several years, and can report that it is indeed brilliant. The excellent Robin Goldwasser (Flansburgh's wife) is also on it. The mix of musical styles is pretty similar to what would eventually show up on They Might Be Giants' 2001 album "Mink Car"; sort of a rock-lounge jazz-funk-disco kinda thing, with some completely unclassifiably weird songs. "Night Security" cracks me up uncontrollably. I need to dig up some of their other output.
Increasingly I find myself running years behind the leading edge of hipness. I think that a lot of what people do with their music choices as they get older is backfill the stuff that they started to get interested in earlier, but never got around to. It seems as if they're stuck in time and have stopped listening to anything new, but they're actually still exploring, and have just found a groove in which they are increasingly expert; if they tried listening to the stuff that is now cool, they'd be back at square one and probably unable to find the obscure material that would really interest them.
The basic problem is that, to an even greater extent than most forms of art or entertainment, music rewards connoisseurship beyond the level that a typical person can attain in a human lifetime; the music that gets heavy promotion is usually crap, or at least not to the specialized taste of any given person, and the music you really like ends up coming to your attention through word of mouth or leaps of faith. Years ago I thought it was pretty funny that my father had become an expert on the output of the Coasters, but when he tried getting into Eighties music, just ended up listening to the soundtrack of "Flashdance" over and over. But we all end up there.
Further observations:
1. Stanislaw Lem wrote this same essay about science fiction, about five times, only he was meaner about it and got kicked out of the SFWA.
2. This whole piece is actually an explanation of why I've listened to "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" about a million times this year.
Increasingly I find myself running years behind the leading edge of hipness. I think that a lot of what people do with their music choices as they get older is backfill the stuff that they started to get interested in earlier, but never got around to. It seems as if they're stuck in time and have stopped listening to anything new, but they're actually still exploring, and have just found a groove in which they are increasingly expert; if they tried listening to the stuff that is now cool, they'd be back at square one and probably unable to find the obscure material that would really interest them.
The basic problem is that, to an even greater extent than most forms of art or entertainment, music rewards connoisseurship beyond the level that a typical person can attain in a human lifetime; the music that gets heavy promotion is usually crap, or at least not to the specialized taste of any given person, and the music you really like ends up coming to your attention through word of mouth or leaps of faith. Years ago I thought it was pretty funny that my father had become an expert on the output of the Coasters, but when he tried getting into Eighties music, just ended up listening to the soundtrack of "Flashdance" over and over. But we all end up there.
Further observations:
1. Stanislaw Lem wrote this same essay about science fiction, about five times, only he was meaner about it and got kicked out of the SFWA.
2. This whole piece is actually an explanation of why I've listened to "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" about a million times this year.