This post is deeply off topic, has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with my personal realizations about music. My calendar says that it is 2009. My radio says it is 1978. The radio must be right because I just listened to ‘Warewolves of London’ each and every day for the last three days. It’s just weird, because I like music, but I am also getting tired of itl. I like to have the radio in the background pretty much all the time. I am what is called a ‘Stereophile’ as well. I love music and I love the intricacies of the technology used to reproduce music, so playing with stereo equipment is nirvana for me. When not writing white papers and blogging, I am reading about and listening to my stereo systems. 3 systems in all, plus a radio in the kitchen, car and garage. My musical tastes vary, but tend to listen to rock during the day, jazz/ragtime/blues at night. The latter has been great as I am not saturated with it, and I am constantly finding new stuff that I like (while I am on the subject, James Brown was a bad-ass!). But it’s the rock and roll on the Radio that’s got me really vexed. Why? On the Radio it is 1987. I know this because I have heard ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ each and every day for the last 8 days. Did our brains somehow imprint an image of what music was supposed to be when we were young, and now we cannot move away from that? It never thought as a child that when I became an adult I would be listening to the same music I was listening to at 4, 8, 12, 15, every day, day after day for eternity. Bad when you grow tired of songs you like, awful when you still hear the songs you grew weary of in high school. I always assumed that there would continually be new music that I liked, from the bands that I liked, and the radio stations would progress as the musicians did. Not so! AC/DC and Aerosmith may have the odd hit, most new music flops horribly. Chinese Democracy can’t get half the air time of Appetite for Destruction. Sure, that’s a blessing, but one is new and the other is a tired 22 years old. A couple new bands offer the interesting song or two, but the rock & roll stations continue to play the same music, over and over and over. It appears that every major rock band in the world wrote three songs and the reminder of their recordings were burned so that we could focus all our time and energy on a handful of ‘important’ (re: safe) songs. Oh, listen, it’s Aqualung. Just like yesterday. This is what prompted me to try and diversify from Rock a bit, but with very little success. Old school Hip Hop gets my occasional attention when I run across something like ‘You Be Illin’, but I have never been able to really enjoy Rap. Tried real hard with classical; even accepted the 1200 classical albums to see if my musical tastes somehow ‘matured’ enough to listen to these composers. Boredom forced me to give the collection away to someone who would appreciate it. Country and Western makes me feel like life is not worth living and I want to slash my wrists. There are plenty of popular mexican music stations that are somewhat entertaining, but after a while, especially when you do not understand the words, the same ‘da da da dat dat dah’ accordion bridge grows very fatiguing. So I tune back to one of the 6 rock stations I get here in Phoenix, where it’s 1985, and I am listening to this fresh cut of Sussudio. In my teens I would never have dreamt that Phil Collins would be on the radio, every day, as if he was a first run artist that everyone listed to – with a new top 10 hit every week. But just listen a few minutes and there he is, as if we just loved his stuff. He gets more air time than Kanye West. A competent singer, songwriter & drummer, I really have no problem with Phil Collins. OK to listen to, say, once a month. 4 times a day on the radio makes me want to hurl. And now I know why Phil Collins is the Mel Torme of my generaiton. Good enough to make the favored radio station play list, but if you were a non-fan of the art, you would think this guy is a Louis Armstrong or Mozart-esque musical genius. What can you do? Keep singing along I guess … “Aaahoo, Werewolves of London”. At least I LIKE that song. Share:
