MUSICAL MUSINGS
by Josh Hosler
October 19, 2004
HOLES IN MY MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE
So I'm riding in a car with my new boss and two teenagers, a boy and a girl. The boy is in the front seat with my boss, and he has insisted that he plug his new mix CD into the stereo. The first song is "Du Hast" by Rammstein—OK, it's got a cool groove, but doesn't it sound a little like Nazi music to you?
And then he starts in about the Dead Kennedys. I can tell he's a sophisticated sixteen-year-old for even knowing the Dead Kennedys exist, but my boss is shocked—shocked—that I don't know any of their songs. How could someone with my musical knowledge not know and appreciate the Dead Kennedys?
Well, as much as I'm usually able to amaze my friends with my musical know-how, I have to admit that I don't know everything. At some point, I decided to make the pop charts my point of entry into music. Let's face it: George W. Bush has been closer to winning Rhode Island than the Dead Kennedys have ever been to a pop chart.
There are holes in my musical knowledge, and that's just as true for me as it is for any other music fan. And, like everyone else, I know things other people don't know. Take, for instance, the fact that 1990 was a year jam-packed with pop gems: "Sittin' in the Lap of Luxury" by Louie Louie, "Dare to Fall in Love" by Brent Bourgeois, "Pure" by the Lightning Seeds ... all top 40 hits, but how many people other than me remember them? My boss knows the Dead Kennedys, my wife knows the entire Sting catalog, and my friend Robert has stacks of U2 bootlegs.
Now, it's not like top 40 hits are all I know. Who's my all-time favorite band? XTC, a band that made the Hot 100 in 1989 with "The Mayor of Simpleton." It's a great song, but for the aspiring XTC fan, I'd recommend the Skylarking album first, followed by Mummer, Nonsuch, and Apple Venus Volume 1. Alternative radio stations still play "Senses Working Overtime" and "Dear God" on their flashback shows. Yes, as XTC themselves said, "This Is Pop," but it's a different kind of pop—the kind Casey Kasem never could have revealed to me.
And while I'm on the topic of great non-charting bands, I'll mention Jellyfish. They also had one Hot 100 entry: "Baby's Coming Back" in 1991. Their two albums, Bellybutton and Spilt Milk, are amazing tapestries of sound, taking elements of the Beatles, Queen, and ELO, and infusing a lot of righteous indignation, especially about organized religion. For a preacher's kid in college, Jellyfish was the perfect soundtrack.
So I don't limit myself to songs that once received a push at radio, but that's where my heart lies. And frankly, it's amazing that I married someone who can put up with that. I haven't had an on-air gig in years, so of course I feel the need to share "factoids" with my wife as we chop veggies for stir fry and listen to the top hits from 15 years ago this week. "Do you know who this is?" I ask.
"Ummm ... the Jackson 5?"
"No, this is 1989." She rolls her eyes at herself. I come to her rescue. "It does sound like the Jacksons, though, doesn't it? It's New Kids on the Block, and it's a cover of a song from the '70s." (Yes, I do voluntarily listen to New Kids on the Block when I'm in flashback mode. The rule is that I have to listen to the entire countdown.)
When my wife doesn't know the answer, I don't berate her. I just have fun quizzing her, and she has fun trying to answer. She gets it right more often than she realizes, and certainly more often than she would have before she met me. When she gets it wrong, I tell her all about the correct answer. She manages to sound genuinely interested, and she uses her relatively untrained ear to hear connections I'd have missed to other songs. Then we move on. Later, she'll tell me all about something she's growing in the garden, and I'll try to be genuinely interested, but I'm feeding off her own excitement rather than my need to know the difference between an iris and a lavender plant.
The fact is that there's only so much time in life, and if you listened to all the great music in the world, you'd never do anything else. My introduction to Queen Latifah was "U.N.I.T.Y." in 1993, but she'd been releasing albums for years by that time. Now, with her award-winning role in Chicago and her album of jazz standards, Queen Latifah is making herself known to an even larger audience. I wasn't the last one on the train after all.
However, my introduction to the Verve Pipe came early. If you're really on the ball, you know their one big pop hit, "The Freshmen," didn't come until 1997. In 1993, the Verve Pipe was a local band in Southern Michigan, and I saw them open for Toad the Wet Sprocket. My friend Laurie had their album, I've Suffered a Head Injury. "The Freshmen" was the last cut on the album, a quick little acoustic number sung in a sad voice. In 1995, the Verve Pipe started to gain traction nationally, and they reissued I've Suffered a Head Injury without "The Freshmen." Then they put out the Villains album with a new mix of "The Freshmen." It was slower, more heavily produced, and more angry than sad. This was the hit version. But I'm happy with my copy of the original acoustic version, now long out of print.
All music fans have situations like this. And you may be the picture-perfect candidate for a radio station's auditorium test, a member of a specific demographic who lives and breathes a specific radio format. But your favorite band is Michael Learns to Rock, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's the force that drives people away from the radio and makes them buy iPods.
You have your own ideal radio format in your head, and nobody's ever going to market it to you. You like Led Zeppelin, Lindsay Lohan, and Edith Piaf. Guess what? You are not the exception. You are the rule. There are holes in your musical knowledge, too, but I won't berate you for them.
Just don't confuse the Dead Kennedys with the Dead Milkmen. Or Dead Can Dance. Or the Dead.
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