From: ajw@cbnews.cb.att.com (andrew.j.whitman)
Subject: Re: Top 40 CCM albums of 1992
Organization: AT&T
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 15:25:05 GMT

In article <103953@netnews.upenn.edu> crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu (Lauren L. Crawford) writes:

(in reference to changing musical tastes):

>I wonder if the aging process also has something to do with it.  I find
>myself -- and this is scary -- more and more attracted to music that's
>easy on the ears ... in other words, songs with lovely, melodic tunes and
>lyrics that make some sense to me.  Back in college, I had a very high
>tolerance for music that required, in retrospect, a lot of effort to
>listen to.  The more alternative the better.  I still find myself enjoying an
>occasional dose of, say, the Sugar Cubes, but that's about as out there as
>I get anymore.  I'm not sure why this is happening.  Maybe it's because my
>life is more demanding and difficult, so I don't want my music to be?  Or
>maybe it's because I came of age during the heyday of punk, and a person
>can only take that stuff for so long.    

I know a lot of people who fit into the same general category.  For
many people college/young adulthood tends to be the most musically
adventurous time of their lives.  There's always strange new exotic
sounds filtering out of somebody's dorm room, and there are lots of
concerts nearby, and there's always the subtle but nevertheless real
hipper-than-thou pressure to check out some band that you've never
heard of but that the guy with the cool ponytail really likes. 

At least that's the way it went with me and my friends.  And it tended
to stay that way until they got married, acquired a mortgage payment,
and a kid or two.  At about that time the musical tastes tended to
ossify.  For me that time period came in the mid-to-late seventies.
That means that my college and young adulthood buddies regularly call 
me up to ask if they can borrow my Beatles and Stones and Dylan  
albums (the music that they - and I - grew up with) and my Pink Floyd, 
Yes, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, and Grateful Dead albums (the music they
listened to when they were in college).  There are a few minor
variations on this - for instance, my Christian friends regularly
call me up to borrow Phil Keaggy and Larry Norman albums instead 
of Led Zeppelin and Yes.  But it's the same basic pattern.  

And I thought about this.  I considered my own parents, who were mainly
listening to the music of their young adulthood, and my grandparents,
who were mainly listening to the music of *their* young adulthood,
and I asked myself if I wanted to be hearkening back to the good old
days of Phil Keaggy and Led Zeppelin at age 65, and the answer was "no."  
So I made a conscious decision to try to expand my horizons.  

Here are a few things I did.  First, I turned off the radio.  In
Columbus this was not a difficult choice because the rock radio
stations seemed to have ossified around the same time period as
my college buddies, the Top 40 stations lost all semblance of
quality in the early seventies, and the oldies stations were
playing music that I already had anyway.  Second, I subscribed
to a bunch of music periodicals that were usually printed on cheap 
paper and were often poorly written and that featured bands I'd never
heard of.  Third, I hit the library and started reading about genres
of music that I knew nothing about - which, in my case, meant every
genre of music out there except for rock music.  I made notes on
some of the albums that sounded the most interesting, and then I started
spending my money on music I'd never heard before.

When I looked at my record collection at the time, I remember noticing
a couple of very glaring patterns.  First, every record that I owned,
except for the smattering of CCM albums in my collection, was recorded
for a major label.  Second, every single face that stared out at me
from a record cover was lily white.

In the fifteen years or so since I've started this grand experiment
I'd have to say that I'm a complete, abject failure when it comes to
keeping up with current trends in music.  I did okay through the 
early eighties, but then my *own* mortgage payments and kids came
along, and I simply don't have the time or the money to listen to
ten new albums a week.  I make a half-hearted attempt at it, and 
I can at least talk semi-coherently about bands like My Bloody 
Valentine and Sonic Youth and Nirvana in the secular world, or 
L.S.U. and Breakfast with Amy and Fluffy in the CCM world.  But
it's just the tip of the iceberg, and I know that there's scads
of new music that I'm never going to hear.  

Where I've chosen to focus instead, though, is on the amazing music
that black Americans have contributed to the musical culture over
the past eighty years or so.  Without this music there would be
no rock 'n roll, and I'm quite serious about that, so I wanted to
go back and discover a lot of the music that played such a formative
role in defining the current musical scene.  In jazz that's meant
an exploration of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington,
Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis,
Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman,
Cecil Taylor, and right up through the wonderful music still being
made by David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Don Pullen, Geri Allen,
and Cassandra Wilson.  In blues it's meant a whole new world of
sounds courtesy of Charlie Patton and Son House, Robert Johnson,
Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Sonny Boy Williamson, 
Buddy Guy and Otis Rush, Son Seal and Koko Taylor and Katie Webster 
and Hound Dog Taylor and Magic Sam.  In R&B it's meant a boatload 
of great music from the people who literally defined rock 'n roll,
and who defined it way before Elvis even thought about picking up 
a guitar - people like Roy Brown and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup and 
Big Joe Turner and Louis Jordan and Ray Charles.  In soul it's meant 
a still ongoing exploration of Motown and the great Atlantic/Stax/
Volt records of the early sixties through the early seventies, and
it's lead to many pleasant hours with Aretha and Otis and JB and 
Marvin Gaye and The Four Tops and Smoky Robinson and The Temptations
and Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge and Al Green.  In gospel it's
lead to some great albums featuring Mahalia Jackson and The
Barrett Sisters and the Mighty Clouds of Joy and The Soul Stirrers.

The thing that amazes me about all this is that the more main roads I
explore the more side streets I find, and there's simply no way
to even begin to study and appreciate this body of work comprehensively.   
There's just too much to take in.  

I can appreciate the desire for music that is "easy on the ears" and
that doesn't make too many demands on one's attention.  But I guess 
I'm also finding that the more one listens, the more comfortable one
becomes with genres of music that were once strange and inaccessible.
To a certain extent you have to work at it.  But it gets a lot 
easier with increasing exposure and familiarity.  

It's sort of like visitng the mall bookstore where your only choices
are Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and 
Barbara Cartland.  You can read the stuff, and maybe there are times
when it's appropriate to kick back and turn off your mind and read
the stuff, but a steady diet turns you into mental mush.  I find
the same ideas apply to music that is easy on the ears and readily
accessible.  It may not be harmful in the short run, but before
you know it you're buying Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Bolton albums :-).  
It's just a short step from there to watching "Entertainment Tonight" and 
studying the Billboard charts.  At that point radical measures may
be necessary - either intensive study of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness"
for non-Christians or a forty-page term paper on The Book of Leviticus
for Christians.  Either way it's not pleasant.  Better to buy some
jazz today.  

>-- 
>The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world --
>if only from time to time.     -- Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood"
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Lauren Crawford  //  crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu

Andy Whitman
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Ohio
att!cblpn!ajw  or
ajw@cblpn.att.com