Oh boy! An Ask Orbie question about music, and a great excuse to babble some more and not get to work on the things I really should get to work on!

By accident I came across an old Sad Cafe album on tape cassette from probably twenty years ago - I listened to it for the first time in many years.

I thought - Wow - there is nothing like this around today in terms the style of the music, the musicianship and the ‘bleeding heartfelt’ vocals.

To my ears, its just a great blend of sound and voice, which to my ears is totally absent in so much popular music today. There seems to be nothing around today as good as any number of bands from that era.

Let’s stop there for a moment. I couldn’t agree more that there is something lacking in popular music today. I’m sure every generation before us has said the exact same thing about the “new” music, but this time, I think it’s true. It’s rare when I hear something on the radio that interests me enough to even care who it is, and almost of it all just sounds the same after a while. That’s not to say there aren’t some rare gems out there, but they aren’t the ones getting radio play. No, for those, you have to know someone who turns you on to them. Niche groups and singers.

Two of my biggest problems with popular music today are the seeming lack of ability for mixers to blend the vocals and instrumentals so that the vocalist can be heard clearly enough to be understood and the seeming lack of singers to enunciate clearly even when they can be heard over the instrumentals. My hearing is fine. I still usually can’t understand what singers are singing about these days. Last night, for example, we caught a few minutes of some fairly popular alternative-folk band on TV. The music was nice, and they were obviously talented, but after listening to the first minute of the first song, I had to ask Lin if the lead singer was speaking English. I knew he had to be, because every so often I would catch a word or two that was obviously English, but he slurred the words together so badly and didn’t enunciate anything at all to the point that whatever it was he was trying to say was just a blur of unintelligible muttering. I expect that from punk bands, but folk music is supposed to be about the message, and this guy’s message wasn’t getting across. He could have been singing about the joys of murdering his sister, and who would have known.

So yeah, I don’t often run across new and/or currently popular music that I like. When I do, it’s usually something someone who knows my tastes suggests to me or sometimes a rare find on iTunes that I run across while looking for something else. Luckily though, I live in the Live Music Capital of the World, Austin, Texas! That means that on any night of the week, good live music by unknowns or aging/out-of-date groups can be found somewhere, and there’s always new groups forming or moving to town, so if the current batch sucks, wait a few weeks and there will be some new voices to listen to for a while. Most of the stuff I hear when we go out, almost all of it by total unknowns, tends to blow the stuffing out of the crap on the radio. More on this further down.

I know you are from a similar era to me. What kind of music do you listen to? Do you ever go back to the music of your youth. Do you listen to different music when you have had a few - than when you are sober?

The music I listen to regularly falls into a few genres: Easy Listening, Classical, Latino, Video Game & Movie Soundtracks (a form of modern classical, really), Folk, and Pop/Rock/New Wave from the 80’s and 90’s. There’s a smattering of Blues, Jazz and 70’s rock, and a wee bit of Country as well, but only very select songs or groups. Oh, and Broadway Musicals (though not as often as I used to).

I listen to a lot of small, mostly unknown local acts too. Many of them defy classification or fall into the Latino/Rock genre. Most of those come and go though, except The Coffee Sergeants and Vallejo, which I have loved for ages now.

I listen to the music that was playing on the radio when I was in high school and college ALL the time, mostly, I think, because there are memories attached to it. Also, you can understand the words, understand the “message” … and you can dance to it. I think most people continue to get stuck liking the music from that stage of their life. Lin definitely prefers to listen to the music he was listening to when he was a young adult, and most of my friends are the same. Or maybe, the music really was better back then.

Sober vs. Not Sober: Oh yeah, big difference in what I listen to depending my my intoxication level. I wouldn’t, for example, listen to classical music while popping the tops of wine coolers. The more alcohol in my system, the more upbeat, loud, and “bouncy” the music gets (which leads to dancing) … or psychedelic. Nothing better than catching a buzz and listening to some oozy psych-pop with a groovy light-show. I have even been known to get intoxicated enough to enjoy groups like AC/DC, but that might have been because we were seeing them live and they do put on a great show. Or maybe I had to be drunk to enjoy it.

What do you think of the music from 20 years ago? Or am I just an old bugger, reliving my youth through old music - and bleating a bit like my dad used bleat about modern music?

I always said, growing up, I wasn’t going to become one of those old people complaining about “kids today” and their weird tastes in music, clothing and so on. I’ve done a pretty good job of that, except when it comes to music. I actually do think popular music used to be better. It’s not really the musicians’ fault either. I have seen bands that were full of talent and who had great ideas and wonderful first, self-produced albums go on to sign with a major label and suddenly start sucking. Having watched one group I knew well enough to hear the inside scoop try to make the leap from self-producing to major label, the fault for the amount of crappy music out there lies entirely with the labels and management. They take something great, and then they commercialize it, change it, and force it into the mold of what they think will sell. In the process, they destroy what was great about it. Even worse are the high number of acts that are completely put together by labels out of some notion of what they think will sell.

Music is organic. I would even call it a natural human instinct. It needs to grow organically and find its own form. Once you start forcing it in one direction or another, it tends to fall apart and lose that spark it needs to be good, and by forcing groups to “commercialize” or change what they are doing to be more likely to sell to the masses, all they are really doing is making it all sound the same … and this sound, it is not so good. It’s the lowest common denominator … sell to as many people as possible to make as much money as possible, and who cares if anyone remembers the band five years from now. If I were in a band, I would rather sell 100,000 albums to people who like our unique sound, stick to doing the music we like the way we like it, and have people remember us and our music ten or twenty years from now … rather than be molded into something that will sell a million albums to people who like one song and never think about us again once that song is no longer a hit. But it’s so hard to make a living doing music that way, and so in order to get more popular, they have to play the game, and then they end up being the latest and greatest that sounds just like everyone else and are forgotten when the next latest and greatest makes the charts. It’s sort of sad.

I might have something more to babble about this some other time, but the day is waiting on me to get going with it. Hope that answered your questions!