UPCOMING EVENTS

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The Easier It Is, The Harder It Gets

I almost forgot I liked music.

That would have been inconceivable to me years ago. I used to live for going to shows, snatching up the latest CDs and 7 inches when they popped out. Even when I had no money--especially when I had no money--I bought a new album practically every week. I used to write songs, all the time, even when I didn't have a band to play them in.

I didn't understand people who didn't actively enjoy music, didn't constantly look for new bands to dig on. To me, they were like some holier-than-thou douchebag you meet at a party who insists he doesn't watch television. He's being different for the sole purpose of separating himself from the rest of us slobs. He is to be pitied more than hated.

In the last few years, though, music has fallen a whole bunch of notches on my Stuff Essential To My Existence Depth Chart. I don't blame parenthood, because the shift started long before that.

I think that my active interest in music waned indirectly proportional to the ease of discovering and acquiring new music. Allow me to sound like an old fart for a few paragraphs.

Music used to be hard. I mean, it used to be difficult to keep up on the latest stuff. You had to get your hands on somebody's grubby Xeroxed zine, or overhear something at a friend's house.

You had to scour the events pages of the Village Voice and its glaucoma-inducing fonts, just to make sure you didn't miss Your Favorite Group's one and only local appearance. If you were lucky, you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy that booked at Brownie's, so you'd know ahead of time when That Band was rolling into town.

Or you had go to Kim's and sift through piles of flash-card-sized show promos printed on neon pink and yellow oaktag, digging amongst horrible jam bands and singer/songwriter fucktards, on the off-chance that Some Awesome Band had buried the news of its imminent arrival therein.

Sometimes you'd have to take a chance because a buddy whose taste you respected told you Band X was the shit, and drop some hard-earned shekels on a record you'd never even heard. So you'd cringe as you handed dough over to the cashier, knowing that if you made a mistake, you'd be SOL for buying any more albums for, well, at least another week.

Sometimes you'd have to trawl the unlikeliest places to find out about Awesome Musicians Before Your Time that would otherwise escape your notice. True story: I discovered Charles Mingus, Black Flag, and the Minutemen in junior high because they were all featured in Tower Records' in-store magazine (which was called Pulse and was surprisingly hip for a freebie publication).

Once you actually purchased something, you had to give it a proper listen. Sit in your room with headphones on, take in the whole album from beginning to end. If it passed muster, you would put it on a blank tape so you could listen to it on your Walkman on the school. When I was in high school, the Discman was still too pricey to consider purchasing (at least for me). Even if I had one, I wouldn't have brought it to school, where consumer electronics had a 50% chance of being stolen or destroyed.

And all of this assumes that you lived in or near New York, or some other place hip enough to have good record stores and music venues. If you grew up in Nowheresville, America, your chances of hearing about, say, Fugazi lay somewhere between slim and none.

How did things change? I partially blame the Interweb, which allows a band to be totally overexposed a million different ways before it's even recorded an album--although I can't really fault a medium that allows information to pass so quickly and freely. I sorta blame the iPod and iTunes for destroying the concept of the album (although that hasn't prevented me from utilizing both). But most of all, I blame blank CDs.

Once upon a time, a record was a Totem. It was LARGE. It was made of petroleum-based polymers. It came in an enormous sleeve with elaborate artwork, liner notes, posters, and other assorted gewgaws.

You couldn't make a record at home, so a record was a magical thing. This mysterious piece of plastic that trapped people's voices in it. For all the public knew, records were constructed by little Teutonic elves slaving away with planes and awls in an enchanted castle forged in the sheer rock face of an Alpine mountain. You know, like something from a Dio cover.

Even the thing you used to play a record was magical, because it was a temperamental piece of machinery that would destroy all your albums if you weren't careful. It had a needle--a needle--and if you breathed too hard near it, the record would skip. You'd have to pick up that needle CAREFULLY OH MY GOD DON'T SCRATCH THE LP! and put it back to the start of the track. That in itself was a skill that required deft of hand and some serious cojones, which is why DJ's still think they're such hot poop.

Then along came CDs. Tiny. Sleek. Sterile. Contained in a transparent "jewel case" (barf) that holds on to the liner notes like Krazy Glue. Played not by a needle, but a laser. And the machinery you used to play them was utterly charmless and devoid of personality. I have a very early CD player in my house (circa 1982), one I found at a Salvation Army on the Upper West Side. Even when they first came out, CD players looked like they were taken from the dashboard of a Ford Focus.

CDs never had the cachet that records did, because they were too small to fetishize in the same way. But still, you couldn't make one at home. And they were really expensive, which most people confuse as a sign of Craftsmanship.

Then CD burners became a ubiquitous piece of computer equipment. You could copy a CD for a friend. You could even make a "mix tape" on a CD! Radical!

Except people eventually realized, "Wait a minute. I can buy a spindle of 50 CDs for like 20 bucks, and I just dropped 18 dollars on that crappy Killers album? That's some bullshit!" Along with that realization came another: the music on this CD is really just a series of ones and zeroes. It's a digital file, no different from a spreadsheet or that hilarious flying toaster screensaver.

The thing that contains music was no longer mystical and special. Therefore, music was no longer mystical and special. That's why people debut their singles not on the radio or MTV, but in commercials and video games.

But I can't totally blame The Decline of Western Civilization for my detachment from music. For about 18 months, I wrote a sports blog (which you can't read anymore because it's been relegated to the Interweb Elephant's Graveyard; meanwhile, Steve Phillips' every mindless observation is available for a fee because there's justice in the world). In order to make sure I didn't miss any BREAKING SPORTS NEWS I listened to sports radio constantly.

Here's my advice to you, from one who knows: NEVER DO THIS. Catching a few minutes of sports radio here and there can be entertaining. Eight-plus hours of it a day, seven days a week, will destroy your soul. And if that doesn't, perpetual watching of ESPN will.

Because not only did it force me to listen to every mind-numbing word by Fatso and Froot Loops. My brain got rewired to the point where all I could stand to listen to was Words. Even when I was traveling or had free time, I wouldn't listen to songs. The only stuff I'd dial up on my iPod was Jean Shepherd shows and archived Mets playoff games from yesteryear that I'd garnered from XM Radio and elsewhere. No tunes, just Bob Murphy.

This past Sunday, it was gorgeous outside. It felt even more wonderful than it actually was, because we've had such a long-ass winter this year. So The Wife and The Baby and I took a trip to Greenpoint for lunch and strolling. Now that I have a kid, going back to Greenpoint feels like I'm spying on my old life. Hipsters playing softball in McCarren Park, drunk at 2 in the afternoon, slurping beer in Styrofoam cups from the Turkey's Nest. Oh to be young again.

Before we grabbed something to eat, we popped into a record store on Bedford. I can't tell you the last time I went into a record store. I don't know if it was the beautiful weather, or if I felt I had something to prove because I was pushing a baby carriage, or if I just felt some obligation to catch up on stuff I'd been missing in my semi-self-imposed musical hiatus.

Regardless, I spent my money like a sailor on shore leave who's got two weeks to live. I can't even remember half of what I bought. I know I got the new Ted Leo, and I know I a Gossip album 'cause the store was playing it at the time. Beyond that, it's all a blur, with only the smelling of charred credit card plastic left behind.

I put all of my new stuff on my iPod so I could hear it on the way to work. But my iPod's being a total dick and not bringing any of it up on Shuffle. Within the last four days, I've heard exactly one new song so far ("Must Be the Moon" by !!!) and that's it. Not only that, but it's playing the same 30 songs (out of 1400+) over and over, including some wacky Xmas tunes that I put on in December and have been too lazy to remove. There's something perverse about listening to Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rap" on the F train while wearing short sleeves.

I guess I could just play the albums on their own, but that's not how I roll. I like to put the iPod on Shuffle and see what pops up. Like it's fate and not a random succession of logarithms.

This morning, I slipped the iPod on as I left the house. When I turned the corner of my street to head to Grand Avenue, I saw the Q58 approaching. This happens every morning, and every morning the bus pulls away before I can get near it. I will swear this on the holy book of your choice. Some mornings, there will even be two buses waiting in succession, and both will flee before I can cross the street and get to them in time.

Just as I reached the corner, as I see the bus idling there, taunting me, Minor Threat's "Out of Step" came on my iPod.

This is a song I once believed in. If not in its literal message, then at least its larger one. And I suppose I still do. When I heard it, the hair on my arms stood on end. I felt the same kind of charge I used to when I listened to Threat as a teenager. I wanted to punch a cop in the head or break a window. Or break a window by throwing a cop through it.

And then I felt ridiculous for feeling this way. I felt ridiculous because I was no longer a teenager. I was standing on Grand Avenue in a Dickie's work shirt, Haggar pants, and dress shoes, with a messenger bag over my shoulder and a thermos of black coffee in my hand. And I remembered that I needed to get to work on time, because I need to keep my health insurance and earn money to piss away on day care. And I looked around and saw that there were no cops nearby, anyway.

And then I thought to myself, Fuck you. Let me stand here for one moment, one god damn moment of my day, and let me feel this way for that moment. And if you have a problem with that because now I'm an adult and have responsibilities--and I don't know who I was addressing here but I was very insistent--then you can go fuck yourself.

I waved at the bus driver from across the street, hoping to get his attention. Amazingly, he didn't pretend to not see me and actually waited at the bus stop until I could dash across the Avenue between cars. I thanked him when I boarded, though he had one of those looks on his face that said he'd rather eat a turd sandwich than receive appreciative words.

As I slid into one of those rare "solo" seats that the newer buses have, I wondered about how to reconcile the cop-icidal urges deep within me with the guy in business casual wear rushing to his editing job so he can keep one foot out of the poorhouse. I didn't have an answer, and I'm not sure there is one.

Everyone needs a little schizophrenia in their lives. Music can help you forget yourself sometimes, forget about The Job and The Bills and The Commute and Everything Else. Unlike Sports (which I've been concentrating on a lot of late), it's not a zero-sum win/loss proposition. You can totally lose yourself in music, in a way not afforded by most of life's escapes. Plus, it's a lot cheaper and less prosecutable than drugs.

I'd almost forgotten all of this, as I slumped in my seat, bracing myself for the rest of the day, and Ian MacKaye screamed I can't keep up I can't keep up I can't keep up...

Posted 04.26.07 10:01pm * Permalink

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