The other day, I was having a drink with a friend when I mentioned something about The Smiths/Morrissey. My friend nodded at the mention, paused for a second, and then asked me, “What is The Smiths/Morrissey?”
Now, this is a relatively “with it,” culturally aware individual — a music student, no less, who studies at a conservatory — from the American Northeast (I mention his geographical origin only as a point of context and not as a dig on other parts of the country; I myself am only almost entirely from the American Northeast). And yet, he had no idea who The Smiths were. This caused me to wonder, to borrow a phrase: is it really so strange?
Granted, The Smiths were never the most popular band on the planet, but this incident did recall to memory the time that another friend blank-facedly asked me who “this Keith Richards person” was. We all have doubtlessly seen our fair share of soul-crushing screenshots from Twitter users asking, typos aplenty, who the heck Paul McCartney (lovingly referred to as “this old guy”) is.
Are we past the era where there’s a set “canon” of artists, groups, musicians, whatever, that one is reasonably expected to be versed in? And, if so, who’s to blame for this? Globalization? The Internet? The death of radio? Maybe even ... our parents?
Here’s what I figure: with the advent of the Information Age came an absolute barrage of choices. We could choose whether to buy a whole album or just one track (or whether to “buy” it at all, as the case seems to have been), whether to listen to AM/FM radio in the car or to listen to satellite radio or to just listen to our own iPods, our own music libraries in a tape loop (“What’s a tape loop?,” asks everyone reading this born after 1992).
With all these choices, I think it’s increasingly clear that most of us chose to pretty much stay within our own musical comfort zones — the indie got indi-er, the mainstream got mainstream-er and so on. With Sirius/XM’s appealing method of restricting entire stations to one genre, our generation grew up never having to “accidentally” listen to a country song (and, God forbid, “accidentally” like it). If you wanted hip-hop and nothing else, you got it. If you wanted acoustic sets from pop-folk artists, there was a station for that. Hell, if your mood happened to coincide with an upcoming release promotion, you could even listen to “Coldplay Radio” or “The Killers Radio” on satellite and never hear a song by any other artist so long as you stayed on that frequency.
And don’t even get me started on Pandora. Talk about “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.”
So, technology triumphs and everybody’s happy listening to what they like. Right?
Well, not exactly, or else I wouldn’t be writing this column. Something is lost by the increasing separation of people into generic groups — something cultural. It used to be that, as much as individuals had their own musical preferences, there was something of a shared collective consciousness.
Think about Elvis, for instance. Imagine an America in which the only people who were listening to Elvis 1968, or were even aware of him, were hardcore rock ‘n’ roll enthusiasts who lived within 25 miles of Memphis. No screaming teenagers, no Milton Berle show, just a guy playing guitar for an audience full of other guys who played guitars.
Now, while I hope to God that Justin Bieber isn’t today’s Elvis, the current situation is that if you don’t want to listen to Justin Bieber, you don’t have to.
Don’t get me wrong — that’s great. I thank my lucky stars every day that I don’t have to listen to Justin Bieber. But when you hear George H.W. Bush announcing that he “doesn’t follow The Biebs,” it sorta makes you think. You can bet your blue suede shoes that LBJ “followed” Elvis. Hell, he probably had a NASA program devoted to harnessing all that sexual energy to defeat the commies (“Shake, Rattle, & Roll to Victory!”).
So, how do we combat this? Surely I don’t expect anybody to delete their Spotify accounts or take a magnet to their iPods. That would be insane. The thing about technology is that there’s no way to undo what’s already been done, and what’s more, I think we can all agree that we wouldn’t want to. But the only thing to do, so far as I can tell, is allow yourself to branch out. Talk to your friends who roll their eyes at Neutral Milk Hotel and ask them what they’re jamming to instead. Get in a conversation about a scene you know nothing about. Surprise yourself.
Seriously, how many of you thought you would like a band called Old Crow Medicine Show before you mysteriously found yourself singing “Wagon Wheel” at the top of your lungs at the bar in the middle of the night?Count how many different genres are in your iTunes library. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, which is why I feel comfortable offering advice on the topic. Even if you’re ignorant about hip hop or terrified of soul music (God save you), I’m willing to bet you know someone who isn’t. Sure, they might call you a poseur and tell you to f**k off, but maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll introduce you to the millennium’s answer to The Smiths or Joni Mitchell or Johnny Cash and change your life. Or, maybe they’ll patiently, earnestly introduce you to something and you’ll hate it.
That’s okay too.
If you were looking for hip-hop and then you found hip-hop, and heaven knows you’re miserable now ... well, that’s all part of the process.
But in any case, let’s do it.
Let’s create the collective cultural consciousness of our generation. Let’s create a canon. Let’s share something, even if it’s not what the Grammys thinks we should be sharing, even if we don’t all like all of it. Let’s give the history books something to say about this generation’s music, other than that we stopped paying for it.
