The Story of My Music
When I was little, I listened to music with my parents. I remember loving the Beach Boys, I even went to see them in 1972. Sometimes we would listen to music on reel to reel. I also had a little record player, and the first song I loved was American Pie; thank god my taste has evolved. That was probably the same time as the Beach Boys, when I was 3 or 4.
We listened to the top 40 countdown with Casey every Sunday, I knew the songs well. We loved disco, especially Saturday Night Fever when that came out. I eventually started listening to old school rock (which wasn’t so old then), and I new classic rock pretty well by the age of 10. Around 1980 when I was 12, my music tastes started to change, and I developed my own style. New music was coming out, I knew it as ‘new wave’, although now it would be mostly ‘post punk.’ Bow Wow Wow was my favorite, I also loved Adam & the Ants, Cure, Depeche Mode, Joy Division/New Order, Gang of 4, etc. I remember once in 1981 my dad coming up to me, ‘I like most of your music, but not this.’ I was listening to the Sex Pistols.
I saw a lot of great shows, Cure, New Order, INXS before anyone knew them opening for Adam Ant. I saw U2 in a small theatre. During ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ a fight broke out in the audience, and Bono stopped the show, saying legibly ‘you’re not listening to the words….. (in my best Bono imitation).’
I went to many concerts, we had a connection through a high school friend of my Dad’s. I remember in 1980 sitting front row for Aerosmith with my friend Josh. Man if we knew then…..
It was hard to find out about new music then. You were basically limited to commercial radio, and the odd random magazine you had somehow. There was no internet, no good way to find music. It was hard. When you heard something you liked, there was no Shazam, you had to track it down. It was a lot of work to find music you liked.
Every time one of us went to NY or LA, we would literally tape the radio on the cassette for hours, and then go back & hear songs, and buy them if we liked them. There was no other way to be introduced to new music.
I went to UCLA in 1985, and was exposed to more music. But music sucked by then, there wasn’t much music that I liked after 1983. The next 10–15 years were dark times for music & me. I still was very into the small genre that I had liked, 80’s music, but that music had become ‘alternative’ music, and was now commercial & horrible. But I listened to the radio for many years. Dark times.
Finally a breakthrough, the internet. By 2000 or so, I could listen to college radio, online. I wish I had known about college radio earlier, I probably could have picked up some in LA. But when I found out about it, it changed everything.
I loved all the music I heard on college radio. So much, that for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to pay attention to who the artist playing was. I could just listen to the radio, at least until 6pm, and hear awesome music constantly. So I didn’t learn anything new about music or bands I liked, I just could listen and like what I heard.
After 6pm was a different story, and I stumbled on Pandora to fill the gap. Pandora is cruel and heartless, it learns preferences that you give it, and it plays songs based on your likes. But inevitably it is not a human DJ sharing music they love, it uses collaborative filtering (and probably other incentives) to throw at you what it wants to throw at you, and inevitably you hear the same songs over, and over, and over. But why? If you select a ‘Cure’ channel, the Cure has many albums and great songs, spanning 30 years (OK maybe their good stuff only spans 6 years) but instead of playing a diverse range of Cure songs, Pandora plays the same songs, over & over & over. It is soul crushingly cruel.
This was a time in my life if anyone asked me who I was listening to, I really couldn’t tell you, I would just say ‘the same old shit,’ meaning Cure-Joy Division-Smiths etc. But finally I got fed up with Pandora, and made the switch to Spotify, and again, it changed everything for me.
With Spotify, you select songs that you like, which implies that you are aware of them already. So at first to me this was a chance to reconnect with my library, and not really worry about new music. So I went through all my old bands, old songs, and started adding. But what ended up happening, is that I would focus on a band that I liked but maybe didn’t know their complete disography, and listen to them all day. So bands like The Dammed, The Jam, Buzzcocks etc that I never really knew that well except for an album or two, I became very acquainted with. So I was learning new music, just from old bands! It was rounding out my weak spots for sure.
So there was a mad dash to learn new music from old groups, and I was back in touch with my early 80’s theme, but this time filling in the gaps. I realized that most of the 80’s music I liked was actually from 77–79. But the education didn’t stop there! I discovered a new way to increase my music. Instead of listening to college radio & not really paying attention, I started noticing songs I liked. And I would Shazam them, and find out who they were by. Then I could look them up in Spotify, and listen to their entire album, and get to know them. In this way I added a substantial amount of new music from all genres and all time periods, from 80’s bands I never knew, to modern music that I thought I would never be into.
So now I have amassed a collection of 2700 songs that I really like, I have stopped adding new music for a while, and my Spotify songs on random shuffle is the best radio station in the world. And when its time to add, I have infinite more to look up.
