Here I am...57 years old and my taste in music constantly evolving. Sometimes I wonder if I'll lose the capacity to enjoy music but then next thing you know I put on my Spotify playlist, the one with over 4000 of my favorite songs, and I realize that there is still much that moves me. Music...I've danced with you, I've cried with you and I've cried for the ones who made you, the ones I've lost...to whatever it was that tore us apart, from heroin to the blade to the gun...my heroes get cut down in their prime.
I've lived vicariously through the tropes, the fantasies, never wanting to admit that my own talent paled next to the ones I idolized. And yet even so I lived those fantasies out in real life, playing music in bands and the whole nine yards (minus the heroin, mind you...and the majority of wild sex haha).
I've written so much over these past what? 40 years? A lot of it comes back to haunt me. But I do my best to keep it in perspective and see it for what it is. Despite the fact that I am a "musical schizophrenic" I know that I'll always be able to ground myself in that one band of the moment, and that moment will take me back to the decade, the year, sometimes even to the day. Music is like that. What a powerful force it is.
Many times it inspires me to write, and I suppose that's what this is all about. I would love to publish a book of my writing but I come from simple means and I will not beg or presume that any of it is good enough that someone would pay their hard earned cash to buy a copy (even a cheap digital copy for the Kindle). I am perhaps, too humble in real life even though my style of writing is, as I like to describe it, in the gonzo vein of Lester Bangs. When I hit my stride I think I can do a decent Cameron Crowe. But I never put myself in their league because they helped invent the "rockcrit" gentre. I feel a kinship with Chuck Klosterman that I never did with Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffeild and I don't know why. Perhaps I see that old Creem magazine spirit in Klosterman's work while Sheffeild comes across as a hack.
Then again it's probably just me. I have friends who record their music on CASSETTES and somehow manage to sell them so that should be inspiration for me to move some archival blog material from this one (and other sources that have been published for gratis) to a medium which is supported by Amazon, Apple, wherever e-books are published...or even better, to see them printed in an actual book form. That would be a real dream come true but trust me, for I am a humble man, I know my limits.
So how do I get from that paragraph to the next without looking as if I'm soliciting funds for a book? I know more about how journalism and advertising work (and work together) than most journalism graduates and have honed some semblance of grammatical skills throughout the years (nope, I don't have a college degree in English or else I'd be teaching and let's not go into why I would make a horrible teacher).
Where's all this coming from, you may ask? Probably from watching the 2020 Grammies last night when I realized that the Real World and the world of Popular Music have merged into some kind of healing force that I am just not feelin'. Marred by the death of Kobe Bryant earlier in the evening the whole affair, at least the 2 hours I sat through, felt uncomfortable, like something really WAS missing from what Alicia Keyes described as "the house that Kobe built". Billie Eilish won best new artist and the facebook trolls were out in full force to cut her down based on her looks, her stage-prop fingernails and everything else BESIDES her angelic voice (at least it was angelic in the song she performed, she's no goody-two-shoes in most of her own music).
Pete Townsend wrote "the music must change" and he got his wish. I don't expect my music criticism to pull in cash money but I don't think it will ever change. So I'm content and hope to continue writing about the stuff I love as well as what I hate (and I hate a lot of music, people!). Same goes with the movies, though I don't watch nearly as many as I once did, for obviously they, too, "must change" and have. Case in point: Martin Scorcese's The Irishman. Has he (or anyone) ever produced a more violent film involving actual human beings that isn't in the horror genre? And yet I tortured myself by sitting through it's overlong 3 hour running time.
I'm a masochist...that has to be it. Then again, you kind of have to be to survive in these times.
Can I get an Amen?
