"Listen," to me
Jan. 15th, 2008 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfield"What really matters is what you like, not what you are like."
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
If it's January, that means it's time for the most hotly anticipated holiday greeting of the year: ERD's "Listen, Dammit," an annual collection (for the last several years, stretching to two full discs) of the previous year's best music, as selected by the Hartford Courant's resident rock critic and hipster-warrior-poet.
For one thing, I think the idea is brilliant. Instead of summing up the year with an inoffensively trite spiritual message or a preening list of his accomplishments over the preceding 12 months, he not only tells me about the year in music -- he tells me about his year, in music.
And, of course, ERD has a well-honed aesthetic sensibility, posessing an encyclopedic knowledge of rock music[1]: he will happily tell you what was the very first alt-country album, or which pretentiously pseudonymous producer is behind the latest robo-Britney single, or when Neko Case brushed her teeth this morning. He knows what he's writing about.
Every year I anxiously unwrap the CD and scan the liner notes, looking for my favorite songs and performers, hoping that "Listen, Dammit" will somehow validate my own taste in music, like the Super Bowl does for our favorite professional sports franchises. "Listen, Dammit" is about a million times more relevant than the Grammys, which not only defies conventional pluralization but practically kicks logical deduction in the nuts.
And every year, I find the playlist foreign to the point of being disorienting, like I'm watching the trailer for a low-budget futuristic horror-fantasy.[2]
So, while I always look forward to it, it always makes me sad. Not because I don't like the music, but because I inevitably feel so horribly uncool. Or even worse: stupid.
I should point out that ERD's selections are not wildly out of line with what most respected professional music auteurs are picking for their annual "best-of" lists. And I should further point out that all the other recipients of "Listen, Dammit" (those who actually listen to it, anyway) love it -- like, LOVE it. LOVE it to the point where they intend to name their first child "Listen Dammit Smith."
I try really hard to enjoy most of these songs, and sometimes it just feels like I'm trying to see the sailboat in one of those 1990s-era 3D posters and I cannot see the sailboat, goddammit. Either these songs are so sophisticated and complex, made of seven different layers and smothered in irony, that I can't relax and enjoy the music, or they are so elegantly simple that they slip through the net cast wide in my brain.
And if Hornby's right, that you are what you like, does that make me deaf and dumb? Pedestrian and cultureless? If I could just get it, I could be smart, and cool. Instead, I feel like Andy Rooney. Which is horribly depressing, at least until I hear a song that grabs me. Because deep down, I really just want to be grabbed.
So I may not understand "Listen, Dammit," or even fully appreciate it, but I trust ERD if he tells me that it rocks. Even if it's just a big, unwieldy boulder that's tough for me to get my arms around, I usually find a nugget of gold wedged somewhere in the cracks.
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
If it's January, that means it's time for the most hotly anticipated holiday greeting of the year: ERD's "Listen, Dammit," an annual collection (for the last several years, stretching to two full discs) of the previous year's best music, as selected by the Hartford Courant's resident rock critic and hipster-warrior-poet.
For one thing, I think the idea is brilliant. Instead of summing up the year with an inoffensively trite spiritual message or a preening list of his accomplishments over the preceding 12 months, he not only tells me about the year in music -- he tells me about his year, in music.
And, of course, ERD has a well-honed aesthetic sensibility, posessing an encyclopedic knowledge of rock music[1]: he will happily tell you what was the very first alt-country album, or which pretentiously pseudonymous producer is behind the latest robo-Britney single, or when Neko Case brushed her teeth this morning. He knows what he's writing about.
Every year I anxiously unwrap the CD and scan the liner notes, looking for my favorite songs and performers, hoping that "Listen, Dammit" will somehow validate my own taste in music, like the Super Bowl does for our favorite professional sports franchises. "Listen, Dammit" is about a million times more relevant than the Grammys, which not only defies conventional pluralization but practically kicks logical deduction in the nuts.
And every year, I find the playlist foreign to the point of being disorienting, like I'm watching the trailer for a low-budget futuristic horror-fantasy.[2]
So, while I always look forward to it, it always makes me sad. Not because I don't like the music, but because I inevitably feel so horribly uncool. Or even worse: stupid.
I should point out that ERD's selections are not wildly out of line with what most respected professional music auteurs are picking for their annual "best-of" lists. And I should further point out that all the other recipients of "Listen, Dammit" (those who actually listen to it, anyway) love it -- like, LOVE it. LOVE it to the point where they intend to name their first child "Listen Dammit Smith."
I try really hard to enjoy most of these songs, and sometimes it just feels like I'm trying to see the sailboat in one of those 1990s-era 3D posters and I cannot see the sailboat, goddammit. Either these songs are so sophisticated and complex, made of seven different layers and smothered in irony, that I can't relax and enjoy the music, or they are so elegantly simple that they slip through the net cast wide in my brain.
And if Hornby's right, that you are what you like, does that make me deaf and dumb? Pedestrian and cultureless? If I could just get it, I could be smart, and cool. Instead, I feel like Andy Rooney. Which is horribly depressing, at least until I hear a song that grabs me. Because deep down, I really just want to be grabbed.
So I may not understand "Listen, Dammit," or even fully appreciate it, but I trust ERD if he tells me that it rocks. Even if it's just a big, unwieldy boulder that's tough for me to get my arms around, I usually find a nugget of gold wedged somewhere in the cracks.
Always trust ERD
Date: 2008-01-16 03:14 pm (UTC)Anyway, it's not always about being the hippest person in the room, is it?
Re: Always trust ERD
Date: 2008-01-16 03:29 pm (UTC)In this case, it is about my fear of exclusion rather than my want of exclusivity. As with any artsy endeavor, you just don't want to be the one person who doesn't understand it, the guy who looks at a Jackson Pollack and thinks, "what's the big deal?"
Maybe there's a problem with my brain, which has been regimentally primed for semiotic parsing and analysis, but I need to know what makes these songs so admired.
You can't really hum them. You can't dance to them. Most of the singers' voices aren't very good. I can't even tell if the instruments are in tune. Apparently there is some overwhelming humanity or beauty in these songs and I don't see it. Maybe I just haven't listened to it enough.
Re: Always trust ERD
Date: 2008-01-16 04:02 pm (UTC)Take another listen — of course you can dance to them! Right now, somewhere, a DJ is spinning that Lady Sovereign song from last year's LD collection.