"Listen," to me

[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.

Comments

Always trust ERD

[(Anonymous)]

As a relative newcomer to Listen, Dammit, I admit these discs have prompted in me a similar self-recognition as a non-hipster. Then again, when I DO recognize a song, or find some gem that I can mention at cocktail parties, I realize that most of the people around me aren't that cool, either, so even a glimmer of hipness puts me above the pack.

Anyway, it's not always about being the hippest person in the room, is it?

Re: Always trust ERD

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

If I wanted to be the hippest person in any given room, I would have to try a lot harder. For example, as I write this I am unironically wearing a sweater vest. If I were wearing it ironically -- like, some crazy argyle pattern or with a pair of Chuck Taylors -- then I would have something. But instead I look like somebody's uncle.

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.

[1]

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

There is a whole dictive problem with trying to explain just what kind of music Eric specializes in, partially because some of the terms are so connotatively loaded, and partially because the Music World and the Music Business are endlessly fragmented and subdivided.

I could have said "popular" music, but this gets confused with "pop" music (which isn't really the same thing, definitively) and is itself interally misleading because its real popularity depends on which audience you are talking about; American Idol is terrifically popular but ERD covers it as if it were toxic waste.

I could have said "commercial" music but ERD's expertise is in "independent" and "unsigned" bands. There is apparently a difference between these two terms; I don't know what the difference is, but I assume that both terms are nevertheless at odds with explicitly commercial endeavors.

I could have said "contemporary" music, but this not only marginalizes the music of prior eras, it casts the net a bit too widely. The "songs" of Hannah Montana and Philip Glass (separately; to my knowledge they have not joined forces) are techincally "contemporary" but ERD is not giving them the time of day.

So I selected "rock" music, because (a) that is what his actual job title suggests, and (b) it has become sufficiently stretched and twisted that nobody really knows what it is anymore. So we're all on the same page.

[2]

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

'This summer: Listen, Dammit Records presents "Radiohead," a creature from outer space that paralyzes its victims with tritonic chord progressions and banishes them to endless ultrasonic soundscapes. After being pronounced M.I.A. after an Arcade Fire, the Priestess (Lady Sovereign) with her still-Flaming Lips tracks The Kills through The Broken West all the way to Beirut and takes on the Ol' Dirty Bastard with her Cat Power. Directed by Tim Burton. Now showing in LCD Soundsystem! Not recommended for minors or viewers with epilepsy.'

Re: Always trust ERD

[village-twins.livejournal.com]

Take another listen — of course you can hum them! I've got M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" in my head right now.

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.

Re: [1]

[hbinc.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, every band on "Listen, dammit" is signed to a record label. Many of those labels are, however, independent, in that they are owned by someone other than a major music conglomerate such as EMI or Universal.

Figuring out what kind of music I cover can indeed be tricky. When asked, I usually tell people that my beat includes everything that's not jazz or classical music.

Re: [2]

[(Anonymous)]

Unlike the sweater vest, this seems to be dripping with irony, so I think you've at least got some of that hipness covered.

I wear my sweater vests without a hint of irony, by the way. But I do have a tripped-out argyle one.