The Highs and Lows of Rediscovering Music

Most audiophiles out there will agree that there is a certain sense of joy in discovering new music. Even if it’s something as awful as Rebecca Black, there’s just something about finding it, being able to talk about it, being able to anonymously spew verbal abuse about her and her music over YouTube that gives us a feeling of inclusion, and most importantly, an ability to exclude certain people from our conversations.

What about rediscovering music though? It’s something I have done a lot of by chance recently. And it can be fun, an enjoyable nostalgia of sorts. I’m currently listening to Jay-Z’s Vol.2 – Hard Knock Life, one of the very first hip-hop albums I ever owned – and this was back when I did buy all my CD’s legally. It’s nice, it’s been at least two years since I last listened to the album in its entirety. But that is just about where the joy of rediscovering this particular personal treasure ends. I’m listening to it, enjoying it, but I know that if I were to click shuffle on iTunes at any point after the album is finished, I could well be confronted with a modern incarnation of this music – a Flo Rida or 50 Cent track which I bought years ago and be so thoroughly disappointed by the way music has gone that I decide to slit my wrists with the broken shards of their CD’s. Yesterday’s music has been completely and utterly bastardised. Some genres have definitely suffered worse than others though.

Hip-hop and rap music was at one point everything to me. Even though I am, and to the best of my awareness, always have been white and Scottish. But it really did move me. There was so much passion. There was real story telling. There was something. Now more than ever it is all about shit I’ve never heard off using London slang which alienates everyone north of Barnet (approximately). The worst thing though is that anything meaningful is pushed further underground than a Chilean miner and almost impossible to come across.

Rock music (as much as I hate that idiotic sounding term) seems to have gotten progressively stronger. With the exception of manufactured pop-punk bands of the You Me At Six vane of course. There really are some great bands out there, and most impressively, it’s some of the ‘classic rock’ bands that are making some great stuff; AC/DC, Iron Maiden, etc. But again, soon after I’ll come across a band which I thought were bloody good only a year or two ago, and wonder why I subjected my ears to such torture.

There is, however, one genre that seems not to age, not to be cheesy, not to be uncool. Acoustic music. There’s something in that particular genre that is timeless. Stuff from Johnny Cash all the way down to exciting new up-and-comers like Ed Sheeran is always refreshing and conveys emotion perfectly. But even that’s in danger. As long as people continue to cover ridiculous pop songs, manufactured by the same band of X-Factor autocrats, that made a right cock up of Many of Horror as lately as last Christmas, we could be in for another slow decade before we get some real music again. Guess I’ll stick to the Biffy for now…