Finding New Music These Days, Part One

There was a fine New York Times article by Jennifer Finney Boylan titled "When Music Was Strange" (May 10 -- Google it, the link is way too long to type here). It's about how the search to find new ("strange") music has changed from 1975 when she was a teenager. (Her experience with the Miles Davis album "Bitches Brew" ?-- I'll talk about that in a later post. It won't be pretty.)

She, like a lot of us at that age, had similar avenues then to explore new music: the radio (FM, not AM), and friends in the know ("Hey, you have to hear this!") Independent record stores? Not yet. But now we have online music services that pretend to be your personal radio, programmed, as the Firesigns once said, "with your mind in mind". Did you like that last song? Here's one that sounds just like it! As Boylan says, it's "the musical equivalent of Fox News and MSNBC" -- a closed system with your own taste "reflected endlessly back". 

A lot of the music I enjoy, I liked immediately. But many of my favorites now weren't at first; they were too angular, too many rough edges, too...wrong. It takes work to listen past the familiar, to hear with different ears. Boylan mentions learning to love the difficult music of American classical composer Charles Ives (very much worth checking out  -- again, we'll talk later). Boylan suggests that the online streaming services would block this one -- too weird! -- and what a loss that would be.

I still listen to the radio: KING, KSER, CBC (there's good music to be found there, despite their best efforts to bury it under utter crap), but with the caveat that radio now plays a track without explaining "Yeah, great song, but the rest of the album, not so much..." Friends pass along recommendations, but many times, they're just echoing some magazine's "best of", and that's pretty dicey advice. Like Boylan, my son clues me in to what he's currently listening to, and I'd guess I like maybe 15%. Hey, it's HIS music, more power to him.

But I realized quite a long time ago that "new" means "new to me" -- it's new if I've never heard it before. I've been listening to a few collections of 78's -- yes, dusty shellac recorded in the '20s -- and there's truly great stuff there, including a track by Geeshy Wiley, recently profiled in ... the Sunday New York Times magazine! 

Part Two: Okay smarty, where DO I find new tunes, and not just rewarmed versions of songs I already like?