I hate to feel like I’m just getting old and only able to appreciate music from my youth. I’m still open to new music and find much to enjoy in the output of the current generation of music. However, I suppose like anyone, I do have a soft spot for the soundtracks of my younger days.
Unrest - Perfect Teeth (Bandcamp)
I tend to place a great deal of emphasis on harmony between the different parts of my life. When there is some sort of discontinuity, it vexes me. This can play out in pretty serious cognitive dissonance.1 It can also filter down to less consequential choices. One struggle I’ve always had is around media formats for music.
For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in a cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for me. I actually went out and sold my Smashing Pumpkins CDs, which I had been collecting since shortly after the release of their debut, Gish.
Not too long ago, I posted about a shoegaze cover of a music charts staple from decades ago and, well, I was sorely tempted to do it again.
I came across a YouTube channel for a service called Musora which bills itself as “the ultimate music lessons experience.” Musora offers a subscription which will help you learn to play an instrument and your favorite songs. For $20/month (with an annual subscription), you gain access to a suite of interactive practice tools and a community of like-minded students.
Madonna’s most well-known album, Like A Virgin just celebrated its 40th anniversary.
Like A Virgin was the first record I owned, given to me by my parents for my 9th birthday. The subject might have been a bit mature for me at that age, but it hardly mattered because I promptly broke the stylus on the family turntable. I couldn’t even listen to my gift. Of course, the hit songs from the record were all over commercial radio, anyway, so it wasn’t like Madonna’s tunes were hiding in obscurity.
Roon Audio has a new feature that should delight headphone lovers — OPRA (Open Profiles for Revealing Audio). OPRA is an open-source repository hosted on GitHub that contains precisely crafted headphone curves for different headphone models (and you get an equalizer, and you get an equalizer…).
I love Roon, although I’ve had my share of technical challenges — today I need to bring up two issues on the Roon Community forum. The ability of the platform to continuously innovate ways to give audio enthusiasts a better experience is impressive.
Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague about music. I had gone to see one of my direct reports' bands, and they were really genre-hopping. I told her about the experience and mentioned that they blended such far-flung musical styles as punk, hip-hop, and shoegaze. She said she loved shoegaze, but when I asked her if she was going to the Slowdive show, she confessed that she hadn’t heard of them. I was a bit shocked, since I would consider them just below My Bloody Valentine in the pantheon of shoegaze progenitors. I asked her what shoegaze bands she was into and she mentioned Emma Ruth Rundle, whom she described as metal/shoegaze.
In Paul Simpson’s review of the new album from the Houston-based Khruangbin (sorry, no link), A La Sala, he acknowledges the fact that they’ve moved past their influences into a sound all their own.
In many ways, though not in all, it’s gotten much harder to share the music you love with others. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago. For my wife’s birthday, my sister made her a playlist on Apple Music. This was thoughtful and kind, but unfortunately, we don’t have Apple Music. So my wife had to copy down the tracks that made up the list and find the songs to make her own playlist on Qobuz.
Back in the day, when you had a crush on someone, or simply wanted to spread the gospel of superbad tunes for getting down, you made a mixtape. If the recipient of your tape had a cassette player (which everyone did — they were standard government issue), they could listen to your creation until their heart's content. Or until the tape wore out (this is a real thing).