If you’re dead , I wanna hear your stuff.

I’ve been looking at some of my aural preferences in the pop genre, and an interesting trend is in play. I tend to gravitate towards pop artists with mental problems that died penniless and in relative obscurity. Aside from the obvious ones I’ve written about (Judee Sill, Gene Clark, Curt Boettcher) combined with some I’ve yet to write about (Nick Drake, Dennis Wilson, Syd Barrett) you could say that a serious chunk of what I listen to falls into this category.

The other category is just plain dead and there are several corkers here as well. James Brown, Steve Marriott, Marvin Gaye, Lennon, Hank Williams and many others are all freaking dead. OK, so much of this is happenstance. I am after all 47 years old and time does march on. Even though everybody in “The Wizard Of Oz” is dead there is no curse on the movie. It’s just that it was made in 1929.

Somewhere along the way I became pretty jaded towards new music. This is pretty much my problem as opposed to music’s. There is plenty of good new music being released if one has the time and/or inclination to find it. Alas, therein lies the rub. During the post punk wars of the early to mid eighties, I had plenty of free time to find these bands, and plenty of disposable income to blow on records. Most of what was out there I hated too, but thanks to college radio I found stuff like Husker Du, The Replacements, The Smiths and others that made the ‘80’s a memorable decade. However, It was still a million miles away from the mainstream.

Eventually real life got in my way. But something else happened, too. I started in on the “how did I miss out on THIS?” kick. I found that by going backwards I could find lots of things that floated my boat and then some. By gravitating towards music message boards on the internet combined with the input from my infinitely musical younger brother, I was able to unearth metric tons of music that had been around forever that somehow missed me. Some was ultra obscure, but there were good chunks that were popular and right under my nose.

For example, I could never get past the tye-dye culture and the hippie-dippie mentality of The Grateful Dead. I could not hear the music because I couldn’t bear to witness the lifestyle. Once that barricade was broken though, an entire floodgate was opened (Airplane, Love, CSNY, Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield) and I suddenly had a backlog of music to listen to just like the old days. All it took was a little de-snob-ification.

So I started to go back even further. Between Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Williams, Armstrong and others, I had lots of catching up to do. I figured that if something new came down the pike it would find me and if it didn’t, it probably was not that good to begin with. Well, this was wrong too.

One of the main reasons I started to ignore new music in general was because I was unhappy with the trend towards pop idols manufactured in board rooms for maximum consumption. To me this was a step backwards for the industry as a whole. Like living through Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon all over again. The edgier stuff was just too damn edgy with most of the lyrics I could only decipher as “kill all the white people”. It became easier and more fruitful to just go backwards and dig deep.

This year though, some newer things happily found their way towards me. These artists have bolstered my spirit and given me a glimmer of hope about the future. Did I finally come around, or is it just that newer more diverse types of music are actually finding an audience in an industry that now is taking more risks to keep itself afloat? I’d like to think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Anyway, it’s nice to be back. I’m still more apt to go backwards than forwards, but at least I’m willing to dip my toe in the water again.