Turn on, tune in, opt out

“A sub­con­scious opt­ing out from the musical zeit­geist is a vital part of adult­hood. It’s a sur­vival mech­an­ism, a gentle nudge to remind us of the fun­da­mental divi­sion between the end of youth and the onset of early middle age.”

Yes, yes, yes, I couldn’t agree more with this art­icle, as penned by a former NME hack in this weekend’s Guard­ian, which argues that as we get older we shouldn’t be ashamed of our some­what nar­row­ing music tastes. Stand tall, and tell the fash­ionis­tas that you’re proud to be out of touch.

It’s undoubtedly sig­ni­fic­ant that this art­icle is from The Guard­ian too, as these days it’s prob­ably the primary source of the very infre­quent music reviews I read; the other recom­mend­a­tions tend to come from, well, you lot — blog­gers. I finally stopped buy­ing my sole remain­ing music monthly, Q magazine, just over a year ago, bring­ing to an end at least six­teen years of reg­u­larly flick­ing through music pub­lic­a­tions of some kind. There’s so much music thrown at us online, on TV and, of course, on the radio that I no longer felt the need to buy a magazine (the major­ity of which I didn’t usu­ally get round to read­ing) to keep me informed; besides which, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be kept informed.

I know I often joke about not hav­ing the slight­est idea what all the kids are listen­ing to, act­ing like my par­ents when I hap­pen to catch sight of the latest edi­tion of Top of the Pops and, above all, hear­ing the latest band tipped for the top and won­der­ing why they sound like they’re straight out of 1981, but I’m now fully pre­pared to admit that one of the best things that ever happened to my love for music was enter­ing my thirties. Because I simply don’t care anymore.

Think­ing back, it was actu­ally bloody exhaust­ing being a reader of both NME and Melody Maker each week, and then try­ing to keep up with every act upon whom they were busily bestow­ing the title of “best new band in Bri­tain”. It was impossible to make my stu­dent grant and, later, my unem­ploy­ment bene­fit or first mea­gre salary stretch to buy­ing all those new releases, and there was little or no chance of get­ting to hear pre­views of tracks in an age where online audio samples prob­ably hadn’t even appeared as a vis­ion of the future on Tomorrow’s World.

Inev­it­ably then, I would spend money I shouldn’t have spent and buy the occa­sional album in shiny new cas­sette format (yes, you heard, a cas­sette — I was never a vinyl junkie, and my first CD player wasn’t bought until 1993). I would then get my pur­chase home and invari­ably dis­cover that only half the songs by the music weeklies’ bright new hopes were actu­ally listen­able. I wouldn’t admit to that at the time, of course. Oh no. Like the emperor’s new clothes applied to the latest noisy indie darlings, I would nod along appre­ci­at­ively, whilst prob­ably secretly won­der­ing why I couldn’t just listen to Eras­ure instead and have done with it.

Take Sonic Youth, for instance — no, I mean it, please take Sonic Youth. A dec­ade or so on from buy­ing a few of their albums, can any­one look me in the eye and hon­estly tell me that they’ve ever sat through an entire Sonic Youth col­lec­tion and enjoyed it? No, I didn’t think so. And why did I buy Sonic Youth albums? Because the NME and Melody Maker told me to, froth­ing at the mouth about “mag­ni­fi­cent cathed­rals of noise and dis­tor­tion” (prob­ably) and pro­claim­ing them as the ground-breaking future of music. (Don’t take this crit­ical maul­ing per­son­ally if you’re a Sonic Youth fan — I still like a few songs from their back cata­logue, and this rant about my youth­ful music tastes could apply equally well to a host of other bands and artists that I’m prob­ably just too embar­rassed to men­tion here.)

I think this atti­tude of just want­ing to listen to whatever the hell you like listen­ing to has also fuelled the suc­cess of radio sta­tions such as Radio 2 and, to a lesser extent, 6 Music. Not yet pos­sess­ing a digital radio, I only get to listen to the lat­ter online, but I like its over­all approach. It feels like they’re play­ing through a mixed bag of CDs that have just been dragged out of an eclectic music col­lec­tion. In fact, if they have a vacancy, I’d rather like a show on that net­work. If I’d given them a taster of what was on my iPod this morn­ing as I lay in bed, you could have been listen­ing to Mazzy Star, fol­lowed by Sleep­ing Satel­lite by long for­got­ten one-hit won­der Tas­min Archer, Shake Some Action by The Flamin’ Groovies, an old Eras­ure song (I knew they’d get back in here some­how), a couple of wist­ful num­bers by Ed Har­court, some Kate Rusby, singer-songwriter stuff from Tom Bax­ter, ori­ginal vari­ety Brit­pop from The Auteurs, the new album from The Go-Betweens, and all fin­ished off with a little Icelandic elec­tron­ica from Mum. Oh, and there was a rev­er­en­tial clas­sical inter­lude for some Arvo Part, but I guess they might have passed on that one.

Hav­ing said all that, unlike the writer of the ori­ginal piece quoted above, I still draw the line at Phil Collins or Super­tramp. Well, you’ve got to have some stand­ards, haven’t you?