Is It Real, Or Is It Memorex?

At my age, I often find myself falling into dismissive territory when I consider new music.  I fall back onto the music of the past for inspiration or simply for enjoyment.  Sometimes I mislabel my emotions or actions as nostalgia, sentimentalism, or familiarity.  I think now its a matter of holding boredom at arm's length.

Pop culture rarely reinvents itself.  Its always a distillation of the distant past or recent-past.  One thing sells so 20 other things that look or sound or feel like it will crop up next.  It is the nature of pop culture and the machine of manufacture, it has always been this way.

I can listen to a number of bands that are popular with today's hipster sect, and I can understand why their passions are aroused.  Self knowing glossiness, self awareness in all-too-knowing lyrics, smugness, routine grinding out of a song that follows a prescribed template.  The trail is always less cluttered when it has been traveled before and the way is easily seen.

Distraction is the last thing you want to have when listening to new music.  When you find yourself drawing a mental line of procession backward from what is coming through the speakers, to the original source, the intent of listening to new music is lost. After the 3rd or 4th derivative generation there is no more distillation from the inspiration, it is all dilution at that point.  This, is what I have been experiencing.

This isn't to say I don't find "new" music to listen to.  For more than a decade I have been finding new music by digging further into the past of rock and pop music and scouring the dimly lit corners.  New music has become the jazz I couldn't comprehend 20 years ago.  There is still something new to listen to, at least something new to me.

I do keep a fantasy alive in my heart that some kid is going to emerge on the music scene, with a sound and energy we haven't seen before.  I dream that they will burn in the minds of millions of young people.  I don't dream of this for personal reasons, I honestly do not care if I get them or not.  I simply wish people below a certain age could live the experience of seeing the world open up before their eyes like some odd fruit because a completely new way of communication has been found.

I may be overly sentimental at times.  If I am, it is only because I can so vividly remember what it was once like to have the wool pulled back from my eyes.  That vision fades in intensity as time passes, but the feelings never diminish.