I had my birthday a few weeks back, which means now I can hang out with former A&E editor Jess Rodgers at Maloney’s (where everybody knows her name). The biggest change over the last year or so, though, has been in something unexpected – my musical taste.
The more music you listen to, the more you get a feeling for what attracts you to certain songs or genres, and for me there’s something about carefully produced albums by wistful, quiet artists such as The Softies or “Michigan”-era Sufjan Stevens.
I’m a sucker for a great guitar part, and it’s no surprise to me that my favorite artists of the last couple years have been acoustic guitar-playing rock musicians such as Ryan Adams and Wilco.
I’ve always been a melody junkie, from my initial exposure to The Beatles and Frank Sinatra on car trips with the family to my own fumbling exploration of local pop radio. The first CD I ever bought was Fastball’s “All the Pain Money Can Buy,” which still holds up today as a great pop-rock record, even outside of the ubiquitous “The Way.”
Perhaps inevitably, I started getting into edgier material when I started high school. Ben Folds Five and Fiona Apple were early favorites, and by the time I discovered the lo-fi late-night ruminations of Elliott Smith – who remains my all-time favorite artist – I’d kicked my fascination with pop-punk and dove headlong into indie rock.
The stuff I was listening to then wasn’t that different from the stuff I started out with. The Olivia Tremor Control was just The Beatles on better drugs, and the very non-indie Dave Matthews Band satisfied the love of acoustic guitars and folk songwriting that my dad led me into with Crosby, Stills & Nash and Simon and Garfunkel.
Finally, of course, there was Radiohead, the band that transcended every genre and stylistic expectation. My first experience with “The Bends” was quite possibly the most mind-blowing hour I’ve ever spent listening to music.
I think a lot of people have had similar experiences with the band. Either way, listening to them started knocking down a lot of doors in my brain.
I came to college ready for anything, hoping to have my nubile young ears turned on to new music.
I ended up just listening to a lot of Ryan Adams freshman year, but all the same, that openness paid off when a friend started getting into hip-hop and decided to make his way through the genre’s greatest works, one album at a time.
All of a sudden, I was replacing Wilco with Wu-Tang Clan, Galaxie 500 with Gang Starr, Neil Young with Nas. For a guy who was spending every waking moment listening to guitars and woe-is-me lyrics, drum machines and rap rhymes were a revelation.
This was music, believe it or not, that I could relate to. Cash rules everything around me. I, like Dr. Dre, still rock my khakis with a cuff and a crease.
And I wasn’t the only one. At summer camp last year, my campers and I bonded over Wu-Tang Clan. We brought the ruckus on a daily basis.
Aside from the obvious draws of excessive profanity, misogynistic portrayals of women and the thug-life aesthetic, what turned me on to hip-hop is the fact that I’m finally getting old enough to think I understand it.
The quality of what I listen to now has a lot to do with it, though – in middle school, my only real exposure to the genre was Puff Daddy. Er, P. Diddy. Diddy? Whatever.
Regardless, at the ripe old age of 21, I would honestly rather listen to the new Ghostface Killah album than Sufjan Stevens’ latest disc. Perhaps they’re an unlikely pair, but Ghostface and Sufjan have plenty of similarities: Both load their extra-long albums with unnecessary filler, flaunt their musical virtuosity, and write songs about murdering people.
So what’ll it be next year? Maybe when I turn 22 I’ll finally get into death metal or hardcore punk (doubtful) or get back to my roots and start listening to my mom’s Billy Joel LPs. All I know is I won’t be doing anything without the Wu-Tang Killa Bees.
Greenwald still listens to The Softies every night before he falls asleep. E-mail him at
dgreenwald@media.ucla.edu.