The Big Green House

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

 

Let's stay together

I haven’t set up my stereo system at Science Manor yet. I haven’t really had the time, and the room in which it’s going to go is full of stuff we haven’t really had a chance to sort out. In the interim, we’ve been using Science Girl’s boom box. It does a nice enough job, since we’ve mostly been using it as background while we unpack.

“Yes, yes. Very interesting, I’m sure. Do you have a point, or are you just boring us for sport?”

Since you ask, it’s a little of both.

Anyway, I bought the new Al Green CD the other day, along with Joss Stone’s CD. SG and I liked them both just fine*, although I haven’t really been able to give either one an in-depth listening. As I said, the music situation at Science Manor hasn’t quite shaken out yet, as it were. My point, or what I’m reasonably sure is my point, is that this sort of (you should forgive the phrase) old school soul is bound to have at least some sort of appeal to us, since that style of music was instrumental in the creation of the aesthetic sensibilities of the both of us. Or, put slightly less awkwardly, we both cut our musical eyeteeth, to a certain degree, on 70’s soul. It played a large part in the formation of our tastes, y’see.

My question, then, goes something like this: How does this music hit the ear of someone whose aesthetics are based in hip-hop? Does it sound horribly antiquated? Is it nothing more than soothing music for old farts? Or does it resonate as roots music, a precursor to the chosen style? Even in the darkest days of my teenage rivethead metal devotion, I could still enjoy 50’s-era rock & roll as a sort of ancestor worship. Perhaps something similar holds true with the youth of today. As one of the aforementioned old farts, I couldn’t tell ya.

Hip-hop, by and large, remains very much a mystery to me. It just hits my ear as being a very cold music, antithetical to the warmth I associate with soul and R&B. R&B in the Ray Charles sense, I mean; what they’re calling R&B these days is another mystifying thing. You kids today don’t know nothing about (twenty-page diatribe mercifully deleted). Now, maybe that’s just because I haven’t heard the right stuff. I dunno. I did hear an awful lot of what radio euphemistically refers to as Urban Contemporary while I was living in Oakland, though, and I can’t really think of anything I wanted to hear more than once.

I realize that, as a middle-aged white guy, I’m not exactly the target demographic for hip-hop. Parts of it are supposed to annoy me, and I’m fine with that. Music moves and changes, and it doesn’t always take everybody along for the ride. Eventually it’s quite possible that I will loose touch with all current music. I hope that day never comes, but it does happen, even in the best of families.

In the meantime, I wonder what the average seventeen-year-old would make of I Can’t Stop, if he/she ever got the chance to hear it.

*OK, Ms. Stone tends to push a little hard sometimes. But hey, she’s only sixteen. What were you doing when you were sixteen? Masturbating and reading sci-fi, right? Let’s cut her a little slack.

bmarkey 1/14/2004 10:11:00 PM