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| Starting over. With a fresh appreciation of the dangers. |
[Ed. - This is a successor blog to another one titled, A Project of Self Indulgence. The story of its demise will follow the formal introduction of this new project, but the short version is that its ambitions outgrew the original premise.]
Welcome to MAME, aka, Middle Age Music Express (and if you’re NME, it’s a tribute, please don’t sue), a site devoted to popular music in its abundance of forms. I’ve concocted several running features, most of them built around brief histories of musical artists, and a hell of a lot of links to Youtube’s (apparently) infinite collection of music. That said, as this site’s one and only author and curator of content, my taste in music will drive a lot of content, for good or ill.
I use the phrase “popular music” to encompass just about any musical form that follows the “verse/chorus” structure that goes back to at least the Tin Pan Alley era (i.e., late 19th century through about the 1930s). A heavy majority of what I listen to starts with the early-1960s and continues to music that’s coming out right now; in other words, I do try to keep up (and enjoy it). To further narrow down what this business of “my taste in music” means, I generally like the indie stuff, and don't like Top 40, or most things you can hear on the radio. [Ed. - Related: I have a visceral hatred of radio as a conceptual failure.] To give a brief history of favorite genres: I started with classic rock until the middle of high school, which is when I found punk/alternative/”college” rock; from there, garage rock lead to a broader appreciation of independently-produced music generally and, I had my first encounters with rap/hip hop starting with the late 1980s, but my interest/education on that only really took off around 2010.
A lot of back-and-forth comes in and out of the above timeline – e.g., after starting with them, then kicking them to the curb in a fit of snobbery, I reconnected with The Who in my early 30s – and that’s a fair warning on how this site will operate. My general preferences don’t mean I won’t one day spend two weeks trying to figure out all the fuss around, say, Beyonce.
Moving on now to nuts-‘n’-bolts, at the risk of crawling back into the tiger pit to jump up and down on the jagged bamboo sticks (see the past/below), I plan on producing the following features.
1) One-Hit No More – About the one-hit wonders from American pop music and the other stuff they did.
2) New to Me/MAME Playlist – Biweekly posts that will give brief histories/appreciations of three bands/artists. Because I don’t see the point in crapping on creative work, I’m only going to review artists that I like. 40-50 song playlists will pony onto those posts and, at the end of every month, I’ll whittle down the two playlists into one final 50-song, MAME monthly playlist.
3) Rotating Feature [Name Pending] – A kind of cover story for every two-week production cycle. I’m going to stick to simple, fairly modest topics at the beginning – e.g., a deep-dive into just one artist – but I hopeful to grow to where I can get more creative with the topics once I find my feet.
I’m leaving out a couple details (e.g., I take requests), but that’s the introduction to MAME. I’m going to link to this in the “About Me” space on the site and use it as m bio. Anyway, I hope that anyone who stumbles into this blog enjoys it or, failing that, that I give them something new to listen to. Now, the sordid history of this site’s predecessor, or, as I’m naming it:
Over Indulgence, aka, The Demise of A Project of Self Indulgence
It all started when a bored little boy (me) got on Spotify. This amounted to putting a very, very large record store in my back pocket. When I discovered that I could listen to pretty much any music I wanted to, at any time, and with very little effort…well, that bored little boy (me) lost his whole damn mind. If you want to stop me (and for whoever’s benefit), I think you’d have to steal my phone…
The original premise of the project was to go through my entire music collection (about 270 folders’ worth on my desktop, about 300 CDs, with a fair amount of overlap between them) one band at a time and to just…write about the music. Personal reminiscences filled in some of the content (for instance, with Mudhoney, Fastbacks, and Treepeople), but most of it was nothing more or less than me trying to describe, deconstruct and analogize the music I was hearing. I’m not very good at that, as it turns out; in fact, I kind of suck at it. (In my defense, the several actual musicians to whom I’ve spoken about music weren’t very good at talking about music either.) The key detail in all this: at no point did I make any attempt to learn about the people making the music I was hearing, or to understand them as artists. I called this feature One Last Pick Through the Bins, aka, the Bins Project. That’s where it all started.
As I got frustrated, I started creating new features, among them: New to Me, which reviewed any band/artist I’d never heard of before one album at a time; a history of American popular music from 1820-1930; and, when I really lost my fucking mind, I was putting out daily playlists/posts under the title, Songs Y’All. It was the New to Me feature, however, that, in the (borrowed) words of Susan Sarandon, “heightened the contradictions” that led to A Project of Self Indulgence’s unraveling. When I couldn’t think of anything fresh to say about a band’s/artist’s music, I started read about them. That didn’t just bring me closer to my comfort zone; it gave me something to say, something worth passing on. The posts got better, and to a point where just about everything that came before it withered under comparison. As someone who takes pride in this stuff, it was brutal.
I attempted to salvage A Project of Self Indulgence by (finally) putting in the research and rewriting the posts. It was slow work, unfortunately, and more...humiliating (honestly) than anticipated. After fighting long enough to get through 17 rewrites (some of them quite good, and steadily improving), I finally and completely tapped out at the thought of doing nearly 40 more rewrites. And I mean completely: in the ensuring purge, I deleted A Project of Self Indulgence, and beyond recovery; I even deleted all the Word files in order to remove all temptation. Even though that was about as fun as shaving my tongue with a rusty razor, when I picked through the first of the New to Me posts night to see if I could find anything to salvage there, that just confirmed I’d done the right thing. (If my computer wasn’t being weird I would have deleted those as well.)
Those two years were not a total loss. I kept the American popular music history drafts and will do something with them once I figure out a good use for them. I also held onto the more recent posts for A Project of Self Indulgence, the ones that came after I had a better sense of what I wanted to do. If all goes according to plan, MAME will pick up where those left off.
On that, I did get about 10 posts into the One-Hit No More project. I’ll be dropping those onto MAME over the next week or so, both to get that feature up to speed and to get this site rolling generally. And, after that, the real work will begin. Wish me luck and calm.
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