I love music, and I hate classic rock.
OK, that’s not the entire story.
I’ll never stop listening to Bowie songs from his peak 1970s albums. I love classic Rolling Stones songs. My favorite band of all time, The Clash, is now old enough to be considered classic rock—even though that band came out of a movement that was bored with mainstream rock of the mid-1970s.
But listening to the same old stuff isn’t good enough for my music-hungry brain. As I head into “old man” territory with my chronological age, I want to keep my ears busy with new tunes.
When I was coming of age in the ‘80s and discovering my musical tastes as a young teen, discovering new music was easy. You just turned on the radio. MTV and music magazines (Spin and the British mag Q were my favorites) filled in the gaps.
These days, the radio, especially commercial radio, is a bad way to discover new music, at least for me. Websites like Stereogum (my favorite), as well as Pitchfork and NME, keep me updated on new music much better than radio. I often hear things via websites that don’t make it big on the radio until a year later. Which smugly satisfies my inner music snob.
All this is on my mind as I’m in the midst of my annual important-to-nobody-but-me process of figuring out my favorite 20 songs of the past year. I’ve done it for several years each December, and I post those that make the list to Facebook and Twitter. It’s a self-important exercise that few of my friends even glance at, but it makes me happy and is an excuse to “research” the “best of 2016” lists on music-oriented websites.
And a question has crept in while assembling this year’s list: Am I—to crib from LCD Soundsystem—losing my edge? I listen to Beyonce’s “Lemonade” or Frank Ocean’s “Blond” (no “e” on the end of that title, folks!) and I can appreciate it, but it doesn’t excite my ears. To be honest, I’ve never been an R&B guy, and so much of today’s hip-hop is heavily tinged with R&B sounds.
I reassure myself by realizing there are plenty of brand-new-to-me artists in my list of songs for this year, and my very favorite songs still jolted me when I first heard them. But I also am increasingly aware that the parameters of my musical tastes are in danger of narrowing. After all, ‘70s punk, ‘80s pop and ‘90s alternative form the bedrock of my tastes, laid down during those years when music, emotions and life-changing experiences all get fused together.
My goal is to make sure I rage against that narrowing and keep my ears open. As long as I don’t feel the need to lock in a “classic rock” station among my car radio’s preset buttons, I’ll be keeping up that goal.