Music & Me

It’s that time of the year again, the time for Best-Of year-end lists.  I’m already seeing a few Best Albums of 2010 lists, and I recognize maybe one or two artists, more if I’m lucky.  Back in my heyday when I obsessed over making my own Best-Of list, I’d recognize at least half of the artists on lists, usually more.  But now, I’m beginning to realize how much I don’t really care about music.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love music.  I still get goosebumps to certain songs and ride the high of my favorite albums, but…I just don’t care about music as much as I used to.  Back when I really got into music, everything was new and amazing.  Underworld and Orbital were my favorite artists, and I obsessed over them, staying up late just to listen and relisten to their best songs even when my eyes could barely stay open.  I found a bunch of great people online who loved them as much as me, and I discovered so many new artists from them.  It was a golden era for me and music.

But, it did not last.  Keeping up with new music each year to do a Best-Of list became a chore rather than a delight.  I’ve always been stingy about downloading music, particularly crappy music, so I never downloaded a bunch of music to sort through.  And when my interest waned from keeping up-to-date, I didn’t care about music quite as much.  I haven’t done a Best-Of list in years.  I’ve listened to maybe three albums all this year.

Seeing the Best-Of lists each year now just makes me sad and frustrated.  Sad, because I feel like I’m missing out, not just on the music but on the communal experience that goes with listening and following music with friends.  Frustrated, because there’s just too much out there to follow, that it’s too much work to follow music sometimes, that I’ve lost much of my interest in following new music.  Yes, I know the internet is a great resource (how else would I be able to follow Underworld and Orbital in America without it?), but damn it, the internet is too big.  There’s too much information for me to take in and process.

Also, other things have taken over my interests.  Comics, of course, are my main focus now.  Back when I was into music, I tried my hand at creating music on my computer, and I produced some decent songs.  I even flirted with the idea of becoming a DJ by purchasing a pair of turntables and a mixer, but now they sit in the basement gathering dust.  I thought I could be a musician, and maybe with enough determination that could’ve been a possibility, but my love for comics and my desire to make comics soon outweighed any musical ambitions I had.
So now I’m concentrating on my writing and comics.  If you’ve been following my Twitter account, then you’ve probably heard I had some computer troubles recently.  My biggest fear was that my computer would lose all my files, which I had stupidly not backed up.  I wasn’t concerned so much about my music being lost as I was about my writings.  I figured I could always replace my music collection, but my writings were impossible to replace.  Thankfully, I didn’t lose my files.  But you can rest assure, I will back up my writings on a more frequent basis.

My relationship to music has diminished that much in the past few years.  It’s to the point where I could probably go a week or two without listening to music, and some days I actually don’t listen to music at all.  A part of me wants to follow everything I can, to be up-to-date.  Then again, a part of me wants to read the classics like War and Peace and Moby Dick, but those books have been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for years.  So I’m starting to come to grips with my fading interest in music, or rather my pursuit of music, because I still do love music.  I’ll read the Best-Of lists, get a little nostalgic, and who knows, maybe I’ll listen to them sometime.

Underworld - Barking

Without question my favorite musical act of all time is Underworld.  They would have to commit genocide or cover a Britney Spears song for me to stop liking them (well, I’d probably find some way to rationalize one of those—I’m not going to say which).  Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Second Toughest in the Infants are always good for a couple dozen plays on my iPod every year, and despite being over 15 years old, they still sound fresh.  I found the Dirty Forums sometime in the early ‘00s when I started to dig deep into their work, and I became friends with hundreds of fans across the world, even developing some actual friendships.  The first time I saw them perform live in Denver ’07 was like a religious experience for this very non-religious person.  My many late nights of staying up listening, adoring, reveling in their music had honed my ears to recognize each song from that concert within a few notes.  When I was able to, I’d catch their online radio broadcasts that catered to us hardcore fans, and I turned into a giddy schoolgirl when Karl Hyde read my questions in that amazing speaking voice of his.  And I even isolated those questions of mine he spoke into individual mp3 files that I still have.

Yes, I am a total geek or nerd or whatever-you-want-to-call-me when it comes to Underworld.  I can’t help it, really.  I remember first hearing “Cowgirl” over (…holy crap…) ten years ago and being blown away by it.  Up until that point, I had never heard a song like this, the typical four-minute pop song format blown apart for something completely different and original.  There wasn’t a structure, at least not one I recognized, but my patience in listening to the eight minute song paid off, and I was hooked.  I am always excited to hear new Underworld music, seeking it out from whatever obscure British radio program had played those glorious new sounds.

Until now.  After a few listens through Underworld’s new album Barking, I am simply lost for words.  The conceit was that each track would be a collaboration with another artist, that Karl and Rick Smith would work on a song and have another artist tweak it in some way.  And I don’t know quite what to make of this.  Some tracks like “Bird 1” and “Always Loved A Film” work pretty well, but the rest just lose me.  There doesn’t seem to be any structural framework to this album.  Unlike Second Toughest in the Infants, there’s no cohesion.  I could listen to one track at a time and feel satisfied (to an extent, assuming the song is any good), but going from start to finish feels disjointed.

But the biggest problem here is nowadays I don’t know what Underworld sounds like.  Yes, I know collaborating with nine different artists is going to produce nine different sounds, but each song has a common denominator:  Rick and Karl.  Especially on Barking, they sound like they’re trying to imitate other artists.  I feel like I’m listening to other artists albums where Karl is singing as a guest.  I felt the same way with their previous album Oblivion With Bells but to a lesser extent (as they didn’t collaborate with someone on every song).  That album still sounded like Underworld at times (i.e. “Beautiful Burnout” and “Best Mamgu Ever”), but the rest felt like their half-baked attempts at experimentation.

This is not to say Underworld can’t experiment with new sounds and try something else—far from it.  That’s one of the reasons I gravitated towards them.  They weren’t like anyone else I had ever heard before, and to this day, Pandora has a tough time finding songs that sound like them.  Their early work is still some of the most inspired, layered, and amazing music I have ever heard or will ever hear.  Karl’s stream of consciousness lyrics turned his voice into another instrument, and despite their seeming randomness, those words evoked strong emotions that require deeper exploration into their meaning.  From 1992 to 1996, they weren’t just on top of their game, they were ahead of everyone else’s game by at least ten light-years.

So what has changed since then?  Well, they’ve obviously gotten older.  They’re in their 50s and have turned into elder statesmen of electronic music.  Karl overcame his battle with alcoholism, which may or may not have something to do with it.  I don’t want to ascribe too much to this point since I think it’s a cliché, and I don’t buy into the drugs-produce-great-art theory.  But the elephant in the room is that Darren Emerson left after Beaucoup Fish.  Unfortunately, I’m beginning to come around to this theory.

But there’s a few things that I still don’t know about this last one.  First off, Beaucoup Fish was a pretty good album, but a steep drop off from Second Toughest in the Infants.  Sure, it produced gems like “Cups,” “Push Upstairs,” and “Jumbo,” but the middle of the album isn’t as prolific or put together as the bookends.  And as such I don’t find myself listening to Beaucoup Fish all that often.  Second, A Hundred Days Off, the first album post-Emerson, was not a big of a thud as everyone thinks.  It follows pretty much the same pattern as its predecessor; “Mo Move” and “Two Months Off” are amazing, and “Luetin” is phenomenal.  Sure, it was more subdued, but it still sounded like Underworld.

Even if you disagree with that entire paragraph, there’s still the matter of “Pizza For Eggs.”  This “single” (I don’t know what to call it) was 25 minutes of pure genius, on par with their early 90s work.  It was everything Underworld was back then but new and amazing.  For a brief time, it felt like they had returned to what made them great.  Until Oblivion With Bells that is.

So where does this leave me?  They are still my favorite musical artist.  They’ve moved me and inspired me too much to remove themselves from that spot.  Simply, I have too many good memories to outweigh these past few years.  It’s like how I feel watching new episodes of The Simpsons; the show was so phenomenal for so many years, I can’t help but think good thoughts about it despite what it’s turned into now.  And honestly, that’s not a bad position for them to be in.