After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Boy With The Hammer" by Mark Eitzel
I'm taking a brief respite from the big topics this week in order do one of my periodic "state of the project" updates. (Next week I'll be writing about religion, so gear up for that one.) We're now past the halfway point for Popless, and as I move into the second half of this project, I confess I feel better knowing that I'm closer to the end than the start. Popless has been a rewarding experience so far, primarily for the opportunity it's given me to organize my thoughts along with my music collection. But come next year, I won't miss spending every weekend engaged in marathon writing sessions that last from Saturday morning to Monday noon (broken up by trips to the playground with my kids, during which I'm usually wearing headphones and carrying a notepad)*.
And yes, I am starting to miss new music. I'm not missing the hype-cycle, in which a record can go from the most important piece of music of the year one week to being all but forgotten a few weeks later. (Is anyone still talking about the new My Morning Jacket? A month ago they were all over TV and the entertainment magazines, but I haven't heard much about them since.) Still, there are albums out there I'm anxious to hear (including MMJ), and I'm looking forward to getting back to that old feeling of putting on a new record for the first time and feeling my way through it, one song at a time**.
One question I've been torturing myself with, though: When I start listening to new music again, will I still be diligent about sorting and purging? I don't know about you guys, but I'm kind of a mania for order when it comes to my media. You wouldn't know it to look around my house, where piles of CDs and DVDs crowd every corner while my actual CD and DVD cabinets sit largely bare, but the reason for the disparity is because I'm so persnickety. I'm trying to store my media in such a way that I can add and subtract pieces easily for decades to come. I'm trying to keep it simple, while also creating some groupings that will help me think about my movies and my records in new ways. (Should I file Blade Runner under sci-fi/fantasy, or noir, or '80s, or Ridley Scott?)
I'm trying to do the same with the music on my computer. I'm keeping my favorite albums intact on CD—and I have a lot of favorite albums—but I'm also using iTunes and my external hard drive to organize artists into playlists that can be easily loaded onto my iPod when this project is done, and creating genre-based playlists for all the odds and ends. And there's where it gets tricky. Like, how should I file this song?
"The Sound Of The Suburbs" by The Members
In the abstract, it doesn't matter that much. If I dump it into iTunes, I can pull it up by "The Members" or I can pull it up along with all the other songs on Rhino's No Thanks anthology (which is where I sourced it), or I can just put my whole library on shuffle and let "The Sound Of The Suburbs" come up wherever. I can even assign it to multiple playlists without wasting any extra storage space. But that doesn't suit me. I want there to be one perfect playlist that The Members' "The Sound Of The Suburbs" belongs on.
So where does it go? I could file it on the "70s" playlist, but most of that one consists of soft rock, bubblegum and glam, and "The Sound Of The Suburbs" would clash in that company. It's not quite edgy enough to be on the "artpunk" playlist either, and it's too polished for "indie rock." Nor is it "garage" or "heavy" or "noise." Ultimately, I filed it under "modern rock," because even though the bulk of that playlist is made up of pop-punk, Britpop and emo from the past 15 years, The Members sounds more like those bands than any other catch-all playlist I've created.
Does anybody else fuss around like this with their music collections? My wife quietly tolerates my filing frenzies, but other friends of mine have mocked me mercilessly for the various lists and indexes and classification codes I've been concocting since my teen years. But to me, it's just an extension of the baseball card collection I had carefully arranged into folders, or the full collection of NFL team pencils that I used to lay out on my bedroom floor in order of the current standings. Why have a collection if you can't obsess over how best to display it?
*Footnote 1: Although I have two more trips scheduled that might disrupt my schedule a little (including a stretch in Toronto that will necessitate another "gap week"), I believe I'm on pace to finish listening to my entire collection by the end of the year. That seemed impossible when I was still stuck in the "D"s in the last week of March, but here it is week 27 and I'm in the middle of the "M"s, which is the last letter in the first half of the alphabet. There are some monster letters ahead: "N" and "W" should each take two or three weeks, and then "P," "R," "S" and "T" might take up to a month each. But I'm not expecting to turn up much in "O," "Q," "U" or "V," and "X," "Y" and "Z" should breeze by. And then of course, there are the number bands, but there aren't many of those either, so I'm optimistic. Then again, I almost have to be. I really don't want to be grinding my way through The 5th Dimension in January of next year.
**Footnote 2: The new music prohibition officially ends November 1st, by the way. That's about the time last year that 2007 releases stopped trickling in and 2008 releases started, so that will be roughly one year without new music. When the time comes, I'll be asking for suggestions about what I should pick up, and then I'll be taking a belated look at 2008's best at the beginning of 2009, as a kind of epilogue. And then back on the bandwagon.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
Marshall Crenshaw
Years Of Operation 1979-present
Fits Between Buddy Holly and Peter Case
"I'll Do Anything" by Marshall Crenshaw
Personal Correspondence There haven't been too many debut albums more perfect than Marshall Crenshaw, a charming throwback to doo-wop and mid-'60s West Coast Pop, steeped in reverb and cooing background harmonies, but with enough post-new-wave edge in songs like "Cynical Girl" and "I'll Do Anything" to keep any fan of Talking Heads and The B-52s happy. Crenshaw's second album, Field Day, was almost as good, in spite of the heavy-footed Steve Lillywhite production. Field Day was actually the first Crenshaw album I owned—I found it in the cutout bin at a mall record store, and bought it because I'd heard Crenshaw's name bandied about by rock critics—and it took me a while to hear anything in that record but excessive echo and cutesy melodies. It helped when I found Marshall Crenshaw at a used record store and spent weeks immersing myself in its clean sound and boyish regret. On that album Crenshaw sounds like a man who's had some bad breaks in love and emerged chastened but still resolute. (Resolute in his faith in pop, anyway.)
Enduring presence? There haven't been too many artists who have fallen off as dramatically from their debut as Marshall Crenshaw, who's spent much of the last 25 years recording album after album with one or two good songs surrounded by a lot of filler—just like the bands Crenshaw loves. That said, I have a soft spot for Downtown, Crenshaw's third album, recorded with T-Bone Burnett in 1985. The songs aren't as strong as those on the debut (though "Yvonne" and "Blues Is King" are both killer), but the sound is as noir-ish and smeary as the picture on the album's cover.
Marvin Gaye
Years Of Operation 1961-84
Fits Between Nat King Cole and Isaac Hayes
"What's Happening Brother" by Marvin Gaye
Personal Correspondence Here's another artist I discovered thanks to a Rolling Stone list. As I recall, the magazine's 1987 list of the best 200 albums of the past 20 years had What's Going On in the Top 5, which surprised me, since all I really knew about Gaye at the time was that he'd been killed by his dad shortly after the corny "Sexual Healing" was all over the radio. Luckily for me, that Rolling Stone list roughly coincided with Motown's 25th anniversary celebrations, which meant record stores were flooded with cut-price reissues and special editions of Motown classics. I got What's Going On for something like five bucks on cassette, and even more than the record's socially conscious lyrics—which, to be honest, aren't exactly deep—I was taken with the fluid sound of that album, which was like something out of my pop fantasies. I'd written a short story back in 1986 that featured a fictional band that played epic-length shows where the songs all ran together in a kind of mega-medley. (Sort of like Side Two of Abbey Road, but four times as long.) What's Going On was the kind of album my fictional band would've recorded. Stripped to its essence, What's Going On only has about three or four actual songs on it; the rest are reprises and vamps that take off from what Gaye's singing about and extend it into the realm of the abstract and emotional. In some ways Gaye's tuneful wails show more shades of anger, sorrow, and memories of former joy than anything specific he sings. Hearing What's Going On for the first time also helped me to understand the origins of the orchestrated R&B sound that was so common in TV shows and movies in the '70s. Mainly though, I was fascinated with how it all fit together, like a musical puzzle. It was the album I'd been dreaming about.
Enduring presence? As much as I still love What's Going On, I confess that I've had less success in carrying my Gaye fandom very far beyond that album. I like a handful of the pre-WGO singles, and a handful of the post-WGO singles, and I appreciate the divorce opus Here, My Dear (but mostly in theory). I'm also frequently surprised by how much of Gaye's music I don't like. I could go the rest of my life without hearing "Let's Get It On" again, and I feel Berry Gordy's pain every time I hear one of Gaye's attempts to leave soul behind and become a pop crooner. (I wish I hadn't ponied up the dough for Hip-O Select's limited edition of At The Copa.) Still, Gaye had a beautiful voice and an artist's soul, and I can't think of too many artists who wouldn't take a hit and miss career like his if it meant one of those hits would be one of the most perfect albums ever recorded.
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