Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

If you are about to take time to read the words I am rattling off on my shiny Mac keyboard, there is a good chance you fall into one of three categories of people. You’re likely someone who grew up in a past generation, having spent your formative years during a period when pop music was actually the good stuff, the very glue of youth culture. Alternatively, you might be someone whose youth landed somewhere in the period of the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, thoroughly unsatisfied by the various fads that found their way into the mainstream, and subsequently over that period found yourself looking for an alternative. Lastly, you may be a music fan who came into things in the post-Napster era, and are only mildly aware of a mainstream at all anymore because you don’t need a radio station to tell you what to listen to.

The common thread that binds those of us who span those generations is the music, the soundtrack to our lives. And there’s a decent chance that most of us have a healthy respect for the music adored by those in generations not our own. Where we differ dramatically, however, is how we all discovered and acquired those works of art that so helped shape our everyday lives. The companies that were the original entities who produced and made available music since the phenomenon of popular culture are still around, but they are failing miserably and no longer seem relevant to those of us, well… those of us likely to read this column.

Many people from the earlier generations could often just listen to the radio to find solid rock ‘n’ roll, and even for those on the hipper side of the fence there existed a large and hardly secretive counterculture that was prone to gathering at large music festivals where underground community thrived. Those from the middle generations grew up skeptical, battered by disco, put off by Reagan, and possibly driven insane by what new wave was shaped into by the mainstream. Driven to college radio and hanging out in local record stores, you likely found yourself eagerly awaiting EPs and LPs ordered from distant towns to show up in the mailbox, the feeling of opening each sleeve an indescribable sensation. For those of us who remain consummate seekers of music in a post-Napster world we have to only look to that magical network of fiber-optic cable that leads us to Blogland. We almost never purchase music, and if we do, we increasingly expect neat little files to be delivered to our desktops.

read more