A personal perspective on the splintering of music

I could be the poster child for Migs's comments about how people consume music these days. In middle school, I fell asleep listening to 102.5 KDON, and I could sing all the R&B and hip-hop songs on the radio. ("All the gangbangers forgot about the drive-by ...") I watched Beach MTV every single day during summer vacation, and not just while I ate lunch -- I'd watch it from beginning to end. Yes, I was twelve or thirteen, so Daisy Fuentes in a bikini was a very large part of this, but she wasn't the only thing; I also loved the Blind Melon, Dr. Dre, Bone Thugs, Counting Crows, and Coolio videos, not to mention one-hit wonder classics like Ahmad's "Back in the Day".


(blatant excuse to run a bikini photo of Daisy Fuentes? You hush!)

(By the way, I'm suddenly doubting the very existence of Beach MTV, because I can't seem to find any sign of it online, and it's not on Daisy's IMDB page. Did I make it up? Did I mix up both the name and the host?)

And where am I now? I've seen Taylor Swift's video where she claims she's a nerd who never gets the boy once. (Quick aside -- I hate that video. The song is supposed to be about remaining who you are, about the inner truth, the connection between two people, being more important than the physical appearances, right? So why does the nerdy girl have to take off her glasses and doll herself up to get the boy to notice her at the dance?) I couldn't tell you five albums that were nominated for Grammys, although I know from Keith Law's Twitter that Silversun Pickups were nominated for Best New Artist even though "Lazy Eye" was a huge smash a few years ago. ("A huge smash" in my understanding being that it was played on KEXP four times a day.)

I don't want to oversell things, because when I look at the list of Best Album nominees, I can tell you who all these people are. I was, in fact, aware of the existence of all five artists, and four of the albums. (The one I didn't know, which is either odd or completely appropriate, was the entry from the Dave Matthews Band. I truly had no idea they released an album in 2009.)

Until Migs mentioned it, though, I'm not sure I realized just how out of touch I was. Part of this is that music never has been a communal experience for me. I think I attended my first live show after I graduated college. In high school, I listened to "alternative" more or less as a means of differentiating myself from the R&B and hip-hop masses. (Yes, I was the stereotype, listening to Nine Inch Nails because nobody I knew got me.) I've been to Fun Fun Fun Fest, a fantastically eclectic two-day festival in Austin, twice, alone each time.

In some ways, this has been a blessing: even as my music tastes pushed farther away from what was on the radio, I was never sucked into those awful "have you heard X" bragfests that rock critics and hipsters (who all just want to be rock critics anyway) insist on engaging in.

But more importantly, because even when I had a shared knowledge of the current music with my peers, I didn't really know I had it, I didn't realize that we were losing that community until it had become so obvious that even Entertainment Weekly would acknowledge it. This has left me with an intellectual understanding that music is not what it used to be (the simultaneous deaths of music magazines, record sales, record stores, and music television, including the VMAs) without any strong emotional feelings about it one way or the other. I can't miss conversations about can't-miss musical moments that never happened in the first place.

(By the way, of all the videos I linked to in the above paragraph, there was only one that I actually felt the need to rewatch from beginning to end, and that was Bone Thugs' "Crossroads". Whatever inferences you care to draw ...)