Day 191: Musicology

This weekend I had the interesting and enjoyable task of assembling an iTunes playlist of music our family can enjoy after the boy arrives.

One thing I noticed during this exercise was that the music I myself was exposed to as a young boy, particularly The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, have imprinted themselves in my mind as music befitting young children. Not surprising that I should have this instinct, but I do credit my parents—never particularly musical people themselves—for having some great stuff around for the discovering. When I was in music school and comparing notes with my fellow classmates about our earliest exposures and influences, I was proud to be able to tell of the hours and hours I had spent exploring a first-edition pressing of Sgt. Pepper's.

Another theme which arose from creating this music collection was the reminder that the 80's was a grim time for the arts, especially popular music.

There are 67 songs in the collection I put together. Only ten of them are from the 80's. Two of those are from the 1980 Bob Marley album, "Uprising". But I'm going to count these as belonging, spiritually speaking, to the 70's. They were released before the election of Reagan, after all. Five of the eight remaining 80's songs are by Tom Waits. I consider this music to reflect the overall state of popular music in that decade. Not that it echoed or summed up 80's music, of course, but that it serves as a sort of allegory for 80's popular music itself. A sort of tattered, gruff, beaten-down and defeated "figure" to represent the state of popular music at the time.

Mary and I recently watched the series "Freaks and Geeks" via Netflix DVD. Spoiler Alert: the series ends with all the freaks gravitating away from their "dirt-bag" stereotype and into other stereotypes. One turns into a disco dude. Another turns from a freak into a geek. The main character, however, turns into a Deadhead.

I was about to turn 15 when Reagan was elected. In the early 1980's my proclivity for psychoactive recreational material put me into frequent community with Deadheads. Deadheads were also loyal, enthusiastic fans of the little band my friends and I started. I listened to the Dead a fair amount, and enjoyed it, but never drank the Kool Aid. However, many of my friends and colleagues did as the "Freaks and Geeks" character did, and gave themselves up entirely to the music and culture of the Dead.

At the time I thought it a terrific waste of time and enthusiasm from some otherwise very promising minds. But on reflection I can think of much worse ways to ride-out the 80's than retreating into the warm, safe harbor of Dead obsession. Outside it was grim, desolate, empty. Personally, I leaped out of my late-60's & 1970's bunker and stumbled confusedly into jazz territory, and to minimalist modern composers, and into my half-hearted, never terribly successful attempts to know and understand the classical composers.

Meanwhile, although the Dead weren't really writing anything of note during the 80's, they soldiered on from concert to concert, ministering to the few cultural conscientious objectors of the era with their solid, wholesome, "good" music. It's creative, accessible, and it draws on a broad and worthy base of influences—both musical and social.

So even though I didn't listen to it at all when I was a kid, and only a bit when I was a teen, I wasn't too surprised to find Dead songs liberally sprinkled throughout the selections I thought would make a good basis for our son's earliest musical exposure. These are catchy, simple tunes with straight-forward harmony. It's something the whole family can enjoy. It's a good, basic, education in American song forms. And it'll be a comforting musical retreat for our son, back to the sounds of his youth, if he should ever be faced with his own 80's-style cultural nuclear-winter.