Dig.

DIG

I’m a passenger in a car on my way to work musing about the intricacies of some song I’m hearing for the first time. One I wouldn’t necessarily choose because it’s not my thing but I listen anyway. Thoughts of where it robbed from stylistically, a period, a place, because musical history haunts me that way. I have this strange epiphany that there really isn’t much I like that’s new, and why? I watch and listen while she drives. Pedals turn outside. Sour grapes wait for the streetcar.

Everything seems to have lost it’s sheen there’s nothing below the surface and it’s fucking agonizing to these ears. It’s a borrowed interest from the enormity of musical history transplanted into banality exiting digitally through a Bose stereo. Few do it well. And there is a plethora of good stuff out there that still inspires it’s the stuff that came before that aches this heart, the shit that makes me weep, the artists that are sadly never talked about -- music from the stereo builds into a boredom as we veer into the left lane to avoid a cab.

Hail, our cherished cult underground dug up like a corpse with one last breath in it’s lungs to be monopolized championed and marched before a public as some new found discovery to the ignorant mass audience of hims and hers, bastardized! I suppose it’s ignorance that plagues the listener. Music that one time marked the very spot crowds gathered in some dank basement fifty years before, a five piece with a space echo machine or a sweaty Juke Joint near Jackson where walls sweat. The same weathered black woman holding up the bar week after week while a black boot stomps in the corner belting out hymns.

It’s time everyone begin to dig. Sift. Get out and learn the history that is constantly copied with packaged perfection, find it’s imperfections, educate yourself like a librarian and then forget everything, discard it, give it away, share it. I promise you you will be enlightened and awestruck by the very mystery of sound.

For there to be palpable change in the way music is heard or experienced there first must be knowledge. Only then can you decipher what makes something powerful and original.

Here’s a smattering of places to start:

CROSS REFERENCE: http://allmusic.com