Ears wide open

I hate my kids’ music. Or, more accurately, I hate what they listen to on the radio. Specifically I have a powerful loathing of a radio station that beams its signal across the lake from Rochester.

Music, it seems, has always had a sexual component, but on 98PXY we are fed a perpetual loop of folks eager to “do it” or, perhaps more troublingly, “describe it” in ever more clinical and prescriptive ways.

Typically mouthed in a vernacular just out of reach of the middle-aged male ear—it typically takes about three songs before it dawns on me exactly what the young man is panting about, or what he would like his lady friend to do with her booty. I look over at my 10-year-old who just shrugs her shoulders. I stab at the radio like it’s a button accordion. “Anything else,” I scream. “Polka, disco. Even country music.”

My inclination isn’t to share the radio in the car. “I’m driving—I get to choose.” It is a simple philosophy. But it’s not one that stands up well to the increasingly pointed scrutiny thrust my direction from the back seat. Worse, my older kids are learning to drive now—and the clarity of my car radio strategy is breaking down.

I understand I am supposed to dislike my kids’ music. Every generation is programmed to reject their parents’ music, taste and culture. In fact, I find it troubling that my kids know the lyrics to Rolling Stones’ or Eagles’ songs better than I do.

Baby boomers have had such an imposing effect on popular culture that classic rock largely blots out opportunity, and air space, for a new generation of musicians. The only bandwidth reserved for my kids’ generation is consumed by the soul crushing, tooth decaying, romance-killing machinery of One Direction, Lady Gaga or Iggy Azalea.

So, it was with a calloused and itchy station-changing finger that I went in search for music from the five acts that will appear at the Sandbanks New Wave festival at Sandbanks Provincial Park in September.

I had not heard of any of these folks— but that was hardly surprising as I have retreated over the decades, almost exclusively into the warm and seductive arms of jazz. (PrinceEdwardCounty, of course, is a rich and rewarding place to live with this particular affliction). And Internet radio means I don’t have to stray to far to feed my need for variety or complexity.

Ryan Noth, the promoter of the Sandbanks New Waves event, pointed me to a Youtube video of Cuff the Duke performing their song Stay. I didn’t hate it. Not hating slowly gave way to pleasant enjoyment. I listened to another tune. And another. They were simple, well-constructed songs. Interesting, smart and ironic.

Irony, I thought, had died in popular music, axphyxiated by the factory that makes Justin Biebers.

Bry Webb. I didn’t hate this either. I wasn’t wild about the truncated use of a perfectly good name—but his music was compelling and evocative. Evening Hymns. Easy to like. Smart. Penetrating. Haunting. Hylozoists. I listened to as many songs by this electronic instrumental group as YouTube would serve up. Even DIANA with their electro pop sound managed to enchant this cranky dad.

I found myself wondering how it was, that all five of these groups had escaped my consciousness. No longer.

Now you must understand that this minor personal revelation comes as a huge relief. It is immensely pleasing to know a new generation is creating interesting, compelling and original music, and finding an audience—even if, until now, it wasn’t me.

I love music. I always have. I opened a record store in my home town when I was 19, so that I could share it with others. I couldn’t play music. But I could talk about it, write about it and peddle it. I was an evangelist for the power and glory of music.

But in recent years I worried that music was failing, a victim of indifference and neglect by a new generation. It turns out I wasn’t listening in the right places.

Make plans to spend some time at Sandbanks on September 13. The crowds will be gone, the food will be great and the music will assure you that musical creative expression is alive and well in a new generation. You just won’t hear it on Rochester radio.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca