Geriatric KeithWhenever someone says, “They don’t make them like they used to,” referring to either movies or music or even books, I’m embarrassed on their behalf. It’s been that way for as long as I remember. I cringe and wonder how we can connect when you’re pulling a Miniver Cheevy on me. As a teen, I usually heard this from older people, and I took it as a sign of stasis, decay. An inability to engage a new generation’s modes of artistic expression meant you were done for, no longer growing. You might as well pack it in and prepare for old age, the nursing home, death. I think what bothered me was that if I could see the value in music made in the past, music my parents listened to, it shouldn’t be a stretch for you of another generation to see the value in mine. The exchange should be mutual. And with my own parents—my mom and my stepdad (who I call dad)—it was. My dad introduced me to hard rock—Sabbath, Zeppelin. There were three wooden crates in the basement filled with vinyl LPs of countless greats from the 60s and 70s—The Beatles and Stones, Hendrix, Bowie. I remember nights, being up late, when my mom would put Joni Mitchell on the turntable, and in turn, over the years, I’ve introduced them to Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, The White Stripes, The National. My feeling is that if you open yourself up to what a younger generation is doing in the arts, it enriches your life, and I hope to stand by this belief as my kids grow. Not only will it allow me a means to connect with them, but it will help keep my mind at work, engaged, trying to wrap my mind around new ideas.

Still, I remember one afternoon in my biological father’s car (who I also call dad…it can be confusing to an outsider, it even proves confusing to my wife who asks me to clarify whenever I mention “dad”)  when I was playing OK Computer. The album had just been released and we were listening to my favorite song, Let Down. “This isn’t music,” argued the man who had introduced me to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Roxy Music. “It’s just a bunch of bleeps and bloops.” He stopped short of the prototypical parent accusation that it was just noise, but I heard him say it anyway. It was implied. Now I’m sure parents have been saying this to children as long as there have been parents and children and music. “That Sinatra, he’s just noise, Enrico Caruso, Mario Lanza, now they were singers!””What is this Fifth Symphony nonsense, Beethoven’s a cacophony to the ears. Now Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he was a real composer!” I understand this in hindsight, understand I couldn’t have expected much more from my dad (biological father). But at the time it hurt. And it hurt for two reasons: the first was the song, even a week after the record’s release, had already come to mean so much to me. That part at the end when Thom Yorke harmonizes with himself, “You know, you know where you are, floor collapses floating, bouncing back, and one day, I am going to grow wings, a chemical reaction…” Man, I just it moved me so much. And because it moved me, I wanted to share it with him.

I wasn’t looking to rebel with music, to piss my parents off. I was looking for mutual admiration, which is something I’ve always sought in the arts. “You like that! I like that too!” I love that moment, sharing  a particular book or movie. For this reason, my tastes are all encompassing from contemporary pop to opera (the subject of my failed first novel and a short story I published in Beecher’s Magazine) to metal to hip-hop. There’s little I don’t like. Throughout the aughts, I compiled end-of-year mixtapes of my favorite music from that year and sent them out to my friends at Christmas, first as CDs and then as a digital download link. Since then, a handful of things have slowly changed the way I listen to music (to the point I sometimes fear adopting this geriatric resistance to the new). One was that making these mixtapes for ten years (I began in 2003 and finished in 2013) burned me out. I scoured the scene, read numerous reviews, listened to everything I could get my hands out, and by the end, this over-saturation had me hating music. I’d get to the end of the year and try to create my compilations and nothing fit together. And while certain songs sounded good, pleasing to my ear, nothing was hitting me in the way that Let Down once had. There was no one song, at least in rock, that had me hooked and returning over and over for more. I started to think not that they made better music in my day, but that it’s all the same thing over and over: guitars bass drums, verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus, the same lovelorn posturing, the same heartache. There were, naturally, experimental acts deconstructing traditional pop, reaching for new modes of express (Animal Collective and Deerhoof are the first that come to mind and Bjork has done it for as long as she’s had a career), and they were interesting from an intellectual point of view, but I had trouble connecting with them emotionally.

Then I met my wife and we got married and had children, and I was suddenly further removed from the subject of 99.9% of rock songs. I no longer identified with the loneliness, yearning, and loss that they were singing about. As a student and sometimes practitioner of music, I could admire songcraft, a well-turned phrase or hook. But nothing reached in and twisted my guts the way it used to. So this is how it happens, I thought. The difference, of course, was that I recognized it wasn’t music that had changed but me. It would be dishonest to say that the music of my youth was better, because I don’t believe that. In fact, when I go back and listen to the band of my youth, this same disconnect applies. Last week, I was listening to William Friedkin on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast. In the course of their conversation, Friedkin remarked that unlike film, he can return to the same piece of music whenever/wherever and have the same emotional reaction, citing a particular recording he prefers of Beethoven’s Fifth. This point of view seems so entirely foreign to me because music fades in power the further you get from the circumstances in which you encountered it. For example, I listened to Beth Orton’s Central Reservation during my study abroad semester in Rome, and for a while, it evoked the blue sky outside my apartment’s window, the wonderment of making the friends I made there, the joy tasting wine for the first time. But it doesn’t anymore. If I put on Central Reservation now, all I hear are the songs.

The same thing is true for music I listened to in high school. There were certain songs from Smashing Pumpkins that I felt at that time were responsible for saving my life, propelling me through tumults of emotion and hormones. And I still believe Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness are masterpieces. But when I put them on, purely out of nostalgia, I find the songs more pleasant sounding than emotionally gripping.  I’m sure there are people in their thirties who hear Stairway to Heaven and get just as excited as they did when they heard it at seventeen. But Zeppelin, while undeniably great, is a band I no longer care to seek out. If I live to be a hundred and never hear the opening riff from The Ocean again, I won’t consider the quality of my life diminished in any way. In fact, I’ve heard it so many times, I can play the song back in my head right now if I choose. To some extent, the problem arises from my expectations of music. Unlike literature, where I love to read of experiences that differ from my own, where I seek to enlarge my world by expanding it with different points of view, I need music to connect with my emotional states instantly. I’ve used it throughout my life as a way of processing, affirming, and dealing with my feelings. And the fact is, they don’t make rock and roll for aging happily married types with two kids (exceptions being Jarvis Cocker/Pulp and The National).

There are times I try to find solace in jazz or classical. But again, my appreciation is often more intellectual than emotional with these genres. The exception to the rule is hip hop. Last year, my favorite records were Dr. Dre’s Compton, Vince Staple’s Summertime ’06 and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. And I have to admit there, that Pimp was a tough one for me. I recognized the artistry but found it bloated, difficult to listen to all at once. A grand artistic statement I’d turn to from time to time, but still, I listened to the other two traditional records more. I suppose I could say that hip hop appeals to me in the way that literature does. I’ve understood for a long time now that most of what’s being sung about isn’t autobiographical. But there’s an authenticity and vitality in these records I’m not getting from rock. The stuff being made by these artists as well as by Killer Mike and El-P feels reflective of the fractured state America is in right now. That is, of course, the critical tack I’ll take in explaining it. But who am I kidding? I like clever word play, and I like a good beat. This has never changed, and I hope it never will. Once upon a time, I sat up in my room, distraught, listening to sad bastards croon, and that day might come again. For now, when I suit up to go running hoping to improve my health and longevity, I know what’ll be pumping in the headphones. And it sure as hell ain’t gonna be Hey Jude…