First, some background to this discussion. I live in Washington state and go to college in Texas. Since food on campus is grotesquely expensive, I prefer to have my car with me when I'm at school. That way I'm not stuck with three dollar packages of instant ramen (those prices are basically highway robbery). I could whine more about Aramark's harmful monopoly on campus cuisine, but I digress. My home in Washington state is a good 2,200 miles away from my college in Texas, which makes for some rather extensive road trips. Every spring, my dad books a flight down to meet me and we begin the several day process of driving halfway across the country back to Washington. I pride myself in my car's music collection, so we can drive four or so days without listening to the same song twice. Choosing music for these road trips, however, is something of a challenge.
There's a rather large age gap between my father and me. Furthermore, my dad basically stopped listening to the radio sometime around 1980, as he came back from deployment in the navy to discover that radio stations developed a fairly unhealthy obsession with rap music. As such, it's a bit of a struggle finding music that we can both appreciate on equal terms. This isn't to say that I dislike the classics. My silver briefcase of CDs is filled with pages of the Doobie Brothers, the Guess Who, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, all that good stuff. My father also really appreciates AC/DC, which is a godsend on road trips since they make perfect driving music. The problem is that so many of my older albums don't make for particularly good driving music. If I put on something like the greatest hits of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, it doesn't matter how much we both like the band. When you're staring down three-hundred miles of straight road with no buildings or cars in sight, half an hour of that stuff and we're both out like a light.
Once I run out of classic hard rock, those albums with universal appeal and boundless energy, things start getting somewhat tense in the car. My natural inclination is to start playing metal. I have a large assortment of metal albums in my car since the stuff makes for phenomenal phenomenal night driving music. I don't think it's really possible to fall asleep to Carcass, after all. However, this is my dad I'm riding with. Death metal and black metal aren't going to cut it here. I needed something with clean vocals and melody, maybe a nice groove too. On this latest voyage back to the evergreen state, I put on some Goatsnake and Gloryhammer to serenade us with bluesy doom metal and cheesy power metal respectively. Here, I'll post some samples. Give them a listen before you continue reading.
It would suffice to say that these albums did not go over particularly well. However, to stop with such a cop-out description would defeat the point of this post. When both albums were done, my dad turned to me and started speaking with that most loaded of opening statements: "Now, don't take this the wrong way, but..." Oh boy, I thought, here it comes. What he ultimately said (after the usual cries of "where's the melody," "metal is too Satanic for me," and "that guy is just chanting 'I killed him' (was actually saying 'a killing floor', which is both the name of the song and a classic blues motif), etc.) was the inspiration for this blog post.
The general idea of my dad's argument is that we will forever gravitate towards the music that sounds familiar to us, which varies based on both life circumstances and one's date of birth. My dad prefers bands like the Beach Boys and Bob Seger because they remind him of his childhood. That kind of music was instrumental in developing his musical tastes, which have solidified with age. The end product is a sort of generation gap for musical appreciation. If something sounds too different to what we listened to growing up, we reject it as just noise and then precede to bemoan the state of the music industry. After all, he argued, we all just really pursue our comfort zone.
Unsurprisingly for longtime readers of this blog, I balked at his suggestion that I too would one day become a musical dogmatist asserting that music died the day it stopped sounding like the soundtrack to my halcyon days of youth. I certainly saw kernels of truth in his argument, what with my adamant rejection of things like dubstep and autotuned pop music. However, I have enough self-awareness to be able to identify this revulsion at modern music as something other than reluctance to accept the next generation. It's not that I dislike so many modern bands because they differ from what I listened to as a youth. In fact, many of the trends I so dislike in music nowadays have their roots in the stuff I listened to naively as a child, wondering why I wasn't able to "get" these artists so popular with my peers. I may be a musical dogmatist, but for reasons that have nothing to do with my musical generation.
In appreciating music, I am first and foremost a connoisseur of instrumentation. In particular, I greatly enjoy a well-played guitar part. I am, after all, a guitarist; can you blame me? This, not any generational divide, is responsible for my under-appreciation of so many modern artists. I go where the riffs are, and the riffs are often in music that predates me. I gravitate towards songs like Aerosmith's Walk This Way and Carcass's Heartwork because, man, those are some GREAT riffs! They aren't really my generation's riffs, they're just timeless. If I seem like a musical curmudgeon, shaking his cane at all the pop-rock and dubstep kids marching across his lawn, it's because I just can't sate my hunger for guitar riffage from those kinds of music. I don't think it matters quite what generation you come from, your first taste of Hendrix should still be something like a religious experience. I hunger to hear the next distant horizon someone will take us to through the guitar. Hopefully, when that happens, I won't miss it from wallowing in nostalgia. I don't want something like a generation gap to stop me from appreciating the next great step in rock, in metal, in blues. Admittedly, if the guitar ever stops being given its due as the king of instruments, as the face of rock, then you'll see me eating these words. I'm happy with whatever generation's music appreciates the guitar, and I want a rather large gap between myself and any generation that seeks to ignore it.
Guitarman out.
