i have an unabashed love for pop music. my dad was a music teacher and as a child i was exposed to classical music on a daily basis. i was taken to severance hall numerous times and even met some of my father’s friends who played in the orchestra. beginning in the second grade i had piano lessons, and by fifth grade i was trying my luck with the drums as well. i was in the band for a while, the choir, and the orchestra. i had some gifts, for instance, i could tell my father what note he was playing on the piano just by hearing it. it was a game that fascinated my father but to me was simply like seeing colors. despite this talent, i had to work too hard to be merely decent. on a micro level, i have poor dexterity, and things like trills, complex left-handed bass lines, or most obviously the drum set, were beyond my capabilities. the point of all this is that my love of pop music didn’t come from a lack of exposure to other genres, it developed on its own.
a couple other things: i don’t like instrumental music of any type, aggressive vocalists excite me, and the original boy band – the beatles – do nothing for me. some of the first pop/rock music i was exposed to was ozzy, “the stoners” listened to this on the back of the bus and at recess. i’ve gone through many phases/infatuations with artists: billy joel (i know…, i find him intolerable now), pink floyd, prince, madonna, michael, rem, dre/snoop/2pac, the pixies, eminem, joy division, new order, sonic youth, and de la soul (in that order). i loved the 80s one-hit wonders and 90s grunge but the deaths of kurt cobain, 2pac and biggie, coupled with a lack of anything that excited me effectively ended my relationship with pop music. so it wasn’t napster that stopped my music purchases, it was what wasn’t.
cheap, large capacity hard drives, digital music formats and the rebirth of eighties new wave/indie – strokes, interpol, white stripes, yeah yeah yeah’s, new pornographers, postal service, the rapture, franz ferdinand, killers, and bloc party – brought me back. perhaps too far. these days i have a pc file server with an 80GB drive and a 250GB containing 245GB of music. A second 250GB drive and a LaCie 160GB external drive backup the first 250GB, the 80GB and the 40GB drive in my G4 mac. i have accumulated nearly 11,000 tracks, mostly from my personal cd collection, the others from the sneaker net at work. almost all the tracks are stored as Monkey’s Audio lossless files. a m-audio revolution 7.1 sound card connects the pc to my kenwood stereo and polk audio speakers (from college). my software player of choice is dBpowerAMP, though i don’t see its interface any more as i’ve written an xml driven, web-based controller for it. that’s been a fun project that continues to evolve. that’s an entry in itself, but you can see parts of it here. it continues to expand, and will soon have an audio-scrobbler-like search/output mechanism.
album of the moment is Waiting For The Sirens’ Call by New Order. i’ve got tickets to see them this thursday at hammerstein, and if they play “love will tear us apart” like they did in oakland, i may just lose my shit right there.