Quite Random

It wasn’t always iPods and dull vocalists, son…

There’s been a lot about Adele in the paper and how she is an up-and-coming star, so I downloaded her debut album, and discovered it was as about as fulfilling as chewing pith while watching ITV. After you get past the fact that she’s got a good voice, there’s nothing much there, nothing to make the hairs on your neck stand up or make you think you’ll listen to the album again. She was being interviewed on Richard and Judy the other day and said she had in fact had her heart broken once, as if that gave her some points towards her NVQ in songwriting. I’m buggered if I know what everyone’s got so excited about – maybe a lot of music journalists and daytime TV producers think everyone is clamouring to hear yet another catatonic coffee-shop soundtrack from yet another young solo songstress with all the spark of a warm bottle of Fanta. Bugger. That.

I remember a time when I was thirteen or fourteen and I went from listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, Pet Shop Boys’ Actually and Michael Jackson’s Bad to discovering album after album after album that actually gave me a physical reaction – prickles, an involuntary grin, the urge to shout very loud and jump off beds. It is rare nowadays that I get the same reaction I did the first time I heard Appetite for Destruction, The Bends, Angel Dust, Maxinquaye, Blood Sugar Sex Magik or Disintegration.

If you’re feeling jaded, it’s easy to imagine that genuinely exciting new music is near-impossible to find. You have to wade through tonnes of detritus. Mika (oh, holy damp Christ in a rusty bucket I hate Mika), soporific Katie Melhua clones, and a recent spate of guitar bands that appear to be completely interchangeable are so thick on the ground it’s like running through wet cornflour. I sometimes wonder if music is going to get more and more boring until it completely flatlines, each song becoming more derivative and less exciting than the last. A lot of music is already there. I could listen to Radio 1, but only Mika irritates me more. One of the best ways of finding new music was Pandora, but that has been shut down outside the US now, leaving a few services like Jango.com or Last.fm for exploring new music, or just downloading something you never heard of before for the hell of it.

Maybe new music is just less exciting when you’re all grown up. Maybe swirling hormones are the key to getting worked up.  In the early 90’s I used to shout and jump off beds to some songs I’d rather forget, and I’ll never forget that in school discos, when James sang Sit Down, we actually used to sit down in the middle of the dance floor. This was the time when Dolby noise reduction on your tape deck was cutting edge, iPods were an insane dream, text messages were written in biro on a torn-off piece of A4 and Twin Peaks scared the shit out of us on Tuesday nights.

So I have found myself diversifying, and looking backwards. When I used to think my tastes in music were catholic, they really weren’t. A copy of the 1812 Overture and the African music from the baked beans advert did not make for an eclectic selection. Now I’m enjoying French-Algerian pop, Californian-Khmer psychedelic rock, Irish folk music, prog rock, much more classical music, and some oldies that had been off the playlist for long enough to feel new again. Despite Adele and the like, music isn’t getting boring any time soon. Even if I am jumping off beds less.