Saturday, January 7, 2012

Unearthing the Musical Past

Lately I've been listening to a lot of old, partly forgotten music. This has been the result of four things. First, reading 'Retromania', which though it argues vehemently against pop music's obsession with it's past, made me think 'wow, there is a lot of old music I haven't listened to'. Second, I bought the book '1001 albums you must hear before you die'. Third, I finally realized 'hey, YouTube has a lot of old music I can listen to for free'. And fourth, the 'Original Album Series' has appeared, where you can buy five albums from a band for just twenty bucks.

So who have I discovered? I recommend the following: Ride (particularly 'Dreams Burn Down'), Roxy Music (lots of great non-radio tracks), the Pretenders first two albums (same), X, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the 70s Bowie I hadn't listened to yet, King Crimson, The Boo Radleys, Wire, the Violent Femmes first three albums, My Bloody Valentine's first album (everyone knows the second), Spiritualized and Spacemen 3, Pere Ubu, XTC, Black Sabbath, Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love' album, and to finish off with some irony, LCD Soundsystem's 'Losing My Edge'. OK none of that list is really out there and people who are cooler than me will have listened to a lot of it, but it's what's got me excited at the moment.

One problem though is I may rapidly reach the point where I have nothing new that's worthwhile to listen to. Perhaps I'd better start liking jazz soon.

1 comment:

MsLaurie said...

I thought you already did like Jazz??