Today: 2pm hit and I made a face.
I don’t recognize this.
Then I remembered: Soundcheck ended. Well, not ended forever, but the celebrated afternoon music show on WNYC has taken a hiatus for the summer. It’s being re-imagined and re-tooled for its post-Labor Day return (in a new evening timeslot) and you can follow its progress online.
Friday’s final afternoon program was all about resolutions – specifically musical ones. John Schaefer’s call to listeners, asking them what musical promises they wanted to keep, got me thinking, and feeling more than a little guilty. I’ve been making audio commitments to myself now for ages: I’m going to listen to this new album. I’m going to check out that cool band. I’m going to get to more live shows.
And despite covering The Cult’s new album, getting into a great new DJ, and seeing Garbage live, I still feel like I’m not doing enough. With every new week comes a new onslaught of albums, bands, shows, all of which I feel I should be paying more attention to. Then there’s the backwards glance – and a glance is really all it’s been when it comes to my own, embarrassingly limited musical knowledge.
Raised as a classical music-playing child, I didn’t really find out about the work and influence Bob Dylan, David Bowie, or The Rolling Stones until well into adolescence. My house was filled with the sounds of Cash, Presley, and ABBA (to say nothing of Back, Beethoven, and Mozart) for many years. Later, with my very-own turntable in my bedroom, neither The Clash and nor Black Flag provided the soundtrack to teenaged rebellion; Aretha Franklin, Ronnie Spector, and Donna Summer did. I related to the strong, glamorous ladies whose music I could dance to. A big part of me still does.
The first time I heard Bob Dylan I was fifteen years old. The song was “Tangled Up In Blue” and it was played to me by a Dylan-loving friend of my mother’s. I’d never heard anything like it; the words dripped with angst, and anger, and a world-weariness I hadn’t quite known before. Somehow, it made the grunge explosion that followed in popular culture make more sense. A guest of Schaefer’s on Friday confessed she didn’t know enough about Dylan’s either, and that her musical resolution over the summer was to correct that oversight.
It was oddly comforting to hear that kind of confession in such a public forum. Admitting you don’t know the canons of such huge music monoliths in public is hard, and it was nice to see Soundcheck – a show I consider to be as much entertainment as education, and a major smarty-pants beacon of deep pop culture know-how -welcome such curiosity with open arms. It’s nice to not be afraid of judgment, or be worried about appearing uncool, of lacking taste, of being plain stupid, but to just be welcomed and accepted.
Perhaps that’s why the “ending” of Soundcheck hit me harder than I expected, and why today’s 2pm mix-up was a bit of a slug in the guts. Schaefer and the fantastic Soundcheck team have provided a wonderful forum for the musically curious masses (with whom I deeply identify) to learn, to ask questions, to branch out, to exercise our curious ear-muscles and maybe have a dance or two across our office/kitchen floors. Thusly inspired, this is what I’d like: to further my contemporary music-scene knowledge while deepening my appreciation of its past. Can it be done with any measure of success? I’ll let you know when Soundcheck’s back on the air in September. I’m starting here. Don’t judge.