Wednesday, October 19, 2005
The Best Of:

I have an idea, and I need your help.  Yes you.  I have been thinking about my changing music tastes these last few years, and I wanted to write about it.  The music that I listen to now is almost exclusively indie pop music.  Bands like the Shins, Iron and Wine, The Flaming Lips, and Rogue Wave have replaced Big Black, Black Flag, and The Melvins.  I started to write a big long ranting post about how the best music of the new millennium is pop, and that the punk and post punk sounds that I loved as a kid have been consumed by the 90’s version of punk music and its degeneration into bands like POD, Stained, and Limp Bisquick.  The commercial success and marketing of these bands to the lowest common denominator of popular culture has made my old music hard to enjoy.  Please feel free to skip this next paragraph; it won’t hurt my feelings.  As a matter of fact, I recommend it.  Skip it! More whiny rambling follows:

I was going to talk about what a shame it is that one is more likely to hear the musical descendents of the punk movement at a fraternity party or in an ad for extreme deodorant. This saddens me in a way that is analogous to the way that the baby boomers, who thought music could be used for social change, must feel when they see the Beatles’ song Revolution used to sell Nike shoes.  Such is life in a capitalist society.  Everything eventually is diluted down to the part of it that will sell “a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves.”   I deserve the dissolution of my utopia the same as they do.  They weren’t really ready to love their fellow human beings in a commune somewhere, and I haven’t really committed myself to bringing the system down and living in a neoanarchist society, completely off the grid with a Mohawk and a Mad Max car.  My theory is that pop music, even indie pop music, never tried to subvert popular culture like other music movements seem to.  It works in a more subtle way, playfully tweaking and mirroring cultural norms rather than trying to overthrow them.  It exists in its own space in conjunction with popular culture;  not attacking it, but sidestepping it.  Because of this starting position of subtlety, in true postmodern reconstructionalist form, it is able to… O shit… there I go again.  I warned you.  Ok  I’m  rambling, and I know it.  I could go on… and I’m sure that some of you who are rolling your eyes at me for going on and on would still sit down over a couple or six beers and argue this point or that band’s influence until three or four in the morning, but we’ll do that at a later date without annoying everyone else and with the added benefit of the beers.

This site is about Ruby, a child of the new millennium, and I think it would be interesting to document what kind of music Ruby’s friends and family were listening to around the time she was born and why.  I’m interested my parents formative music.  My mom’s love of 60’s folk and the serious look in my father’s eye when he discusses Santana’s Abraxis are as important to me and who I am as the music I called my own in the mid eighties.  We have two and a half months until the fifth year of the millennium ends, and I want to come up with a semi-definitive list of the top ten or twenty albums since 2000.  Ruby’s decade will probably be the teens or maybe the twenties, and she’ll be able to put together her own list then.  But we’ll have to help her with this decade. 

Please post your favorites here, or better yet, email them to me at greg at rubydawn.com, and I will put them on my ipod and listen to them for the next two months.  I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, I just want some suggestions for new music.  Justin, this is your chance to show me why the Decemberists are so great.  Give me an album to listen to and a reason why!  Jordan, you’ve got some great tastes, and I appreciate the CD’s you picked out.  What else? Dan, for you, I’d even give Brian Wilson’s Smile a chance.  Do you think it’s worthy of inclusion?  Leah, is there some recent prog-rock brilliance that I’ve missed?  Mom, is there some music from a film you saw that I should check out?  Borgerding, I know you’re getting into some cool stuff, help me out.  Charo, you and Lenny have the magic touch when it comes to music, don’t let me down.  Mark and April, what do you listen to these days?  Why?  Jim, Jen, Jason, and the rest of PDX… Sound off!  Momma C, I know you listen to some music later than Jimmy Buffet, but whom?  Does anyone out there have any hip hop to recommend? It’s a genre that I haven’t explored.   Electronica?  Any other music?  I understand if you aren’t into it, and if lists aren’t your thing, but I think it’d be fun…I know what Ruby’s favorites are, and she and I will share them with you, but I’d like for you and I to be able to share our favorites with her.