Listen to good music. There's too much of it out there.

Originally written December 2008

Alternate title: "Why I feel personally offended by bad music"


I'm overwhelmed by good music. I buy a couple new albums every week, music new and old. I have over 700 albums, and I'd say the majority of them are pretty good.

I've barely begun to scratch the surface.

If I had the time and the funds, I could probably buy 10 albums a week of new and old material and with careful selection I could go most of my life without listening to any really bad music. If people just stopped producing new music today, I could still probably spend the rest of my life discovering music and never come close to getting through even a fraction of the truly great music out there.

There's great music of every type. Great baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary music. Great blues, jazz, R&B. Great rock & roll, pop, disco, funk, metal, folk, country, hip hop, noise, prog, post-rock, indie, shoegaze... Whatever genre, whatever style, whatever aesthetic tickles your fancy, there are near-endless depths of great music to plumb.

So I get offended when people listen to bad music.

I know you're thinking two things.
1. I listen to some terrible music. Guilty as charged.
2. Who's to say what's great music?

Everyone enjoys some garbage entertainment now-and-again. Sometimes, you just want to turn your brain off and enjoy schlock. Yes, I love Phil Collins' album "Both Sides", and Yes's 90125. They're bad. They're cheap entertainment. I love Friday the 13th Part VI and Hellraiser VI too. But the key word is "sometimes". I try and spend the bulk of my time listening to good music, watching good films, and reading good books.

I guess I have a hard time understanding why people don't spend more time listening to good music. If you like dance-pop music, don't listen to trash, listen to Cut/Copy or Sally Shapiro or M83. Smart lyrics, clever melodies, better production, more energy and more care went into that music than into Owl City or the like.

But why should you listen to good music?

It makes you a better person. Really. Good art of any kind demands you engage with not just the art itself, but with the rest of your life and with your relationships with other people on a deeper level. If you're just listening to schlock and your only justification for listening to it is "it's fun" or "it has a good beat", you're not only not engaging with music, you're not engaging in any sort of meaningful discourse ABOUT music. Which brings us to how does one define good music.

I have lots of ways that I determine what I want to listen to. That encompases a lot of good music, and a bit of bad music, but it certainly doesn't encompass all music. I don't really like hip-hop, or metal. I'm fairly indifferent to R&B, though I like a bit of it, and I like a bit of jazz but it's not really my passion. I'm not so arrogant to think that just because I don't like this music, though, that it isn't good music. Any art is good art, or at least valuable art, if you're able to have a meaningful discussion about it. Which I guess I should qualify: The only meaningful discussion you could ever have about "My Humps" (objectively the worst song ever written) is about how awful it is - that doesn't make it art (though I guess one could argue that "My Humps" crosses such a perverse line of awfulness that it actually becomes inverse-art, or something, but lets not go there). I mean meaningful discourse about artistic merit, about why it's worth listening to, about how it affects people on a level beyond "there's a beat. I guess I'll dance to it".

You should listen to good music because there's no excuse not to. Visit www.pitchforkmedia.com or www.cokemachineglow.com and read some reviews. Go visit Ditch Records or The Turntable here in Victoria, or your local record store whereever you are, and talk to the staff about music. Go to amazon.com or iTunes and listen to samples. It requires almost no effort to discover truly great music. If you just want pop music, don't be lazy and just take whatever is shovelled to you on the radio. Take 10 seconds to find music that's melodic and danceable but isn't mind-numbingly terrible in every other regard.

If you really don't care, why are you even listening?

Prior to records being available (and really, prior to car stereos, walkmans, and music ubiquity) people who didn't care about music didn't listen. Now people hang their music around their necks as a way to define themselves, like their awful jewlery and their gaudy clothes. Don't do this. If you really don't care about music and you just have it on because everyone else does, find something else to do with your time. Find something you're passionate about and invest your time and your money there.

Now go listen to Magma, or Deerhunter, or TV on the Radio, or Sonic Youth, or King Crimson, or The Beatles, or Fleet Foxes, or Neil Young, or Bob Dylan, or Nirvana, or The Smiths, or Talking Heads, or JS Bach, or Oscar Peterson, or John Cage, or Steve Reich, or Sufjan Stevens, or Final Fantasy, or The Arcade Fire, or David Bowie, or Tragically Hip, or Barenaked Ladies, or Arctic Monkeys, or Franz Ferdinand, or Mogwai, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, or Mono, or Radiohead, or Coldplay, or Jethro Tull, or Peter Gabriel, or Morrissey, or Saint Vincent, or I'm From Barcelona, or Polyphonc Spree, or My Brightest Diamond, or Bjork, or Sigur Ros, or Mum, or The Who, or Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath, or Slint, or Smashing Pumpkins, or The Field, or M83, or Hercules & Love Affair, or Antony & The Johnsons, or Red Hot Chilli Peppers, or Genesis, or Gentle Giant, or Do Make Say Think, or Broken Social Scene, or Feist, or John Coltrane, or Yo Yo Ma, or...

You get the picture.

There's a lot of beautiful, wonderful, exciting, challenging, terrifying, engaging music out there. Please don't deprive yourself of it.