While readily admitting that my music bias resides with my generation, I just can’t figure out “new music.” Frankly, I haven’t been able to decipher popular music for more than 20 years. The last “new music” I remember buying was probably Talking Heads. Oh, I buy a lot of new releases (moe. Grateful Dead, Keller Williams, String Cheese Incident, Yonder Mountain String Band, and The Big Wu come immediately to mind), but these aren’t new musical forms—more like retreads of older musical forms if you will.
But “new music” has always evaded me. Consider the Billboard top-selling albums of July 1971:
- “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones
- “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye
- “4 Way Street” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
- “Aretha Live at Fillmore West” by Aretha Franklin
- “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” by James Taylor
Even if you’ve been living under a rock for the past 30 years, you recognize these as classic releases. I smile contentedly just at hearing the titles. Yes, they were commercial releases, and yes I was listening to a lot more non-commercial stuff as well in 1971 (ironically—or maybe not—with the exception of Spirit, it’s mostly a lot of the same stuff I’m listening to today). No question these releases have withstood the test of time.
Compare that list with this list of top-selling releases of July 2001:
- “Songs in A Minor” by Alicia Keys
- “The Saga Continues” by P. Diddy & the Bad Boy Family
- “Devil’s Night” by D12
- “Break the Cycle” by Staind
- “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child
If you’re older than 13, chances are you don’t know or care who these people are, either. And as for the test of time, it’s best to classify these as derivative clown music. But if you’re a music critic you have to listen to this crap and, well, that’s just what Nick Hornby did in his excellent “Pop Quiz” in the current issue of The New Yorker. Hornby sat down and suffered through a thorough listening of all 10 of the top-selling releases of July 2001. Bless Hornby for sacrificing his ears so the rest of us don’t have to; the very best any of these releases could muster, in Hornby’s opinion, was “harmless.”
This is one of the best pieces of pop music criticism I’ve seen in quite a long while.
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