The Great Awokening marches on at Harris For President (2024)

Second, like I say, i live in the past

That’s not terrible by itself; it’s common to the ‘human condition’. The opening for friendly criticism comes when you hold yourself out to be an arbiter of quality (in this case, for music). I mean c’mon bruh, you spam us with dreck like Captain Beefheart. Are those posts a genuine attempt at bonhomie, or a low key troll? Impossible to tell. It’s lazy, druggy ‘hey man, you can’t go wrong with the Captain’. [lebowski.jpg]

the only reason I’m going to bat at all for Billie Eilish is she’s the current subject as a badminton poppet on these threads

That’s called “white knighting”. Which is more about the ‘knight’ than the damsel. 🙂

Third, well hey, you wish you were one-third as hep as I was at age 15

The lyrics to Spingsteen’s “Glory Days” comes to mind, though I’m guessing your “speedballs” were different than his.

I agree that pop and hip-hop these days are a load of crap, but to be honest, I don’t really know what is on the good horizon. Care to clue me in?

WHERE TO BEGIN. (kidding) (not really)

First, forget about the music itself. It’s about you: Where you at, pal? How far have you been? (In every city, in every nation, from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station? sorry) We all know you were a hep cat scenester back in the day. You know names. Allegedly you yourself were a name in a peripheral artistic discipline. Cool, cool.

But unfortunately it seems you were imprinted with a frozen-in-time terminally hip ‘gun slit’ view of pop culture (scenes, name dropping), leaving you adrift when assessing the (creative) past and present. Advanced age and brain damage from past drugs and booze binges probably ain’t helping, either.

I can’t fix that all that. However, to throw you a line and answer your question, big picture, if you really wanna know, you’ll have to do remedial work. First, the obvious: Dump your non-artistic personal motives for boosting an artist (e.g., with Eilish you’ve cited personal white knighting and White identitarian reasons for defending her cultural presence).

All right, next you’ll have to find new good music and discover missed older music. This is fraught, because innate personal taste comes into play here. If you have a tin ear (perhaps due in part to blasted cilia from having been a downtown-scene street urchin) there’s no way for you to really judge. You may ‘like’ this or that for whatever reason, but if you put it up for scrutiny on a public message board, someone like me could take you to task. C’est la vie, mon ami.

To find new (to you) good music, assuming you can judge, listen to various internet-available college (or indie) radio shows and YouTube playlists. They’re free. The best college stations have long-established ‘resident’ DJs with themed shows (i.e. not current students, who given their young age usually don’t know much).

Skim through radio show upload timelines of recent broadcasts (which usually disappear after about two weeks for copyright compliance) and write down good tracks and artists for further investigation. One good reason to listen blind to college show upload streams is there are no visual distractions to initially judge the music, unlike YouTube which can feature imagery which can distort the perception of the music: Some music videos are great, others detract from the song.

Otherwise, YouTube has tons of stuff, much of it searchable by category (e.g., “darkwave playlist”). Some individual playlists are better than others. Skim around. Write down good finds on a master list so you don’t forget them. (Extra credit: Support artists you really like by buying physical media. Go to shows if you still go to shows. Buy tickets at the venue box office to avoid fees and surcharges.)

This kind of research takes time and steady attention. If you’re serious, and do it for the music appreciation itself (rather than superficially trying to find what’s ‘hip’ or ‘cool’ or ‘the next thing’) you may find the effort personally rewarding. OTOH, most people are ‘casual’ music listeners and after a certain age already have the ‘soundtrack of their life’ set in stone—for them, the above would be a waste of time.

That’s it. Good luck!