For now, my thoughts are on music.
I am not a musician. My training in music theory is limited to a couple of years of courses in high school and watching my daughters train on violin and cello by the Suzuki method. Mostly, I just listen to a lot of music, and I remember just about everything I hear.
Lately, I've been listening to a lot of so-called "classic rock". This is a radio format that has existed since at least the early 1980's, which, fortuitously, were also my "formative" years (i.e. junior high/middle school through college). These stations always annoyed me in the past; I used to describe them as "overplayed hits of yesteryear", except that oversimplified things a bit -- even if they weren't overplayed before, my point was, they were being overplayed now. I haven't listened to much radio for years now, so I don't really know how this format has developed since I last spent any significant time with it. Are early-90's grunge/alternarock acts, many of whom were influenced and inspired by "classic rock", now played on radio stations formatted for "classic rock"?
I don't really care. My project -- or, at least, my first project -- will be to do a band-by-band description, with some analysis, of a "canonical" classic rock format as it existed (or, perhaps more accurately, as I understood it, which may not be the same thing) in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Eventually, I will have a good running tally of the songs that made up a "classic rock" playlist back then, a canon of sorts. Maybe I'll even manage to suggest some "apocrypha", songs that by various criteria didn't make the grade then but should have.
We shall see.
No comments:
Post a Comment