I’ve been living under a rock OKAY?
The only thing I know about the band Nirvana is that they have a song called Smells Like Teen Spirit.
I was out to lunch with two coworkers the other day and they were surprised to hear that the only thing I know about the band Nirvana is that they have a song called Smells Like Teen Spirit and I can vaguely recall a melody. Is Kurt Cobain the lead? Is that how you spell his name? Didn’t he die early?
Let me tell you about the rock I’ve been living under.
My wonderful, beautiful, glorious, Christian parents rarely played secular music in the house. To be fair, this was during the good era of Audio Adrenaline, FFH, and Newsboys before the rebrand. I was on the praise and worship team at church for over a decade, so I consumed a lot of Christian music. Listening to this genre was encouraged, safe, and allowed. Listening to secular music was a matter much more complicated, and it’s usually easier to say “it wasn’t allowed.”
But this is a partial truth. Aside from the one time a Billy Joel CD was taken from me because my listening to it endlessly was linked to poor behavior (See Philippians 4:8), I had freedoms including a radio and an iPod. Not all secular music was off the table, but my parents preferred to vet everything before they let me purchase songs (ah, the days before streaming). So if there was something I was interested in I would ask my parents to review it and then they would decide if I could listen to it. My two working parents were busy so most of the time I didn’t bother.
There was also the matter of personal taste and ultimately the self imposed rock I’ve continued to live under.
A really big factor in all this is my classical training and love of classical music. I started piano lessons at age 6 and only got more into it as the years passed by. When I attended an arts high school I only got more obsessed with classical music and if you’ve ever tried exhausting the genre, it’s an impossible and addicting feat.
While I know a lot about the foundations of western classical music, the majority of popular or once-popular music has yet to reach my ears. Over the last several years I’ve made considerable efforts to “catch up” and round out my musical tastes, but I’ve got a long long way to go.
Let me tell you what we’re working with.
The 4 musicians my parents were fond of because hey, we all have our vices.
Billy Joel
The Beach Boys
Johnny Cash
Jimmy Buffet
Aside from that, I can sing several songs from the following artists:
Billy Joel
Joni Mitchell
Nina Simone
First Aid Kit
The Lumineers
Avenged Sevenfold
Taylor Swift
Coldplay
In my efforts to pull myself out from underneath the rock, I’ve been slowly working my way through Paul Moon’s 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.
It has introduced me to some amazing things like Duran Duran, Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass, My Morning Jacket, etc. The only thing better than “discovering” something so mainstream is seeing the look on everyone’s faces when I tell them about it.
But admittedly working my way through 1,000 things is way harder than, say, a list of 100. Rolling Stone’s list of 100 in fact. Because chances are, the top artists on that list are probably the ones like Nirvana. The ones that hinder me in conversation when I don’t know what everybody else is talking about.
And not timeboxing my experience can also be problematic. I’ll either get super sucked into an artist and have the Earth Wind and Fire experience where it’s all I listen to for weeks and weeks, or I’ll have the AC/DC experience where I listen to one album once and decide “wow that was pretty good” and then never touch it again.
Rolling Stone's Top 100 Artists
So I’m going to have Keith randomly pull a number, then cross reference that number with an artist on Rolling Stone’s top 100 list. I’ll write down all my prior knowledge and what I think I know about that artist. Then I’ll give myself two weeks to do a total deep dive on them (articles, interviews, essential albums, tracks that span the chronology of the career, etc.) and then report back.
