Feeling Lonely

When you spend as much time online as I do–and come on, I’m a blogger–well, I’ve never estimated before, but I read voraciously. Lots and lots of articles are digested, via Boing Boing, Digg, Daily Kos, Yahoo! News, and then dozens of other things I keep up on. Occasionally I’ll read something that really sticks with me: The Moral Case Against the Iraq War by Paul Savoy in The Nation, for one (not to wear my political allegiances on my sleeve or anything). Another couple of pieces I’ve loved for a long time are these humor essays by Philip Michaels, The Loner’s Home Companion and The High School Guide to Hate. The real sine qua non of this entry though is 29 Thoughts on the Apparent Sexiness of Conor Oberst, by Adam Boyle. This was part of a once-regular series on Nerve.com, detailing thoughts on the apparent sexiness of all kinds of things. Gems:

3. Something tells me without the neat haircut, he’d just be Conor, the guy serving me a Mochaccino in Omaha.

9. When Chopin was around, was there some idiot like me writing stuff like, “I don’t get all the fuss!”

But the real reason I’m writing:

23. It’s exhausting to keep up with new music. Sometimes I think I should throw out everything except Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, and I’d be perfectly happy.

And this related tidbit from 29 Thoughts on the Apparent Sexiness of the iPod (link is a touch NSFW):

22. One thing about the iPod is that it’s put such a premium on taste — listening to the right music, being up to date, making sure you’re just as cool as your friends has never felt so important. But it’s tiring. Sometimes you just want to put on Peter Gabriel’s So and relax the fuck out.

Being paid to review music all day sounds cush, but it’s not all Spoon and Rasputina (regrettably!). To be frank, some of the music that comes in I can just instantly pass on. But having to make that decision leads to some anguish, doubled if the artist personally calls or emails me asking about action taken. Other music that comes in takes very little effort to add–I know the artist, I love them already, I’m told which songs have F-bombs (or a lyric sheet is included). Where the real effort is is the valley between those two extremes. I received another thirty CDs yesterday, including two that were going for adds¹ that same day. If a bio doesn’t mention which songs have swear words, and there’s no lyric sheet, and there’s no lyrics on the Internet, I’m left in an uncomfortable position. I can’t very well listen to every track of every CD, and even if I could, that’s the other problem–when I’m reviewing music, I have to make sure that I’m constantly actually paying attention to what’s playing. Sometimes I’ll sit down to respond to emails, and I’ll put in some new CD before I do so. Ten minutes later I’m on track four and I can’t remember anything that I just heard, so then I have to roll it back over to track one.

But about the quotes there, as fun as it is to become acquainted with good new music and help DJs listen to good new music, and so forth, it is exhausting to only ever listen to that. I don’t often take CDs home with me to review. My home and my walk to and from the station is filled with music I know and love already, most of the time: Apples in Stereo, The Avalanches, Beulah, The Clientele, The Decemberists, DJ Shadow, Thelonious Monk, Rilo Kiley, Tom Waits, The Velvet Underground, The Violent Femmes, Wilco, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Zombies. These are some of my favorite musicians.
Usually when a label says they sound like Decemberists, DJ Shadow, or Tom Waits, they are not nearly as good as any of them. That’s the sad truth of it.

OK, enough rambling. I have work to do. Footnote 1, “going for adds,” after the cut.

1: “Going for adds” is a sort of an embargo date promoters and labels have, nearly always a Tuesday, before which they don’t want DJs to play a CD. They do this to have a single big promotional push for the albums or singles. It’s also the tastes-best-when-used-by date, because CMJ has a Top Adds chart, where music directors choose their five favorite new releases going for adds that week, and the most added gets the highest ranking. So if I really love a CD but I didn’t get to it until some time after 11 AM Pacific time on a Tuesday, it only helps if its chart ranking is up there, too. Recently I added the Aa album gAame, and it hit #1 on the charts, but its add date was weeks before (its arrival predated my taking over of the position); the promoter called me the next week and said he was glad, but that he had just finished promoting the album.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 2:24 pm and is filed under job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.