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Rated G

Since the late 1980s I have intermittently compiled song samplers, labeled only with the year of their creation, as a kind of audio diary. I don't store them anywhere particular, they just turn up every once in a while and sometimes accompany long road trips. And, with advent of CD technology, they have become Hi-Fidelity Christmas cards.

(Yes, I have figured out how to assemble compilations using iTunes software. I'm not such a senseless old dodger that I don't see some virtue in new technologies. But so long as it behaves like a slightly better educated cassette tape and knows its place, I'm content. I still mourn the end of the era of physical product, even as our daughter studies dinosaurs with her new-found reading skills.)

Since the computer has made the moving of tracks too simple, I've become much more obsessive about the sequencing of things. (There's an early tape somewhere, filled with classic rock songs, and then Mudhoney's "Touch Me, I'm Sick" at the very end. A provocation or a signal, I know not which, nor did I know then.) This year, as I try to sum up my hearing of 2007 for our annual critics' poll, I have taken to dumping a song or three from albums I liked onto the computer and making preliminary guesses about sequencing.

For the last few years these compilations have been meant as an audio essay, as commentary and autobiography. This year seems less to be shaping up differently, but I can't guess how yet. Assuredly not autobiographical, anyhow. (Once finished, whenever that is, I will post the list up here so y'all can poke fun.)

One of the tensions within No Depression remains concerns about our relative age. We are one of the few music magazines not obsessed with the doings of the youngest and the shiniest, and we remain committed to artists whose work will endure, whose careers will stretch past a handful of hit singles, who continue to find cogent things to say and sing and write about well past the sweet blush of youth. This, of course, is my prejudice, for I can no longer pretend to be anything BUT middle aged, and it becomes increasingly important to see and hear other creative souls of my general demographic continuing to bang as hard as they can against the outer edges of their skill and craft.

This does not mean we're uninterested in younger, emerging artists. But it does mean -- as it has these thirteen-plus years -- that we're engaged in writing and designing and conceptualizing an adult magazine about adult music for adult readers.

A couple days back Maggie needed diverting for a few minutes, and she was near to my forbidden (that is: too messy) office, so I invited her in and thought to play her bits of my assembling 2007 compilation. Maggie is four and a half, and, unlike her father, she likes to dance. I hope she always likes to dance, though I should prefer she not tromp on too many jewel cases. But I realized quickly, once lyrics began to kick in, that I'd have to do some explaining I'm not ready for if she paid attention to what was playing. So I skipped to the next song, and then the next, and then the next. And then was glad the need for diversion has passed, because there wasn't much amid these songs I wanted to explain to a precocious four-and-a-half-year-old. Nor, uh, to hear repeated to her grandparents.

Now, that's obviously not the tension we talk about between new and established artists, between younger indie rock stars (in whom I too rarely believe) and veterans who can still bring it when properly motivated. But I was struck that this really is adult music which engages us in these physical and metaphorical pages. It's not kid stuff. It's not supposed to be.

Posted by grant on November 18, 2007 10:45 AM | Permalink