Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve often won­dered when a new genre of music would come along that would shake the foun­da­tions of our soci­ety in the way that rock and roll did in the 1950s.  Where is that new sound that par­ents and elders will demo­nize while the youth move to its rhythms.    Who is my generation’s Elvis?  I will laugh at you if you say Kurt Cobain.  His was a vara­tion, not a true invention.

I don’t know why it came to me today, but I real­ized how much of an idiot I have been ask­ing myself that ques­tion.  What is the new genre, the genre of the late 20th cen­tury, early 21st?  What comes after rock and roll in the pro­gres­sion of pop­u­lar music?  Duh, you idiot, hiphop.

This generation’s Elvis Presley is a com­bi­na­tion of Jay Z, 50 cent, and Eminem.

I’ve been slowly open­ing to the notion of hip hop since leav­ing col­lege.  There, the musi­cian you were most likely to hear echo­ing across the log­gia was Ani DeFranco.  Grinnell was a fairly insu­lar bub­ble when it came to music.  Not a lot of new things pen­e­trated its exte­rior shell, at least while I was there.  It’s not neo­pho­bic by any means, but the stu­dents have more impor­tant things to focus on, and music that makes them think is just one thing too many ask­ing for brain power.  Through Grinnell, I mostly lis­tened to what I loved in high school.  The mp3 rev­o­lu­tion brought me not new things, but old things in a new format.

Then in Wyoming, I had noth­ing but time to think.  I joined Emusic when it was still buf­fet style, and I down­loaded things that I would have never con­sider pay­ing $15 for an album, just to try out and find some­thing that hits my ear dif­fer­ently. I dis­cov­ered all man­ner of music from around the world, but still I failed to appre­ci­ate hiphop.

It took a suc­ces­sion of three artists to open my ears to what was going on.  Kanye West, Pigeon John, and MC Frontalot.   My ini­tial dis­like of hiphop was that all I ever heard about was gang­ster rap. Misogynistic, vio­lent stuff–certainly valid art, but not some­thing with which I con­nected.  Then I began to hear more sub­ur­ban hiphop, even nerd­core.  Music that comes from places not quite so urban.  It took lis­ten­ing to those artists for me to go back and real­ize what I was miss­ing by not lis­ten­ing to Jay Z and others.

I used to think techno was the future, the next rock and roll.

In my teens, when I dis­cov­ered techno music thanks to a after dark radio pro­gram on the local alter­na­tive sta­tion, I thought that the elec­tronic beats would be the sound of the future.  Everything I heard on that radio pro­gram sounded cyber­punk.  I remem­ber one track in par­tic­u­lar that actu­ally sam­pled heav­ily from Blade Runner.  I would lay on my bed after mid­night on a Sunday night with the radio next to my ear and soak in that new sound.  I read sci­ence fic­tion then–nothing so good as what I read now, but enough to have this vision of a future where com­put­ers were impor­tant.  What could sig­nify that more than a genre of music made on the computer?

I still lis­ten to quite a bit of elec­tronic music.  I’m not a fan in the sense that I can actu­ally label all the sub­gen­res.  I like tracks selec­tively.  Some down­beat, some drum and bass, some indus­trial, a lit­tle bit of every­thing really.  Artists like Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and Fatboy Slim are what I turn to when I want to con­cen­trate on some­thing in an upbeat man­ner.  I find it dif­fi­cult to feel down with those kinds of beats danc­ing around my head.

But I’ve added no small amount of hiphop to the mix. I’m even more igno­rant of the genre than I am of elec­tron­ica.  I don’t have the time I used to have to explore music and to really seek out new sounds any­more.  These days, dis­cov­er­ies are purely accidental.

I used to think that old people’s tastes cal­ci­fied as a process of grow­ing older, and per­haps they do.  Our brains do tend to become less plas­tic over time.  But I’m not so sure that our tastes don’t stag­nate more because we aren’t exposed to any­thing new, or at least weren’t, because we’re so busy work­ing and rais­ing fam­i­lies.  And by the time our chil­dren bring new sounds in, all it does is remind us of how we’ve grown older, and so we instinc­tively reject the sound of youth.

Maybe my gen­er­a­tion will be dif­fer­ent.  I’m sure every­one has said that about their gen­er­a­tion since Socrates, but the inter­net changes things.  Tools like Pandora and Last​.fm appar­ently intro­duce new music to peo­ple quite well–albiet music that is algo­r­thymi­cally related to music they already like.  It’s rare that any­one makes a leap from one from of music to some­thing so com­pletely dif­fer­ent.  Change in taste is a steady pro­gres­sion of bread crumbs through a back cat­a­log of tracks.

Now that I work from home and can lis­ten to loud music with no regard for the health of my ears or the tastes of cubi­cle mates, I really must con­fig­ure last​.fm again and start explor­ing music again–if not actively, then at least pas­sively as I work.   I’m afraid of my brain grow­ing rigid.  I’m afraid of turn­ing becom­ing that cliche of the old man who shouts at teenagers to turn down that racket.   It’s part of being afraid to grow old, and yet it’s some­thing dif­fer­ent.  Afraid of sta­sis, afraid of stag­na­tion.  If I’m not mov­ing for­wards, I might as well be mov­ing backwards.