When should we stop chasing new music? When should we just give up and pretend that everything ended with Def Leppard and get stuck in a continuous loop of hair metal? fn1 You know those people. Their listening habits revolve around the bands they listened to during high school. Years later, they cannot escape the classic rock, the grunge, or the hip hop that defined their golden age of listening. Their soundtrack will always be tied to a particular epoch of their life, and there is simply no reason for them to move on and let anything else crowd out the nostalgia.
Life happens. College, marriages, jobs, kids. No one should expect us to stay up on the latest bands, right? And no one can blame us for going back to our sweet spot because it feels as comfortable as our favorite sweatshirt that really should be sent to goodwill. Anyway, there is too much damn music to wade through, especially in the age of Apple or Spotify with an endless listening library at our fingertips. It is simply too difficult to keep up. Right?
I wonder what would have happened if had I stopped paying attention. In my case, I experienced a two-year hiatus from popular music from 1998 to 2000 while serving as a missionary in South Africa. After coming home, it could have been a clean break for me and an easy excuse to listen, forevermore, to the bands that carried me through high school: Live, Counting Crows, Pearl Jam, Beastie Boys and other stalwarts could have been the soundtrack for the rest of my life. Nothing wrong with that sort of lineup, right?
Okay, it is depressing to think about. "What sort of music do you like?" followed by "Oh, you know, I like [insert bygone era here], I don't really listen to much to new stuff." To imagine a world that stopped with The Eagles, ABBA, AC/DC, or whomever the usual suspect may be is downright sad.
Staying plugged in, if even a little, is invigorating. And it doesn't take much effort. It is the difference between living an aesthetic life with the wind at your face, willing to try new things and hear where the world is (rather than where it was). We should never let go of what came before, of course; it is too vital to our shared history or personal makeup. But we should also keep our eyes ahead and our ears open. We just may find new sights and sounds that augment our lives in uniquely powerful ways.
This year, to name just a few musical moments, we discovered the glorious dislocation in "Daydreaming," the jazzy swagger in "All We Got," the devastated cries of "I Need You," the soaring cultural politics of "St. Augustine," and the prescient death before death in "Lazarus." Yes, even today, there are great songs to savor along our way, and great artists that will never pop up between Styx and Zeppelin on our classic rock station.
fn1 Wait a minute . . . that could be amazing!
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