This whole digital music thing is not working out so well. Using a work computer has meant keeping a digital library that is about 10 times smaller than my physical (CD and vinyl) library. Using CDs less, I wound up packing many of them away. Itunes match somehow misplaced hundreds of songs. To combat this, I recently pulled out boxes of CDs and actually listened to them!
One of those I came across was the Lemonheads' first record, Hate Your Friends, on the TAANG! label. I remember buying this one on vinyl, circa 1987, with no idea who they were or what they sounded like (Ok - I was guessing punk. I told my roommate that I bought the record because the guys on the record sleeve looked like us). Where I bought it is a funny cultural history, too: this Boston-based band was in the "import" section of the record store at the Ford City Shopping Center (on the Southwest Side of Chicago, where you'd think somebody would know better, but you're wrong because on the South Side, everything's 20 years behind and they are still waiting for Nevermind to come out).
Some friends and I were just talking about how there are so few blogs out there, especially related to music. So I thought, I better step up and start blogging . . .
So here it is, another music blog. Another music blog by a white guy who spent his 20s listening to college radio and is an academic.
Seriously: I am doing this for a few reasons: I chair a composition program, but I rarely find myself writing (outside of emails and proposals for new hires or new classes, that is), I have thoughts on music that I need to get out of my head (even if most of them are twenty years old . . . especially because most of them are twenty years old), I have dabbled academically in music analysis and need to find some ways to engage with that discursive community despite the fact I have less and less interest in publishing in academic journals (and maybe writing this blog will change that), I have found myself becoming stuck in my musical listening ways and figure this is a way to prompt myself to change them.
And what in the world does "sound arguments" mean? A couple things -- first, my goal is to write arguments about music--not only what's good or bad, but how to interpret and make sense of it. Second, it represents the way I tend to think about music, as being a kind of argument -- an argument about what sounds good, an argument about society, an argument about how to live and be in the world. In the academic writing I've done, I focus on how music works rhetorically (I'll explore and expand and play with this idea in the blog, so I won't say much more here) and that approach will be in play here.
So what's to come? some thoughts about the Lemonheads and their AllMusic reviews, some thoughts about Liz Phair (and maybe a review of the new 33 1/3 book on Exile in Guyville by my colleague, Gina Arnold), some thoughts about the return of a bunch of Minnesota bands from the 1980s and which ones don't suck.
For now, I think this blog will unapologetically reinscribe my own white and lower middle class and academic privilege, but I promise to interrogate it and expand as time goes on. Something to come back for!
