Not So Easy Listening

I love music. I have always favored older stuff over what's contemporary, not for any really noble reasons so much as for the reason that old stuff is vetted already, and it's an ordeal to sift the good from the bad without a list of the best albums of all time from Rolling Stone Magazine. Still, I do get into the newer stuff more and more thanks to the influence from today's social networking websites. They tip me off to things I never would have heard of.

I did learn of Kanye West in college without the benefit of new online developments, but his latest album is an example of something I may never have listened to without music apps and websites that are now so prevalent. I was listening to said album yesterday and patting myself on the back for being in some kind of mainstream for a change, but I must confess that the album didn't do much for me as previous ones from Kanye had.

I knew that "Yeezus" wasn't reaching me when I realized that I'd been listening to a commercial jingle inserted in between tracks by the program I was using for at least fifteen or thirty seconds and I hadn't noticed one bit. This wasn't even the first time something like that had happened. Maybe I just have a hard time focusing on music like that, or maybe I am just not disposed to keep up on the vanguard of music.

If there is any comfort to be had, it may lie in the fact that ten more years will see me in middle age, where I can respectably close myself off to new music and fall back on all the old classics from my youth. Of course, I will have to actually start getting a handle on all the music from my youth, which will mean keeping the stuff from before I was born at arm's length for a while. That will be an unpleasant but necessary process.