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Leo Records on Bandcamp, a good book about pop music, and much more

Garden gnome as backyard snow measuring tool (photo: I.A. Freeman)

So this is nice: Shaun Brady wrote a really good piece about Leo Records, and the current digital reissue campaign I’m working on, for Bandcamp Daily. I’m quoted, as is Leo founder Leo Feigin, and there are some capsule reviews of essential releases. Check it out, and then buy some music, won’t you?

Gene Seymour wrote a really thoughtful review of In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor for the latest issue of Bookforum. He calls it “a densely detailed chronicle of an artist assembling the rudiments of his style and being on his own highly subjective terms and, against formidable odds, adhering to and broadening his vision to the end.”

Another cool thing: I was recently interviewed about the book — and about Cecil Taylor more broadly — for the site JerryJazzMusician. That piece isn’t up yet, but as an appetizer of sorts, they’ve posted the introduction to In the Brewing Luminous. So go read that, too, and then maybe buy the book if you’re interested. (Amazon, Abebooks, Wolke Verlag)

A guy I knew in high school named Hank Shaw is a chef and cookbook author. His newsletter is called To The Bone. I subscribe, so should you.

One of the primary ways people have expressed love, over the last two centuries or so, has been through love songs. One of noted dickhead Frank Zappa’s most oft-cited aphorisms was, “There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.” And once upon a time, I used to listen to a lot of love songs, because I used to listen to a lot of pop music. I even paid attention to the lyrics, or at least allowed them to worm their way into my brain. But no more.

I have been thinking lately about the fact that pop music doesn’t work on me anymore. I mean, maybe it would if I allowed myself to marinade in it the way so many of my fellow critics do. But I don’t have time for that. I am required, for professional reasons, to spend most of my dedicated listening time with instrumental music, whether it’s the new Branford Marsalis album that’s a re-recording of a Keith Jarrett album, or Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s new piece coming out in March. No one’s paying me to listen to Sabrina Carpenter or whoever, so I don’t.

But it’s starting to feel like my ignorance of contemporary pop music is evolving into a disinterest in songs. I love melodies; I love riffs; I enjoy conventional compositional forms and music with obvious structure. But all that affection manifests itself in a love of jazz that sounds descended from ’50s and ’60s hard bop, or a really ass-kicking, headbanging metal anthem. Atavistic pleasures, in other words. And forms that push the same pleasure buttons in me that a pop song apparently pushes in other people. So why don’t I want to hear new pop songs?

I refuse to flatter myself by saying that new pop music isn’t as good as the stuff that came out when I was young. But maybe it’s that I’m just full of old songs, and have no room for new ones. Maybe a new pop or rock song can’t gain purchase in my brain because of all the songs I learned when I was a teenager. Because my brain really is jammed with 40, 50 and 60-year-old songs; they leap into my consciousness unbidden, and a chorus or a half a verse will take over my mind for an entire day, leaving me reciting something from the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, or whatever, from my morning shower all the way to lunch.

And then I start thinking about whether I ever liked pop music after the age of 12 or so. When I was 10, in 1982, I received a small AM radio as a gift, and started listening to American Top 40 every weekend. I liked some songs, disliked others. The first time a song really jumped out at me as being different somehow (and better) was when the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” was inexplicably on the chart. I was instantly drawn in by that song. I listened to the show every week specifically to hear it; I would probably say that was the first time I had a “favorite song”.

But it definitely marked a shift in my listening habits. By the end of that year, I was listening to Judas Priest, and very soon I had mostly given up on pop radio in favor of metal, and then punk (Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Flipper), all thanks to a slightly older kid who later became a Republican bank vice president. A few years later, I discovered jazz. And ever since, I’ve bounced between those two poles — aggressive guitar-based music, and various sounds that fall under the jazz umbrella.

(As I type these words, I’m listening to a new double live album by the ritualistic Greek metal band Rotting Christ that’ll be out in April. It rules.)

Songs, though… I just can’t appreciate them in the “learn all the words and sing along” way. I’m not that guy. The communal experience of pop music is not one I enjoy, or seek out.

All that said, I recently read my friend and fellow Stereogum writer Tom Breihan’s book The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music, and really enjoyed it. It’s based on his column of the same name, in which he writes about every song that’s ever hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The book, obviously, is more selective. It starts with Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”, from 1960, and ends with BTS’s “Dynamite”, from 2020. And there are a lot of major artists covered in between — the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, Prince, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears — but some other names you might expect, based on their commercial success alone, are not here. There are no chapters on Drake or Taylor Swift, though they get mentioned. Because what interests Breihan is when a #1 hit song is also somehow a sign of a broader cultural shift. Either it’s a new sound, like the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”, or it’s representative of a new way of selling/marketing music, like Soulja Boy’s “Crank That”. And he’s really good at tracing the stories behind these songs, and showing you the connections to broader trends and phenomena. If that kind of thing is interesting to you, buy the book.

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