White noise

Free stuff. Everyone likes it, and I’m no exception. One of the perks of being the arts and culture editor at The Uniter is the free CDs. Musicians just send them in. As someone who has been listening to music obsessively since I was 13, and who once aspired to write for >Rolling Stone, getting free CDs is a fantasy fulfilled.

With the free CDs comes the responsibility to review them. In the two years I’ve been seriously evaluating the music I listen to as a “music critic,” it has become increasingly clear to me that making aesthetic judgments – like whether or not a song’s chord progression is cliched, or whether or not an album is merely an imitation of something that was done better 20 years ago – is less important than asking questions like: What is the worldview the musician is presenting? What does their work say about society? And what does it say about society if their music happens to be the hipster soundtrack du jour?

The supply of CDs coming into the office for review is endless, and after a while it can become hard to care about those larger questions. Asking them starts to feel almost pointless. How many bands made up of four or five white, middle class guys in their early 20s can I listen to? What really makes Band A different from Band B and Band C, and if we already have bands L, M, N, O and P, do we really need Band Z? How many songs about girls, Saturday nights and being upset – whether at mom, dad, “the system” or whatever – does the world really need?

Maybe all that this music really says about our society is that a bunch of us grew up with parents who had enough disposable income to buy us instruments and pay for music lessons. We never struggled, we never had to work hard for anything. We could make music because we had free time after school and knew that dinner would be waiting for us on the table when the jam session was over. And we could buy lots of music.

Maybe what I’m hearing every time I listen to a CD is the overproduced sound of affluence.

The above is an excerpt from a longer article that appears in the current issue of Geez magazine (The Music Issue), in stores now. To preview the issue online, visit www.geezmagazine.org/issue11.