Music Sources

A decade ago I made a large party playlist of tracks representing four decades of popular (if sometimes eccentric) music. More recently I decided to add another decade worth of tracks and found that the way I discover music had changed. Or possibly it had reverted to far older ways of encountering music.

In the family home the only radio that played was talk-back radio. There were, however, a few other ways to be exposed to music. School gave me a random mix of sing-alongs derived from nursury rhymes, golden oldies and footy anthems. Visits to shopping centres exposed me to whatever was charting or deemed suitable for shoppers. This included a surprising number of novelty instrumentals that tend to be dismissed today as 'musak'. But there were also pop songs by artists now all-but-forgotten like The Captain And Tennille. Added to this were TV ads for record compilations of easy listening favourites by the likes of Nana Mouskouri and Kamahl. Indeed the selection wafting on the waves was surprisingly multicultural - moreso than a contemporary lens would imagine. But TV was more important for me in another way.

TV themes and movie scores were possibly the biggest part of my childhood musically. And before the 90s they rarely pushed cross-promotional songs. Once more instrumentals were central to all this. And it was via this medium that I developed a taste for folk, classical and jazz. This was all pretty passive listening however. It was only in my mid-teens that I started following the charts from a mix of TV and FM radio.

I first watched Rage at a sleep-over and from around 1888 to 1992 I actively watched such programs and tuned into hit stations (for which we had a stereo 'boom box' added to the household inventory). After that my explorations continued to be deliberate but diverged into two parallel tracks. Have I related that here in another entry? Sorry if I have.

One track was to notice whatever my uni friends were into and played at parties. This took me away from charting songs and into the tastes of various sub-cultures from goth to feral. That was interesting as some things I assumed were new and very 90s were in fact 80s but innovative (like Violent Femmes). This went on for a while and involved a lot of sharing of CDs till the era of online music access.

The other track was possibly started by a coffee table book I came across on the history of rock-and-roll. In its front cover was an overly elaborate 'family tree' of popular blues-based genres and suddenly I was hooked into exploring this history. Another thing that reinforced this was an excellent BBC documentary series Dancing In The Street. The focus of such history was on artists who may have been popular but were also deemed important in the development of those various branching genres. This then became a big driver of my tastes getting older at the same time I was also keeping track of current trends. My 90s were as much about the 60s as they were of themselves. Since then I have 'lost touch' a bit.

Younger friends allowed me to keep somewhat abreast with newer artists into the present century but I will admit I lack interest in the newer iterations of older forms. And so in expanding that playlist to cover five decades I fell back on those older childhood sources of music. A few tracks come from movies (like Skyfall by Adele) while one or two had been played in shops (like Cool Kids by Echosmith). To find songs that fit in with the older selection I also hunted for tracks by newer bands who played in a consciously retro way (like Panic Station by Muse). Then there were new tracks by old artists (Sting and Shaggy collaborated on an album and that was a fun discovery made for my by the YouTube algorithm). Finally I wanted a bit more linguistic diversity to match my existing variety of genres and drew on artists like Youssou N’Dour.

I think it worked. It could be worth continuing this practice to stay even somewhat 'up-do-date'. On the other hand things have changed now. Media fragmentation means that we are losing a common experience of music 'everyone' knows. If that is so then maybe my preference for stuff that 'was good then and is still good now' is just another part of that fragmentation and that is as okay as any of it.