Mental Constipation

Believe me when I say it, discovering new music is tiresome. As I have mentioned before (I think?), I recently decided to start liking The Cure. I’m not sure where it started, but I think I wanted to download some Joy Division, for some reason. Before downloading I read about them on Wikipedia, because, you know, their story is interesting. What I also came over was their genre – little did I know what I was getting into. Post-punk, it said. Interesting, I thought. I’ve always loved punk music and the narrative of “music destroying music”, but what kind of music came after it? Well, as I learned later, post-punk isn’t technically “post” – it developed alongside punk rock from about ‘77 – but it has a distinctly different sound.

The Wiki-article on post-punk directed me to a list of artists whose names I’ve heard many times but never really listened to a lot. I picked out a few: The Smiths, Talking Heads, The Cure, The B-52’s. I skimmed their respective articles, then checked their discographies and downloaded the three or so first albums of each of them. A few days later I was a fan. It didn’t stop there, however: my music player, Songbird, has a nifty function that shows information on the artists, directly from last.fm. I started reading those, too, and checking out the “recommended artists” section. More names were added to my To Listen To-list. Among those was Elvis Costello, which brings us to today. I had already listened to his three first albums and become a fan, but I just needed to check up on some facts. And that’s how I fell into the Wiki trap. Long story short, one article led to another, and soon I was reading about The Specials, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, then Dire Straits, The Police, and then Eric Clapton, David Bowie, Rock Against Racism and British fascists. The point to all this? Well; that the history of post WWII 20th century music is very interesting. And, the lesson: don’t enter Wikipedia unless you’re sure you have a lot time ahead of you. Hours may fly by unnoticed.

EDIT: This post should also be read as a gigantic musical recommendation. I whole-heartedly endorse every artist mentioned on this page.

EDIT II (or post-post scriptum for you latin spics out there): as I am reminded of maybe once a year, once upon a time this blog was supposed to have a link to good music in every post. Well, consider this a massive recompensation: every link in this post will lead to a video of an exemplary song from the respective artist. :)