So yeah, the post about good music. There's very little that can be said that hasn't been said, written or blabbed before, so there's no reason to belabor it. Good music may be the most perfect form of art because it actually enters the body in a different way than anything. Maybe good food can compare in that way, but few see food as art the same way they do music. There is also the added dynamic of seeing music performed live versus listening to a recording. When simply listening, the music becomes a soundtrack to life (as discussed in an earlier entry), which is a pretty amazing thing. A great painting or sculpture can't as easily follow you around and shape the way you see the world like music pouring directly into your ear canals via Apple's lovely white earbuds. (Sidenote: Why won't Apple make black earbuds to go with the black iPod?) When seeing a great musical performance live, the music isn't a soundtrack to your life, but rather, you are a merely an audience to the music itself. It's a role-reversal, but not any less significant and rewarding.

All the cliches apply here. Great music transcends time and space, we all know. That was the topic of NPR's "All Songs Considered" recently, where the topic of discussion was "Were the 80s Really That Bad?" There are a myriad of reasons why the 80s were somewhat great. Aside from being born, several other great things happened and not just in music. The Raiders won their last Super Bowl, the Mets won the World Series (as an added bonus, this coincided with the Red Sox losing a World Series) and...and...well, Back to the Future came out in theaters. So yeah, that's a decade's worth of great things, right? Birth, Raiders, Mets, Back to the Future.

The panel on the NPR show did a pretty good job pulling music from different veins, but at times it seemed a bit contrived. This came as no surprise. Of course, the start of the show focused heavily on the predominantly abhorrent supply of synth-pop that infected the 80s. Thing is, and as the panel discovered through discussion, some of these songs really weren't that bad. At least the writing of the song wasn't. Sure, some of the new studio tricks and the presumed "in sound" made things go haywire at times, but "Take On Me" can be a great song in any decade. Thankfully, the panel was also careful to include genres of music best represented by Guns N Roses and The Replacements. There is nothing "1980s" about these bands' albums except the year of release. As the panel agreed, this music is just as timeless now as it might or might not have been then.

Since the advent of pop/rock music, every decade has had hits and misses, not to mention hits that should have been misses and misses that should have been hits. This will never change. Something that has changed and will continue to do so is the converging of mainstream and underground music. A quick thought of the best mainstream music of the 2000s yields a depressingly short list, but that doesn't mean incredible music isn't still being made. Almost everything that seems mainstream these days is hip-hop/R&B or some crossbred mutant therein. That's well and good, but illustrates the point that people have other outlets for music these days and that's where the good stuff is. Leave the crap for chicken finger restaurants at lunch, just not Otter's (see previous post).