"I'm never gonna know you now, but I'm gonna love you anyhow."

So.  Yes, you are correct, this blog has been in limbo for a few months after swearing up and down I'd do this thing, darnit.

But after grinding all that time, trying to write reviews of two albums I didn't like as much as I'd hoped, I picked up at random another one of those albums that the hipsters tell me is a classic.

I'm not even halfway through it and I love it more than both of those albums put together and then some.  So I think it might be a better place to start.

The title of this post is a line from one of the tracks on it.  You hipsters should know it in a heartbeat.  (And I'm sure Google will prompt you otherwise, so no prizes for guessing correctly.)

Stay tuned.

There Should Be An Entry Here By Now

. . . but there isn't, as you might (or more likely, might not) have noticed.

I have listened to both of the albums I challenged myself to.  I have thoughts on them, yes I does.  But I'm still going to need a couple more days to get them in a form that's suitable for public consumption, so January's entry will be a few days late.  My apologies to anybody who was truly burning with curiosity about my opinion of Exile on Main Street.  Here's the short version:

Dear Mr. Jagger:  Wikipedia informs me that you were born in Dartford, Kent, England.  You are not from the Southern United States.  Please quit trying to sing as if you are; it triggers my embarrassment squick.  Thank you.

No, Really, I'm Totally Going To Do This

Well, the flag I planted over two years ago is still standing where I left it, so I might as well make use of this particular patch of the blogiverse.

It's 2012 and since I've already decided I'm going produce a flower a day and 100 words per week, I might as well add one music review per month and see how well I hold up.

The albums for this month's review have been picked.  (In fact, I've had them sitting around waiting to be listened to since 2009.)  I will be doing a dual review of both Exile on Main St. by the Rolling Stones and Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair.  There may be comparing or contrasting, depending on what there is to compare and contrast.  I'm not sure; I haven't written it yet.

But I've got a month.  So we'll see.

Introduction

I pretty much suck as a music journalist, so I decided to start a blog about music.

My peculiar relationship That What We Call Rock And Roll is shaped, as it is with most white folks, by my adolescent experience. Initially, music was something that belonged to my parents and my older siblings. Through my parents, I had a love-hate-love affair with The Beatles (spending several years refusing to like The Beatles because the film Yellow Submarine scared the crap out of me at a tender age) and through my sister I was exposed to things like ELO, Klaatu, The Alan Parsons Project and Styx.

So, yeah, I’ve been uncool from pretty early on. It probably didn’t help that my record collection stalled at five albums (all of them well-meaning gifts from family members) when my hand-me-down stereo ceased to function and I had no replacement for at least a year. But then Christmas 1984 came and I was given a turntable unit of my own and bought my first proper record for myself with the money from Grandma.

The album was Rio, by Duran Duran. It was salvation and my damnation.

It was my salvation because it was music that belonged to me, chosen by myself, a way to differentiate my sense of self from my elders. I was at an age when this becomes a vitally important matter. It was my damnation because it marked me for permanent exile from the ranks of the cool and hip. I went to a high school where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a kid wearing a T-shirt with Johnny Rotten’s face glaring from it, but heaven help you if you were into *snicker* Duran Duran.

I devoured music magazines for news of them and read the other articles while I was at it. Since a number of cool and hip artists (I’m looking at you, Robert Smith) felt a need to trash Duran Duran in interviews, I assumed that if they didn’t like what pleased me, I wasn’t going to particularly like what they played. So I steered clear of a lot of music that I probably would have enjoyed and only really listened to it once my years of hormonal irrationality had safely passed.

My relationship to hipness, overall, has been rather damaged ever since. I suppose I’ve recovered some measure of it from my years as an enthusiast of the local music scene here in Atlanta, but there remains a great deal of Vastly Influential music that I have simply not heard, because I spent a long stretch of time convinced that it wasn’t for me. This crippled my ability to write credibly as a music journalist (which I’ve done a bit of, here and there) since I don’t have all the usual points of reference to pull out of my bag.

So I’ve decided to start a blog and review various Recordings of Great and Profound Influence that I’ve never actually heard all the way through and review them from the point of view of an outsider rather than an expert. This is not a blog about new music, not at this point, anyway, but a blog about old music, about the albums that music geeks wax rhapsodic about but that I have not properly heard. At some point, I suppose, I’ll wind up becoming one of those experts in the process of educating myself, but that may be a while yet. My hope is to examine the canon of rock music (and all its peculiar variations) from the point of view of the terminally unhip. Unlike most professional music reviewing types, I make absolutely no claims whatsoever to impartiality. I will try to avoid the irritating habit of bandying about my opinions as if they were proven facts, the way some are prone to do. I will further try to avoid letting my perceptions be polluted by the hipness or unhipness of the performers and try to listen to the music itself and decide. I have no idea how effective I will be at sticking to these resolutions, but I make them here regardless.

I have a few albums in mind I want to start with. I may be setting up an email account to take suggestions at a later date. But this entry simply plants the flag and stakes my little personal claim on the blogosphere, and thank you for reading it.