Music Library

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with D&D.  It's about popular music, and how my relationship to music has evolved over the last thirty some years.  And it's about how music fits into my creative process, which may be of value to someone.

Coming of age in the 1970s, my first conscious memory of a popular song came in the summer of 1973.  I connect the song with standing in the sun on the flooring of cabin my father built himself, from scratch; the previous summer, the raised deck had been built and in 1973, the walls were going up.  The radio played all day when he worked, and a funny song that played twice a day was very popular here in Canada, though it only reached #9 in America.  The memorable lyric went, "... long haired hippy type pinko fags ..." which is an odd lyric for a 9-y.o., as I was; but of course, living in the television and brick-phone era, I had no idea what the last word meant.

It would be years and years before I would identify what the song was, or who sang it.  No one ever seemed to remember it; and no radio station ever played it, perhaps because the lyrics grew increasingly obtuse in a post 1975 world.

Thoughout my teens and 20s, as I worked on D&D, university or anything, really, radio music was always an important part of my ethic.  Until reaching my mid-40s, I found it difficult to work in a silent room, though I do not when I'm writing something new, such as this blog post.  But when I'm working on the wiki, or maps, or researching, or copyreading, or crunching numbers, music plays pretty much constantly.  The most valuable aspect of music, for me, is that it's ongoing.  As each song picks up from the last, it evokes a steady sound that appeals to my sense of creative flow.  When I'm deeply engaged, I don't hear the music at all; and when I'm more relaxed, I hear something I like and begin to sing along.  Most of all, because there are no interruptions in the sound, I don't have to interrupt my thoughts to find something new.

I started collecting music around 1977.  Obviously, there were albums, and my parents had many from the 1950s and 60s, but I had only a few.  Mostly, I worked with 8-track tapes.  We had a player, and 8-tracks let me copy music without ambient noise ... though of course the quality wasn't great and it degraded over time.  Still, at 88 minutes a tape, I slowly accumulated some 20 tapes of individual songs, about 1760 minutes.

With the 1980s, I moved onto VHS recordings of music videos and cassette tapes, which would play in my, yes you guessed it, walk-man.  I bought albums on casette and accumulated about 4,000 minutes of individual songs, much of it downloaded from public library resources.  The height of my cassette library came around 1999, when I would play mixed tapes (illegally) for the coffee shop I ran, astounding a lot of my older-than-40 patrons with music they hadn't heard in decades.  See, my tastes in music are very eclectic.

In 1999, I was given the volume shown by a friend at the time, who knew about my pursuit of music.  I couldn't find a copy of this specific edition online (though there are other editions), so its my own photo.  The book is very beat up; the spine is broken, and yes that is duct tape along the binding.  I've been carrying the book around for more than 20 years now, using it as a source for finding music, learning more about music and ... well, I'll explain.

The book includes every song that ever made Billboard's Top 40 between January 1st, 1955 and December 24th, 1988 ... even if the song made it for just one week.  The number of pages runs 444, organised by performer.

Coincidentally, the book arrived in my possession somewhere around August of '99, when in October of that year I took a room in a house occupied by three others; one of those was a hard-core computer techie, who built his own computers for fun ... and that is how I came to be introduced to Napster.

I'm sure everyone knows, but Napster was the first media sharing platform that would allow individuals to download music without playing for it.  You know, piracy.  When I started using the program, songs being uploaded consisted of a dozen individual files, which had to be stored in separate folders; thankfully, that was soon overcome.  

As I was working as a cook in the evening, and most everyone else worked during the day, I had the run of my roommate's computer and napster for about 4 hours a day.  And during those four hours, I conceived of a gargantuan task.  Let me show you by posting the pages 112-113 from the Billboard volume above:

This gives a sense of the book's layout.  As I say, there are 444 pages of the kind of content shown above.  Intentionally, these pages include the song that I mentioned at the post's start: it's Uneasy Rider, by the Charlie Daniel's Band.

The rubbed out marks are a legacy from those Napster days, when I decided that I'd listen to every song from the book, and decide afterwards if it was a song I wanted to keep.  As might be expected, the task itself took longer than Napster survived as a platform, so the work continued steadily throughout the 2000s, right into the time when this blog was started.  Slowly, I accumulated a total of 1,200 songs, which mixed in with another 700 from the time since 1988.  That's about 6,500 minutes.  It takes about a month to run through my library, if I'm working full time and I'm able to listen to music while working.  Which is mostly anywhere I've worked.

I haven't listened to a radio for any meaningful period since 2006.  And since 2017, my general interest in reviewing music online that's just come out has faded.  But the last decade of listening to my own music, and to my partner's music as well, has awakened me in ways I never expected.

First, I could tell that what I had wasn't enough.  It was lots, and I wasn't getting tired of it, but the eclecticism offered didn't satisfy.

Secondly, the overall list failed to reproduce what radio used to offer.  Most of what I'd here in the era of radio was stuff that wasn't particularly special to me ... and though I didn't realise it at the time, that lack of specialness tended to highlight the content that was special.  The good stuff stood out better because it wasn't all good stuff.

And so, during Covid, I began an experiment.  I decided to obtain every song that had reached a top ten position, regardless of my personal feelings about the group or their music.  I'd ignore my "taste."  I'd treat it as though taste didn't matter.  I began the process in February 2021, doing as much as I felt like doing, at the speed I felt like working at.  At the same time, I'd obtain anything else that looked moderately interesting, as I went along.

I noticed the effect right away, as the first few hundred songs were mixed into my rotation.  And as that number grew and grew, I found myself feeling better about how the background music was influencing my attention.  At first, there were songs that definitely sounded like nails on a blackboard (and you'll notice that I've been deliberate about not explaining my general taste in music) ... but I forced myself to ignore that, and let the familiarity of those songs sink into my consciousness.

I may be very different from the rest of the world, but I'm increasingly learning that the difference between a "good" song and a "bad" song is how familiar I am with it.  There are numerous songs in my list now that I'd have considered "bad" in 2021; but which now, two years later, I'm quite indifferent to.  Some I've completely changed about.  It's somewhat interesting.

I'm writing this post because the book is very nearly complete.  I'm just 12 pages from the end (at the band "War"), which I should have wrapped up some time after the weekend.  My list is now 4,700 songs (more than 15,000 minutes), and I have my work cut out for me going forward.

Billboard magazine has finally seen the light and has chosen to admit the internet exists ... and so in the last two years, they've made their week-by-week top 100 song lists available.  I'm starting to create documents that organise these lists so that when I'm ready to move on, through 1989 and into the '90s, I can go on collecting anything that's reached the top 10.  I don't see any reason not to continue that pursuit up to the present day, though I do tend to think modern music is a somewhat, shall we say, derivative.  But what does that matter?  I don't have to like it.

Nor is that the end.  I've been considering that the "top 10" may be a bit limiting.  Why not the top 20?  That's good for at least another hundred songs per year.  I'm quite curious about what a music library of 20,000 songs would be like ...

To work to, that is.  A list so large that it never bores me, no matter how long I leave it on.