RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: ROB DUBBIN
The Music Was Fantastic But The Singing Caused Nightmares

There’s a lot of stuff out there. It’s apocryphal but NBS once told me his colleague Bob said bands make more music in a year than there are seconds in the year to listen to music. I guess you could halve that problem by mixing two iPods into the same set of headphones, but at that point you’re not really respecting either artists’ work, are you.

I don’t think of myself as one of those people. Meaning, the kind who doesn’t respect artists’ work, not the kind who would mix two iPods into the same set of headphones. Nobody should do that, it would sound terrible.

The thing is that barring my irrational hatred of Rod Stewart, I’d like to believe that I’m the kind of guy who gives every band a fair shot at my fandom. But I also know that it took me less time to hear about, download, listen to, and get sick of most albums this year than it took the artist to figure out which alternative comedian he’d thank in the liner notes. See, I’d decided that in 2006 I really wanted to “follow” music, to hear every possible album for myself, as it leaked, so I could form an opinion before the masses even knew, to furnish one example, that the music was fantastic but the singing caused nightmares.

It only sort of worked out that way. I listened to almost a hundred and thirty 2006 albums, obliterating my previous record of maybe three dozen, but here we are at the end of the year and my favorite is still the first one I heard, way back in November of 2005. The only thing I really gained from my ambitious (for me) canvassing of this year’s scene was a serious case of burnout, a thin handful of serendipitous discoveries, and an iTunes library riddled with truly vile shit from bands like Gomez and Some by Sea.

That’s what it took me until about August to realize: I’m not very good at being a 0-day music consumer, because I don’t have the patience to digest that much material and still enjoy new stuff from the bands I actually like. This year I was so caught up in my self-imposed grueling pace that I rarely gave albums a third or even second chance, the musical equivalent of shooting twelve bears at Chimney Rock and only carrying 100 pounds back to the wagon.

Naturally the lesson there is, don’t be an idiot and try to carry all the bear meat by yourself. One of the reasons I went rogue in 2006 was my general disillusionment with music blogs in 2005 -- too many people competing for good seats on the next trend, not enough people trying to write well – but after my experience this year I think it’s time I yielded to superior authority again. That doesn’t mean I’m going to start slurping up the bands Microsoft uses to advertise the Zune, it just means I’m going to be a little less defensive about letting other people’s opinions dictate what I listen to.

Of course, as with music, opinions are something the Internet has in droves. Or I guess packs, to keep the bear thing going. Herds? No wait, I looked it up. Bears travel in sleuths. And that’s fitting, because my current plan for 2007, such as it exists, is to put roughly the same energy into finding good opinions that I put this year into finding good music. I’m hoping to meet with a lot more success and a lot less Gomez.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006