Music Only Old Guys Like

Should "popular music" be defined only by chart position or also by style and genre? Can it truly be "popular music" if it's never actually embraced by large numbers of people?



I picked up on this odd pairing while paging through the celebrity playlists on iTunes. Most of which are predictably, wincingly useless. But the now cotton-topped Christopher Guest seemed a smart and mature enough guy to take seriously when he named the album that includes this number, Raising Sand, his favorite of the past decade. (Dimly visible playing guitar in the bg, producer T-Bone Burnett.)

My favorite bit is the little dance Plant does toward the end, while Krauss looks on, smiling indulgently, pleased to see that when the spirit is upon him grandpa can still get an attack of happy feet.

Because I am not, at the end of the day, truly musical, the music I like tends to be the stuff that makes me feel good, a standard I would never apply to novels or movies, art forms that at some basic level I imagine I understand. (Leaving aside for the moment vexed questions such as how, exactly, gloomy music makes us feel good.)

I had no awareness of music whatsoever growing up. First blush was the electric current that passed through my scalp as a college student the first time I heard some of the vinegary harmonic twists in the music of Wagner and Strauss -- which I'm sure could be written off as very crude, almost directly physical effects, not even truly musical. But at least now there was stuff out there that went by the name of music that did something to me, and that I could say I loved.

My "musical life" is still almost entirely hit or miss, but recently I've been trying to make up for lost time. What I've been finding is that it's just when I imagine I'm recapturing my lost youth that I am drawn back inexorably to Music Only Old Guys Like.

When I was trying to quit smoking I ran head on into a truth of human nature that Saint Ignatius might have endorsed: when you bear down on a bad habit, it fights back. Trying as hard as you can not to be smoker is the single most sure fire way to be confronted by your actual condition as an addict. (It's only when you become a nonsmoker in your head that beating the physical addiction becomes a real possibility.)

A lot of pop music is, obviously, dance music, music that has nothing more in mind than creating an upbeat mood; therefore useless to those whose toes refuse to tap. Which is not to say that toe-tapping alone can make a guy look or even feel young.

Robert Plant in this clip looks worn beyond his years, presumably by hard living. An effect that is spotlighted rather than mitigated by his disfiguring "youthful" hairstyle. The attempt to look rejuvenated doesn't work, but it's his failure on that level that makes the performance work. It's precisely because Plant looks old that we empathize with his irresistible urge to swivel.