The Definition of "Green Worthy"

I feel the need to clarify some things from recent posts. First off, after listening to Deerhunter's back catalog, I'm going to have to take back what I wrote about them being my new favorite band. They're operating at about fifty percent. What I mean by that is only half the songs on each album or EP are would be worth buying as individual downloads. I realize this may sound bad after I got on my soapbox about the death of the concept album last week, but trust me, I respect everything Deerhunter has done and I'm NOT calling any of their music bad. It just may not be "green worthy" (more on that in a bit), and that's a prerequisite to become one of my personal favorites. While initially the vocals reminded me of the late Ian Curtis from Joy Division (the remaining band members went on to form New Order), some of the instrumental tracks were too ambient or too noisy. Am I getting old? I took one of their albums (you'll have to guess which) back to the store to trade and the clerk informed me that I had earned enough points to get a new CD free. I honestly couldn't think of anything I'd pushed off buying, and rather than wait for a future release, I asked the clerk what he'd been listening to and as fate would have it, he directed me to some pre-New Order, pre-Joy Division bootlegs/demos from when the lineup called themselves Warsaw. It's standard late-'70s punk, but hesitantly featuring the band's first dabblings with synthesizers. I can't say that I like ALL the songs nor can I call them definitive of any era, but they're "green worthy" and that's a mystical, memorable, highly subjective thing.

Before I define anything, allow me to continue my history with pop music from last week. Looking at the picture to the left, you may be asking, "what does classical music have to do with pop?" I mentioned in my "Depeche Mode" post that I built the foundation of my CD collection by joining and re-joining the BMG and Columbia House music services over and over throughout high school. In the beginning, I ordered a lot of classical music collections for really cheap. The first or second was The Idiot's Guide and it represents my approach to music exposure on everything from Casey Kasem to iTunes. There were 99 clips of classical compositions each less than minute long and a booklet that listed movies and TV commercials that had used that piece. That's what makes this pop. I marked up every entry in that booklet immediately. If I liked the piece, I put a check mark next to the track number. If I hated it, I put an "X." If something was a must-have, I put two check marks or circled the entire name of the composition/movement. That, my friends, is the difference between what's good and what's "green worthy." I only put an "X" next to five or six of the 99 tracks listed. I probably only put the two check marks next to the same amount.

Whether I'm talking about movies, music, or comics, it's all the same scenario. I will probably never be exposed to more than the smallest portion of what is out there, but not for lack of trying. All we ever know, no matter how indie or obscure we may think we are, is what's pop, even moreso now with internet search engines which search by, can you handle the truth, MOST POPULAR HITS. Majority rules. Millions of people can't be wrong, can they? I was just as ignorant as most until I found 1-800-MUSIC-NOW. It was a number only around for two years (1995-6) that you could call and listen to short samples of all the songs on a particular album, and they had pretty decent selection. I started marking all the artists I was unfamiliar with in my BMG A-Z catalogs and then looking up them on the phone service. I learned quickly that they hung up on you after 20 minutes if you didn't purchase anything, so I would call multiple times per day from different phones, at home, at school, the mall. I must have looked like a drug dealer stopping at every pay phone I saw, scribbling notes in a little book, but I managed to sample every artist available from BMG before it went away. That's how I discovered Yaz (Yazoo in Britain) and rediscovered a song I'd been looking for since I first heard it on a Disney Sunday Night Movie ("Situation"). I learned that they were proto-Erasure they same way Joy Division was proto-New Order. It is possible for something to be pop and "underground" at the same time.

Case in point, the nonexistent Ferris Bueller's Day Off soundtrack. I love soundtracks for discovering new music. Everyone has seen Ferris Bueller but how many people know the Flowerpot Men? (Hint: their song is played after Ferris picks up his girlfriend from school.) I copied the songs played in the movie from the end credits and it took me years to collect them all to make my own soundtrack (this was before Amazon and eBay). The (English) Beat song, "Rotating Head," featured while Ferris races his sister home, isn't even the original version, it's a dub or a mix from the b-side of the record single. That was all I knew of the band until I heard "Mirror in the Bathroom" for the first time on 1-800-MUSIC-NOW. That was only enough for me to buy their debut album my senior year in high school. I caught up on the rest in college. I'm going to have to crunch if I plan to include a definition of "green worthy" now. It's sprinkled throughout this post though. Bottom line: there are more artists than anyone has time or money to be exposed to. I make rules like the ones in my "Film Classics Library" post to save time and money (by the way, I rewrote a part of that post to save people the confusion of thinking I like some of IMDb's "Top 250" like The Usual Suspects - I don't, that movie sucks; I do watch R-rated movies, but I just don't buy them, so call me a hypocrite). About five percent of what I come across I absolutely love and it's "green worthy." About five percent of what I come across I absolutely hate and I don't want anyone to own. The rest is just there and I don't really have an opinion but I'm always on the lookout.