I've always known I was pretty weak at contemporary music, but it never seemed like an issue until a year ago when I, firmly in my study of all things trivia, realized it was one of my weakest categories. I was never able to identify songs on the radio, at trivia nights my friends could pick out songs that the quizmaster played after about 3 seconds while I was still pondering if the lyrics had started yet (speaking of lyrics I've always had a hard time deciphering the lyrics to songs, maybe because my brain usually focused on the melodies and individual notes when developing as a violin player in classical music orchestras. I understand that most people pick a favorite band or genre of music and develop eternal loves for their favorite bands during high school, but I was too busy reading "Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter" to spend hours just listening to mix tapes or CD's (yup I was early millenials before Ipods), except my tennis buddy Dan got me into Franz Ferdinand (I associated him with the historical figure whose death started WWI), which I liked but unfortunately they weren't the most consequential band. I do remember certain hit summer songs or catchy radio tunes that rang out, like "Backstreet Boys are Back,"Skater Boi," "I'm the Real Slim Shady," "Oops I Did it Again," "Breakaway" (Kelly Clarkson) and "Crazy in Love" in 2004. Yea, that was the era I grew up in.
Most people REALLY hone in on their music during college with tons of time in dorm rooms and supple minds ready to advance to the next levels of music, but along with my delayed levels of maturity in social life I also had a very immature taste in music, and I remember my co-workers at the summer camp I worked at scoffed at me in 2006 for saying my favorite song was "Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira, then "Umbrella" by Rihanna in 2007. Among the many things I want to go back in time and shake myself for the mid-2000s was "STOP ONLY LISTENING TO THE RADIO and pop stations! Do your own research!"
No surprise, then, that whenever a 70s classic rock category comes up, how blank my mind went. As much as Jeopardy! can sound like a different language for the uninitiated, those music categories of famous band leaders, matching No. 1 hit songs to their artists, lead singers of each band, those were all foreign to me. I barely knew who the Rolling Stones were, thought CCR was similar to CPR, thought Tina Turner was wonderfully in love with Ike Turner, Whitney Houston was the awesome lady that sang the Bodyguard whom my parents named my sister's middle name after......such wonderful facts, that didn't deal with any of their music at all!
So about a year ago, after the Squid Game euphoria had died down a bit and my stock market gains were still raging high (RIP), I decided to endeavor on the quest (not Questlove or a Tribe called Quest, which I found were two different things completely) to educate myself on non-classical music throughout the years, or what normal people call "music." First was discovering a resource called the Rolling Stone magazine, both the physical magazine and the online Top 500 albums list......that's a treasure trove of all the hit songs ever, as dense in facts as reading an encyclopedia or just staring at a map for hours. Installing the Shazam app on my phone has created another impulse to check my phone, but this time to gain the valuable insight of whatever song is playing, with the wonderful dopamine rush when I realized that a famous melody I've always known but never knew the name to was associated with a famous band. I subscribed to a music-heavy trivia podcast called "Trivia Time," plus the Omnibus podcast's John Roderick is in a band called the Long Winters and often name-drops other artists like Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit). And for the first time in a long time, I've turned on the local radio Kiss FM-equivalent radio station to see what's playing, and discovered why oldies stations exist: for the nostalgia and harkening back to better musical eras. All together, it's been one of the best self-prescribed classes I've taken, based on my own curriculum and with some of the best study materials ever, the glorious sounds of the last 100 years or so of contemporary music. I feel like it's the Re-Education of Robert Yan (contrast to the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill). And now after that year of musical thinking, once in a while, I can even get a $800 question on music right on Jeopardy.
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