Day 81: George Strait – 20th Century Masters: The Millenium Collection

Man have I been shit at this for the past week or so. I admit I have totally run out of steam on this project, but the whole point of the project was to learn how to keep doing something even if it’s unpleasant and I don’t want to do it. So I often think about writing, each day, and find the idea of putting together thoughts on an album while saying anything productive or interesting whatsoever to be an insurmountable task. Which is too bad, because for a couple months there, I feel like I was learning a lot, and writing a lot of things I was relatively content with (for what they were).

I’ve been reading a John Barth short story collection called Lost in the Funhouse, and a lot of the stories are about a writer (presumably Barth himself) having trouble writing about anything but the existential stress of writing  — the fact that I am writing about the difficulty I’m having writing and citing that story makes this blog post a few levels of abstraction beyond obnoxious, and I apologize for that. But it’s my main roadblock in this project.

But it’s my big hangup here. This is yet another country album, and it’s hard not to look at it that way. It’s a collection of, honestly, some great songs, with well-written, clever, and most of all sincere lyrics, almost all dealing with heartbreak(/ing), but I’m running out of ways of contextualizing what is essentially reiterations of the same music over and over.

What’s more, I honestly feel like an ignorant prick for so casually condescending to several entire genres of music. I don’t like that, because it runs counter to the whole point of the project: To dig into what other people liked, and figure it out. But it seems like the more I listen to, the more I suspect that my polarities are crossed from my friends’, because I have gone through so many things that people love, and tried to find why and just failed so many times now.

Today I replaced my earphones (which finally succumbed to poorly-made-plug syndrome and went out of service days ago, worsening the prognosis of this blog dramatically). Flippantly forgetting the resolve I had a couple posts ago to not stray from my daily albums, I put on the new Cut Copy. I didn’t even have an album picked out for today until like 7 p.m. Anyway the album started and from about ten seconds into the first track, something happened. I was boxing textbooks to return to the publishers and was alone in the big warehouse, which was so quiet that all the books on the shelves seemed to be in repose. And the music started and it just grabbed the fuck out of me. It flooded me with feeling, and reminded me of listening to LCD Soundsystem last spring, shuffling in a daze out of the woods of a terrible winter, and deciding to make my spring/summer feel as good as that music felt. I danced in place while I worked for the next hour and excitedly queued the album up again, all the while planning out the writing for the Album of the Year accolade I would bestow it in January of 2012.

How do you make someone else feel that? When I fail to connect with an album someone recommended to me that they have that kind of tie with, or even if they don’t, if it’s just something they feel represents what they like, when I fail to see it I feel like I’m driving a stake into so many little hearts. What is important ultimately isn’t whether this music I’m listening to every day is good or bad. The worst music I’ve had to listen to so far wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been (I count maybe five just unredeemable albums, off the top of my head), but my ability to identify, to relate, to what are essentially bewildering strangers, is wearing out and not regenerating.

This project is going to take more than a year, that much is already obvious — and I’m experimenting with being fine with that. I have 284 more albums ahead of me, and I can guess I might not like 84 of them right off the bat. But someone did, and that means something. And if I’m not gonna at least try to figure out what, then I’m wasting everyone’s time here. And I promise to try not to use this space to write about how hard it is to write about these albums.

What a little open-mindedness can do. Here I was thinking this album sounded like generic country. Apparently, if it sounds like that, it’s because George Strait basically created contemporary country.