What Am I Missing?

Nobody likes all the music. To start with, nobody hears everything there is to hear. If you’re a typical music fan, with a life to live that requires your attention on a daily basis, you pick and choose. For a lot of folks that means perhaps following a favorite band or artist, and if they put out new music you likely get around to listening sooner rather than later. For a whole lot of other people, putting on something that feels familiar and nostalgic from an earlier, less distracted, time of life is a completely satisfying way to get a music fix.

Diggers, like me, are less common. Searching, reading, watching, listening; trying to find the stuff that’s likely to raise the hair on my arms is worth the time and effort it takes to find it. And I don’t even come close to hearing everything. For every 5-10 new releases I scan every week, there are literally hundreds I don’t hear. The average number of new releases dropping every single Friday hovers somewhere in the 200 - 300 title range most weeks. If you’re not being paid to do it, who’s got that kind of time? I can eliminate a lot of stuff by genre - I give a hard pass to bro-country and death metal albums, for example. I also have no interest in giving up the time it takes to keep listening to the music I already love and will give me great pleasure to hear for the rest of my days, which kinda describes my vinyl collection.

But I do have an appreciation of popular music history in general. I try to have as full an understanding as possible of the artists who matter. The visionaries, the culture-changers, the uber-popular, the cult favorites, the loosely agreed upon “canon” of the rock, pop, jazz, soul, country, and R&B worlds. Most bands who fall into that category I get, even if I don’t love them all. If I'm honest, I admire a whole lot of records I don’t play for pleasure.

This post highlights five acknowledged members of the rock canon I just don’t get. I’ve tried. I’ve listened, read the criticism and the praise, had lengthy discussions with serious fans with vast musical knowledge and refined taste, listened some more, and I would still prefer you not play me a record from these five if we hang out sometime. So, back to the post's title - what am I missing? I’m going to do my best to try and explain why I don’t connect with these five, hopefully that’ll open the door to some enlightening conversation, if not conversion.

JETHRO TULL: Many years ago, I read a music journalist who described the concept of "retirement bands" and it stuck with me. In his mind, he had a list of classic bands that he just hadn't spent enough time with to fully appreciate, and the time demands of his life and job prevented him from diving in until he retired. That made sense to me, and I made my own list. Jethro Tull has been my first "retirement band." I was certain I should like them more than I do.

But I guess I don't. I've seen and read more than one interview with Ian Anderson over the years, and he comes across as a bright, thoughtful, somewhat pessimistic creative person. Sarcasm definitely hangs on his tool belt, as well, right next to the codpiece. The less attractive aspects of that complex personality seem to dominate his songwriting and performing, to these ears. I hear a kind of overtly condescending pain in the ass in his lyrics and voice. I will say, I have nothing at all against the use of a flute as a lead rock instrument, at least in the controlled environment of the studio, but the live records show that it doesn't translate all that well on stage. There's a lot of huffing and puffing added to the instrument's sound by a very active lead singer. Locomotive breath, if you will. I can't unhear that when I listen to their live stuff, and it grates on me.

As far as the catalog goes, there's some stuff I like, about half of Aqualung, most of Thick As a Brick, bits and pieces of Minstrel in the Gallery, the idea of Heavy Horses and Songs from the Wood. There's some rock scattered through most of it, some proggier passages, some earthier folk shades and, in later years, some shockingly bad electronic textures. Martin Barre is a very fine, perhaps overlooked, rock guitarist, the rest of the classic band is agile and versatile, but overall my feeling about this band remains the same as before I did a deeper dive. A tendency to overreach, fussy, too often amelodic, and self-absorbed to a fault, which, in my view, falls chiefly on the songwriter. Interesting band, for sure, but I still can't say compelling.

THE DOORS: For many years I've glibly tossed off the observation that I hate The Doors. But if I'm going to be honest with this post, I have to admit that's not really true. I do find their music annoying, which is different.

I used the phrase self-absorbed to describe Ian Anderson above, but Jim Morrison defines the term within popular music forever and ever amen. I hear his high regard for himself every time he opens his mouth to sing. Which is not to say a performer, especially a rock and roll front man, doesn't need a big, steaming pile of ego to succeed, I just don't need to be hit over the head with it all the damn time. I find the heed-the-troubled-genius vocals annoying enough to not give a single shit about his lyrics, however "poetic" he tries (too hard) to convince you they are. It doesn't help that, for me, the bass-less novelty trio sound of the band wears pretty thin after an album or two. Everything I hear when I listen to The Doors adds up to, not hate, but a consistently unwavering annoyance.

RUSH: Based solely on their rabid YouTube following, Rush is the most popular band in the world. I haven't tried to count the number of channels dedicated solely to discussing their releases and tours until your ears bleed, but it's fair to say the number is greater than the world needs. Even channels that exist to be about general music discussions regularly program Rush content because they know the number of views and comments will spike, and some hosts aren't shy about saying so. There's a lot to unpack, for sure, the band was as prolific as mating Canadian rabbits when they were active. Besides the 19 official studio albums, Rush released dozens of live albums, concert videos, compilations, and box sets. All of which explains the what, but not the why. I believe I've heard all 19 records, most more than once (I have friends who are that kind of fan) and the only one I don't mind hearing again is their debut. The fact that it's pre-Neil Peart isn't a coincidence.

To my ears, there's a mountain of chilly technical tedium in Rush's catalog. It seems to attract a certain kind of fan who wants to analyze, as opposed to dance, or hum along to, their records. I think of them as the definition of a band with a lot of rock and no roll whatsoever. I don't have the issue with Geddy Lee's voice that drives some music lovers away, I just find the songs, and even moreso the albums, to be pretty daunting constructions, with a fatal lack of melodic ideas to hang your listening hat on. You have to want to do the analyzing to get into them. If you're looking to just bop your head or shake your hips, you're out of luck. For all of the percussive possibilities in Mr. Peart's size-of-a-small-city drum kit, he very rarely finds what others call a groove. Ultimately, their records feel like homework to me, tiring assignments in music arranging and production. The only way I can tell an early Rush album from a late period one is their introduction of synthesizers somewhere around mid-career.

WILCO: The most recent band on this list, and one of the most revered by music fans old enough to have started listening back in the classic rock days and maintained enough interest to follow at least some rock music forward into the modern era. A lot of them latched onto Wilco, for whatever reason. Full disclosure, I love two Wilco albums - their second, Being There, and their sixth, Sky Blue Sky - but, for me, the rest of the catalog lags way behind the last couple Uncle Tupelo records, from whence Wilco auteur Jeff Tweedy came. To my ears, since he broke with the strong second personality of Jay Farrar, Tweedy's songs come across as too self-conscious, too fussy, too cerebral, too rock with little roll, to work within the Americana genre he gets outsized credit for popularizing. That pair of records I like have an emotional directness and melodicism I wish was more prevalent in their other albums. Except for the opening track, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," I find their consensus "masterpiece," Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, all but unlistenable and the pinnacle of the band's arty self-indulgence. Farrar took Uncle Tupelo's shit-kicking tough country-rock with him when he formed Son Volt, whose catalog as a whole I greatly prefer, but never found much commercial success with it. Shame, he was obviously the rocker.

FRANK ZAPPA: "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Churchill famously said that about Soviet Russia in 1939, and Frank seems to have embraced the idea as his guiding creative concept. Rock music as meticulously composed presentation, too arch by a mile, too snarky and condescending by two miles. His entire catalog to me sounds like a giant in-joke that I've never gotten. Fanboys (and his followers are heavily slanted toward the male of the species) often point to Zappa's guitar chops as a sure measure of his genius. Yeah, the man knows his guitar. He knows how it works, how to get a great tone, how to construct (with a capital C) a solo. And yet, there's not a single passage I've heard, live or studio, that moves me in any way. His playing is indulgent in a purely intellectual way, unlike, say, Jerry Garcia, who indulges in an emotional, even soulful, way. I can listen to Jerry's explorations all day long because his extended playing is based on something more human than music theory and sarcasm. Frank was the easiest artist to put on this list because he's the only one here who goes beyond "I don't care for it" into "it makes me uncomfortable to listen" territory. He's my fingernails on a chalkboard.

There are other bands and artists that could have fit this post. These were the five that came to mind first, but I could have easily included Peter Gabriel (with or without Genesis), Little Feat, Ry Cooder, and 99% of the AC/DC catalog, off the top of my head. So how about it? What am I missing with these five? What's the key to unlocking their considerable appeal to a lot of people? Or, if you don't feel like going there, which artists would fit this catalog for you?