Niches

Pouring rain, lovely and cool and damping down the dust.

We went to the Hong Kong Tea House last evening, needing a good meal. The music on was piano covers of old pop music. Rather amazes me that a radio station playing such pap still exists. And for me, overexposed to these tunes because I was young and listened to the radio constantly - unaware of the toxic effects - the words I once memorized sing along in my head. Not as if I so loved pop music, I just sponged up any song and learned the words to sing along. Only rarely did I hear music that really reached inside and resonated.

My mother complained of song when "you can't understand the words." As well as paintings when "you can't tell what it is." For me, music and art are not about literal interpretation, that's what literature is for. Music is about how it feels.

The music that appealed to me barely peeked into my life, and usually in the most commercial form, ie Simon & Garfunkel. I remember the first time exposed to the biwa, Japanese tones, while my mother reacted as though it were fingernails on a chalkboard, and for me it was like my first lick of mole negro - magnetic. My tastes run to music with edges, raw and melodious together, indigenous and complex. Not much of that available on the radio of the 60s and 70s.

Although it was through radio I found more and more of the kinds of music that energize me, from They Might Be Giants (first heard on All Things Considered) to Kate McGarrigle (on the local community radio station.) D got me into The Clash and Bob Dylan. Obviously, it took a long time for me to gather the music that resounds in me. I don't claim it's great, only that it gets in my head in a good way. Unlike all the pop songs that turn into ear worms.

I'm glad of the internet that allows access to niche artists, music from all over the world, bands that the big record labels would snub.