Listening to "A"

Inspired in part by Noel Murray's "popless" columns in the A.V. Club, and a personal desire to trim my own digital music collection, I've started the long process of going through my music, artist by artist, album by album, song by song. Now, I'm not going to listen to everything -- I know I want to keep the Beatles or Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan (just a few "B"s right there, at least, in the way iTunes organizes things) -- because that would take 122 days of continuous listening to get to the end (providing I don't add anything new). As I actually have work right now, that probably isn't going to work. So it's more a matter of listening to the unfamiliar and deciding if it should stay or if it should go (hmm, that could be a song title).

So far, I'm up to Ae -- which, as you rockers would know, means Aerosmith. It's interesting how musical taste can work in odd ways. Yesterday, I carefully pruned the AC/DC lists, cutting out most of the post-Back in Black music, but only deleting duplicates when it came to the Bon Scott era from the 1970s. Now listening to Aerosmith, who ply a similar style of blues-based hard rock who hit their peak in the 1970s, I am mainly impatient when listening to the non-radio hits. Some of this could be personal -- AC/DC was one of my first rock 'n' roll loves, all the way back to the night in the summer of 1980 when I first switched the dial to the rock station (KQRS, which pretty much plays the same music -- I mean, literally the same music -- today). I got Back in Black for Christmas that year and listened to it constantly (Mom and Dad -- sorry!)

On the other hand, Aerosmith was moribund in the early 1980s, sunk in the depths of their various drug addictions. Permanent Vacation was still seven years away, with a variety of solo projects and badly thought-out albums (including a pair of Spinal-Tap worthy moments: one where all of the writing was backwards; and one featuring  Stonehenge) still to come before their renewal. When I did get a chance to hear their older albums (I had an eight-track of Get Your Wings) I wasn't particularly impressed.

But I don't think it's just my personal preference. For all the swagger, Aerosmith doesn't have the pure free rolling spirit of the original AC/DC, where Bon Scott shared his excesses with child-like glee. Too often, ballads and serious tunes got in the way of Steve Tyler, Joe Perry and the rest. And Perry, while a good hard rock guitarist, can't hold a candle to the raw boogie of Angus Young. In comparison (and since I'm trimming, this is all about comparisons) the Australians completely kick their American brethren's asses.