“Tyranny of good taste” in Starbucks’ albums!? “Good taste!” Oh my god! What’s this world coming to? And just to underline the underlying scare review of the Starbucks’ music style (whatever that turns out to be) let’s threaten listeners with the revival of Bubblegum music. This sounds very bad to me, but being almost 70 years old I haven’t the slightest idea what “Bubblegum music’ might be. Something by “The Bazooka’s? I accept that whatever it is it would probably really screw up the needle on my turntable.

Turntable! Yeah, right. So many of the “straight down the center” choices on Starbucks CDs are indeed old favorites of old guys, like me. Only now this Best of stuff is on CD or played through the endless tape of digital radio. Great. If I can afford to pay the outlandish prices Starbucks charges for a cup of coffee, I can afford to finally cover some of the best I have on tape and vinyl by buying a shiny CD. But one more price increase on that cup of Joe and I’m outta there.

By the way, just about every cultural commentator I read or listen to slips into “generationalese.” Whether they chop and dice people by decades or music styles and categories, little chunks of time often stand-in for true analysis for what’s being heard, seen or read. Is this valid?

I don’t know. Here’s my shot at it.

Everyone is deserving to live in a context of their own making. Take Starbucks music. I tend to give it an OK, or at least a pass, because the vocalists are generally respectful in regard to the lyrics they are singing. Is this just the yearnings of an old guy (me) looking for, hoping for, dreaming of a more coherent, understandable world? When rap, or the next new thing that branches off from rap comes on whatever box I’m listening to it seems to provide word sounds that are so self-consciously stylized andover produced that these musicians might as well be playing a Beatles song backward. I heave mightily to find content, meaning to match the beat–almost always without success.

I look around and see head-bobbing. Personally, I tap my toe, you head-bob, and so it goes. I can’t really think when my brain is physically pistoning. But that’s just me.

So the smooth singers of contemporary ditties may not have much in the way of “edge” or “danger” or “out there” or, to find safer ground vocabulary-wise, “whatever,” but they do honor a lyric, enunciate and give the listener a chance to think about or sink into–a reverie. Hey, when you’re seventy, you’re angry about Bush and the insanity of war. Rap, etc, etc. just doesn’t speak to those issues, or if/when it does: I’m listening but you’re not communicating.

So, how’s that for “generationalese.”? I know, I know, “they” just didn’t understand me either back in the fifties when I was tuning into Al Benson on WGES in Chicago and paying a thin dime for a cup of Joe.