Great music isn’t always obvious.

Think of it like this.  Chances are (to quote a former colleague), your favorite song didn’t become your favorite because you only heard it once.

Which perhaps is why Coca-Cola — arguably one of the most famous brands of all-time — still advertises.

Why then, if there’s a decent band, critically acclaimed even, under the radar but the real deal… here comes release date, folks make a lot of noise… the record drops, it’s great and… SILENCE?

Basically, that’s what happens.  It’s a mindset across the board… from marketing campaigns to blog reviews, radio-play to Gray’s Anatomy soundtracks, the NEXT big thing is the story — a dog-eat-dog scrapple among Pitchfork wannabes to claim the uber-crown of cutting edge.  Even day-old is too old… and you know how I feel about old.

And for a heritage act?  Forget it.  Yesterday’s news is no news whatsoever.  Shame, really.

For one, our emotional connection to music is undeniably fueled by a mysterious neuroscience-nostalgia; a process which “requires that we’re able to hold in memory a knowledge of those notes that have just gone by alongside a knowledge of all other musics we are familiar with” (Levitin).  Meaning, REMEMBERING is therefore key to discerning.  A symbiosis is at work: the new NEEDS the old.

Two, it’s the old music that lays the groundwork, gives us context, putting us  “tantalisingly close to the past, so close that [we] can almost reach out and touch it” (Bowie).  A prospect that, as we age, sounds pretty damned good.

Ideally, new music then feeds off this emotion and is able to transfer it, to absorb it as its own miraculous fountain-of-youth sonic serum… simply by association (the busy work of all those neurons); what’s new, suddenly and strangely, feels familiar.

Of course it’s the familiar which has value and, in the end, is what counts.  Not the $.99, not how crappy it sounds condensed into an MP3.  But how the song makes us, the fans, FEEL.

Although first, as is the case with shampoo, cereal, winter tires, sneakers, etc., we have to be regularly REMINDED that the song even exists.  Some of us to discover it for the first time.  Some of us to discover that we love it for the first time.  And some of us, glorious rediscovery.

Because we don’t give a shit if it’s new or old.  We just have to like it.