Surprising?

I know what you're thinking.

"Evan, musical cynic you, stop being such a negative Nancy and boring us with your endless ranting and complaining about the music industry! Some of the music being made today is really good."

And you'd be right.

I'm often mistaken for one of those people who insists that no good music was made after nineteen hundred and whatever year, arbitrarily picking out a specific time when everything worthwhile ceased to be, elitist snobs that they are. Believe it or not, there actually is a significant amount of music made recently that I like, some of it even mainstream. I can feel your shock and disbelief even now. But it's true.

First off, Richard Bona. If you know much of anything about my musical taste, you would know that he makes my pants tight for a lot of reasons, none of them homoerotic in any way. I could go on and on talking about why he's so amazing, but I've talked about him before, and there's little doubt that I'll find some reason to talk about him again, so I'll demonstrate my superhuman self-restraint by just dropping a video in here and calling it good.



"But what about someone the rest of us have, you know, HEARD OF?"

Fine, fine.

Well, immediately I think of Christina Aguilera. Yes, I said Christina Aguilera. She's one of the relatively few musicians who came out of the '90s:

A) Alive,
B) Still performing, and
C) Still worth listening to.

And really, she's gotten considerably better since the beginning of the new millenium, by my estimation. That's saying something, because I hadn't really thought much of her way back when, so it took some serious changing of my mind to get me to a place where I'd be saying this. But she's really, really good. Case and point: the video below.

With pop stars, I usually see a certain sort of unrestrained cliche in their music that mirrors whatever trend is "in" at the time among popular acts. But in this song particularly, I see and hear a subtle but definite restraint with a very specific purpose - the meaning of the song.

She could have performed it in other ways, made it more "flashy" and "pop starish," but instead she reserved her (formidable) talent as a singer and let the music as a whole speak for itself. The result is a very surprisingly powerful song. She had something she wanted to say with this song, and she said it - the honesty is unmistakable. It's real.

I'll put it this way - it gets me teary-eyed. There's very little in music that can do that, so I pay special attention when it does happen. Even if you don't think that her music is "your thing," I urge you to listen to this. It may very well change your mind.



I can also recommend exploring her other music without having to grit my teeth as I say it, making her even more of an oddity. She's put out her fair share of great albums; I personally really dug "Back to Basics" and "Stripped," both of which seem obvious to me as evidence of a teen pop star who, through some combination of fortune and sheer tenacity, managed to survive through the major obstacles of young success, and went on to take charge of her own career to whatever degree she was able and make exactly the music she wanted to make. Now, if that isn't worthy of some heavy praise in the artistic mire of the modern music industry, I don't know what is.

I really don't have a whole lot more to say about this. I could go on recommending modern stuff that I think is great, but that's not going to necessarily do you any good. So I'll offer what advice about it that I can. Basically, in spite of the wretched, twisted business that controls music today, there are still gems to be found. Not the pseudogems that "aren't bad to listen to," or are "impressive" because they write their own songs before they turn 18 - that doesn't matter one bit if the music ISN'T GOOD. Give everything a real chance to impress and surprise you, but be honest when what you hear is just another iteration of the same manufactured "musical" trend.

Ears, mind, and heart open, you will find good music.