Loud Love: Appreciating music that changes the world
by Drew Wilson on Oct 03rd, 2011
Drew Wilson, formerly the man behind the curtain of WRVU’S “Loud Love” Show, is a punk rock connoisseur from New York City and one of the last of a generation who can say they grew up going to CBGB's. He moved to Nashville to get into radio and found a spot at the Vanderbilt station in 2008, where he put his training to use and took over the waves of Music City with the only punk rock show on the radio at the time. Now, in 2011, he's still playing the best of new and old punk, hardcore, and garage rock, and he's a fixture at the local shows as well as booking and promoting local bands, and keeping the volume turned to loud.
There was a lot of talk last week as Nirvana’s classic Nevermind album hit it’s 20th anniversary. Arguably as significant an album as any in musical history, Nevermind, — and the lead single “Smells like Teen Spirit,”– almost single-handedly ended one musical era and began another. Hair metal and bright colors went from the height of style to laughably passe instantaneously as Alternative and Grunge took over the airwaves and the national style and attitude. Big hair turned to long hair, bright colors and tight clothing went to flannels and baggy, ripped clothes; extended guitar solos got blended into fuzz pedals. It was a sea change in culture and music and one song off one album was the catalyst. Think about that for a second. We talk and spill so much digital ink on music and it’s “importance” but this is real importance, this is real change.
Chuck Berry changed the world when he introduced it to Rock & Roll. Suddenly the youth had an outlet away from what their parents were doing and what they were expected to do. Elvis pushed it even further. The Beatles reintroduced an entire country to America when the played Shea Stadium, and the Clash later introduced a new way to look at that country at that very same venue. Melle Mel with Grandmaster Flash and the other pioneers of rap & hip-hop took rhythmic rhyming over a beat into a new musical style, and when Run DMC collaborated with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way” it took off into the suburbs and soon across the entire nation.
Just last year a Tunisian rapper called El General risked everything to upload a track called “Rais Lebled” to Facebook, a scathing indictment of the iron-fisted dictatorship of Abadine Ben Ali that ruled his nation since the ’80s. Within two weeks a revolution had begun, with that song and the subsequent arrest of El General a major flash point.
It is estimated that over $150 million was raised for famine relief as a direct result of the Live Aid concerts, although there was later controversy and accusations of corruption.
All of these serve as explosive examples that sometimes…music really can change the world.
Nowadays we hear that label attached to albums every so often. “A game-changer,” “creates it’s own genre,” “leads in a way others will follow,” and other such hyperbolic quotes are tacked onto the plastic around a new album all the time. It makes us inured to such praise in this advertising-dominated world we live in. In the media saturation of the day and the internet, it seems like every album is on someone’s list of Top 10 of the Year, or is a must-hear! We feel the need to sort everything into some genre. On iTunes at last count, there are 25 main genres and 246 sub-genres –246 sub-genres! That is only the ones that are “official” on iTunes. It is hard to legitimately break new ground when everything released is alternately so hyped and then so classified down into it’s component parts. As Nirvana, Chuck Berry, Elvis, The Beatles, The Clash, Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash and El General show us, however, sometimes it is not just the hype. Sometimes you can believe what you hear. Sometimes music really does change the world.
We only have to look back to see for ourselves. After that sinks in, we can enjoy the album for what is as well as what it meant. Music.
D.Rew
Loud Love