Pop Music.

These days I cannot abide pop music. What passes for hits these days grate on my every nerve whenever I am stuck in a place where I cannot avoid having my ears and my mind assaulted by this rubbish.

Of course I do have positive feelings for much of the pop music that was around in my youth and during those years when I was disposed to not only listening to it, but celebrating it. There is always room for hypocrisy and chauvinism when it comes to one's own nostalgia. So I will admit to that up front.

Thus, I do whatever I can to avoid modern pop music. I don't intentionally listen to radio at any point, and I don't allow it to be played in any car that I am driving. If I'm behind the wheel, then by Jove I will dictate the state of the radio and the speakers assaulting my ears. If you have your own device with earphones...go at it. Just as long as I don't have to hear it.

But sometimes I do enjoy listening to the pop music of my youth--which covers a lot of ground. I did listen and follow pop trends from about the time I was six or seven--when the Beatles were leading the British Invasion of the US pop scene--up until about 1990 when I completely stopped listening to pop. Typically, if anyone brings up a group or so-called "artist" who appeared after 1990 I have no idea who, or what, they are talking about.

One of the pop groups from my youth that I would only grudgingly listen to was the Bee Gees. Today most people dismiss them as some kind of twisted aberration of the US and British music scene, discounting that they were almost constantly charting hits from the '60s and for the next four decades. But those same people were glued to the radio and buying Bee Gees records for all that time. I never bought a Bee Gees record, but I did sometimes listen to them.

The reason I even mention them now is because of Robin Gibb who was the sometimes lead singer, but often stuck in a supporting role as vocalist. For decades I had supposed that his voice was electronically enhanced in some way, and that most of his vocals were, in fact, the trio singing in tandem as harmony while he led.

But this was a misconception. That really was Robin Gibb singing solo. And, no, his voice was not being artificially enhanced, nor was it some kind of spliced-in harmony with his two brothers. It really was his voice.

Yeah. I was surprised. I've heard his voice referred to as an acquired taste, and I admit that it can be annoying. But there is something unreal about it--almost, I would say--supernatural. When I finally read that his voice was not being twisted in some electronic way I wondered how this was so. For a while I refused to believe that it was one person singing and that it was not, at least, being looped with multiple tracks.

Since then, I've heard it described as a kind of unique vibrato, or a strange kind of tremulous warbling. Whatever it was, it was singular, and now and again I'll find myself intentionally listening to tunes where he was the lead vocalist, or singing without the benefit of his brothers.

Pop Music

When I was young pop music was a huge part of my life, just as it is for most people of a certain age. Not long after I got married and had to buckle down to earn a living and make a home I stopped paying attention to pop music. It was as if there was absolutely no time at all to listen to it. I quite actually did not have the leisure moments to hear what my old favorites were producing, nor to discover new music. I cast it aside and I was left behind in the wake of the industry.

What time that I did have for myself since those days I have almost always used to spend with my wife and son, or to create stories and novels, or to travel to see places that I fear may not survive the coming years (National Parks and wilderness areas). To put it bluntly, music didn't just take a back seat in the current of my life, it was all but dead to me.

I will admit that I was able to catch the tail-end of the great days of Napster and was able to glom onto thousands of old tunes I recalled and to discover a few artists who had appeared on the scene since I'd stopped listening to pop. But the industry soon put a stop to that and I went back to completely ignoring popular music.

These days, from time to time I will look up a group or an artist whose work I quite enjoyed as a young man. And every now and again I will recall that for a few years I made money selling vinyl records and got a huge kick out of discovering acts I'd never heard of, or musicians whose work I had just never sampled. This made dealing retail music a lot of fun and I looked forward to finding a jewel in the midst of what generally did not appeal to me. And those memories will sometimes spur me to look back at the sounds that made me smile when I was a younger man.

One of the groups that I found in my days as a retailer was The Motors. They were, apparently, a short-lived act who appeared, cut a few records, and then vanished. They had a nice sound, good keyboards with strings and nice vocals (both in chorus and as belted-out blues style solos). I recall them with some good feelings and occasionally pull up one of their old tunes to listen while I write. Here are a couple that I played when I was a youngster in my 20s: