SO----what is Fingertips music?

It's intelligent, yes, and it's made with spirit and craft and heart and all those good things, but what the heck is it, what kind of music is going to be featured on Fingertips, I mean, is it singer/songwriter stuff? "Adult alternative"? "Brit-pop"? "Emo"? "Indie"? Well?

I guess I am not too fond of labels, which is partially why I'm doing my best not to use them. But if you've clicked down this far, you may be the sort of person who understands that labels, however philosophically inadequate, are still useful sometimes. So I'll give it a try.

A certain amount of the music I'll highlight here on Fingertips is the sort that these days is lumped together under the "adult alternative" label, which itself tends to be music that is not too electric and often springs from individual singer/songwriters.

This causes a problem for me right away, however, because I also like music that can be thoroughly electric, music from real bands, music with a certain amount of spit and gristle to it. And I really don't connect to music from singer/songwriters who are so earnest that they don't seem like any fun at all, and that (unfortunately) tends to be a lot of what passes for adult alternative here in the '00s. (And how do you say that, have we figured it out yet? I mean, the '90s were "the nineties," but how do you say the '00s? Just wondering.)

Ah, see, I changed the subject.

Back to music: for music to grab me, I need a good sense of melody and/or structure in the sound and I need lyrics that are either obviously insightful or, at least, intriguingly elusive. I need to feel that there is artistry underneath, not a focus group. Music that subtly exudes a sense of musical understanding and musical history is definitely a good thing. 

When all is said and done, I like music that feels musical and is in some fashion or another listenable. I don't mind some tension, some resistance, some dissonance--as a matter of fact, I like that stuff--but in the end it has to hang together as a pleasant and engaging experience. 

This means I may not often, if ever, write much about truly experimental music, or the hard-core ends of any particular genre, be it standard rock, punk, or electronica. Dance-oriented music, for its groove-based vibe, may not end up often featured here. Blues is also likely to be rare, mostly because I don't know much about it (I consider it beyond the boundary of rock music). Likewise hip-hop, for similar reasons--although I am definitely open to listening to and learning more about any genre with which I do not yet feel comfortable.

Okay, so that's my description, and what it ultimately means is that I listen to and am excited by music that falls under a variety of different labels--modern rock, indie rock, alternative rock, classic rock, singer/songwriter music, new wave, brit-pop, power pop, trip hop, folk rock, emo, grunge, chamber pop, and on and on.

While the music on Fingertips will often veer towards lesser-known artists, this has as much to do with the tendency of such artists to provide free and legal MP3s versus than any great need of mine to like music that isn't popular.  I like quality music; I am not concerned whether very few people know a group or whether everyone does.

In the end, I resist the categories most of all because it seems to me that having all these separate labels tends to divide music into artificially separate domains. In actuality, I believe the broad category of rock'n'roll is a wonderfully, vitally varied whole. Everything is connected, even when it seems separate (much the way, come to think of it, your own fingertips are actually connected through the whole of your hand).

Hm. I'm not sure I've explained very much. I'll keep working on it.



 

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