you've probably been obsessed with a band to the point where you've looked up old performances of them on YouTube,
the type of performance where a band who has a big following now was just a band on a small local stage with a small if enthusiastic crowd,
and then you naturally think to yourself as one does, "That looks fun as hell. I wish I could have caught [band] when they were that small."
and it makes total sense. The show is more up-close and personal. The band might even casually talk to you at the merch table. And they're playing all their old songs that you have a soft spot for that their setlists understandably never have room for anymore. And it looks like a real community. You don't get the distance you get when seeing an artist at a stadium.
And after sitting with it for a bit, you reach the logical conclusion that you can only really experience this if you go to see local bands play.
What a great experience that is, to find some local bands you really love and be able to see them live semi-regularly.
Bigger artists may come to a city near yours once in a blue moon, (Seriously, why is it so fucking hard for artists to come to Houston? They always go to Austin or Dallas instead.) or even worse, they're big enough that you've heard of them and they're your favorite band but are simultaneously too small to ever visit your country, let alone a stop in your city.
Local bands are always playing in your city. (Until they're not, so don't take them for granted.)
Still, I think this is where most people bow out.
It's hard to blame them for it too. Surely there's this understanding that there could be a gem in the piles and piles of poorly-performed and amateaurishly-written riff-raff songs, but curation is hard and we're all too busy and many of us would rather lean on old favorites or charitably let the algorithms decide our new favorites.
I know this because I used to feel the same way and do those same things.
but what changed my mind is that I had a problem that avid music listeners know too well.
I don't pretend anyone's surpised by this, but I want to drive home the point that really. You can't remotely do this.
There aren't enough days left in our lives, and even if you did listen to every great release from this month/year/decade, there will be another month/year/decade right after it.
And this is to say nothing of listening to unenjoyable music in between the ones you actually mesh with, how many albums don't click until the nth listen, and finding time to listen to old favorites, or even older releases that you're discovering for the very first time.
This is why and how someone like Anthony Fantano can pride himself on being the "Internet's busiest music nerd". And listening to everything is his full-time job that he presumably gets paid well to do. I don't doubt that he puts in the work for sure. And he still doesn't get everything! How could he? He's just one guy. So if I'm out here with a non-music-related 9-to-5, then there's just no way. And this is why in my "top 10 albums of 2024" post, I said it's not often that I can make a ranked list of that many albums in a year.
But we're all kind of aware of this.
Not just as it relates to music, but all media consumption. You can't watch every movie, play every game. God help anyone who tries to read every book.
And that's why against all odds, I read a substack post earlier this year that actually stuck with me. It made me reconsider my music listening habits, in terms of which artists to explore and how, and the (probably paraphrased) line that stuck with me went something like
(This paraphrased quote probably came from this Substack post, but I can't tell for sure because it was previously free and now it's paywalled)
Maybe people who live in cities with big music scenes feel differently, but if you're out in Houston like me, this is an entirely reasonable prospect. A motivating one at that.
In fact, you will probably run out of releases to listen to in your favorite subgenres, and may have to resort to looking up bands' back catalogs.
This is what makes combing through the "riff-raff" seem like less of a daunting move, and so I did just that.
Bandcamp has a nice feature where you can filter releases by city, and so it's as simple as typing in "Houston" and clicking the buttons that say "Indie Rock", "Emo" or "Pop Punk".
That's all you have to do.
And I won't sit here and pretend that everything you'll hear is good. I think most people expect most of it to be really bad, and I did find a few releases that uncharitably gave me some second-hand embarrassment, but what you'll find more often than that is music that is okay but not super memorable. And that's fine, but it's a small price to pay sifting through that when you eventually find the stuff that's really good. The songs that get constantly stuck in your head or that you can't stop listening to on loop.
I got enough of this downloaded that I was able to make a playlist of just local artists that's about 2 and a half hours at this time of writing.
Even though diving into local music is quite managable, especially as an alternative to just roaming free with music from any municipality, it's still understable if the prospect still seems daunting. Like I mentioned before, we are all still busy after all and that's not going to let up just because you're open to bumping local talent now.
I think the other disconnect is that when it comes to artists from other places, they've already been "vetted" if you're actually hearing about them regardless of where you are. And sometimes that's all we want, for society, culture, or even a trusted friend to tell us "hey, this is the good thing I think you will love." and for it to be true.
So if you're someone I know personally, I'd be more than glad to be that vetting process. And if you have good things to share with me too, I'd be ecstatic. I still don't know everything and have only really been searching for artists via Bandcamp search, so if there are other ways to listen to local artists short of just going to the shows every day, I'm all ears too.