American Music.

I have a brother in Afghanistan. Don’t worry; I said I wouldn’t get personal, and I won’t. But my brother bought an iPod online and asked me and my other brother to fill it up before we sent it out to him. I thought he might want to hear some American music (the Blasters’ “American Music” is the main reference point), and spent a week ripping, downloading, and researching songs, compositions, and sounds before deciding that I could probably spend the rest of my life trying to make the Last Word on Twentieth-Century American Music; and my brother needed his iPod. But I copied the folder, and have been listening to it on my own mp3 player for a week.

I’ve been adding songs here and there since I sent the iPod out, and I’m closing in on 3,000: and every one a stone-cold classic. Early minstrelsy, ragtime, vaudeville, marches, and parlor music give way to early jazz, Broadway tunes, and hillbilly, which give way to blues, swing, vocal standards, and country, which give way to bop, r&b, big-band, and boogie, which give way to rock & roll and pop radio, which give way to folk-rock, surf, and the messiness of the Sixties which spills over into the Seventies. After that it tapers off sharply, though I have a handful (say a couple hundred) of major hip-hop and indie-rock tracks from the late 70s to the 90s. And there’s so, so much more. A selection of stand-up comedians, historical speeches, TV themes, classical works, and “party records” helps to break the all-pop-music monotony.

I’ve been listening to it on random, of course, and it can be thrilling to jump from Billie Holiday’s chilling “Strange Fruit” to the splendorous release of one of Brian Wilson’s teenage symphonies, or to come down from the plastic funk of Prince’s “1999” to Dock Boggs’ flintlike voice and banjo that sounds like it was made from the gut of the first cat in America.

And there’s so much of it; I’ve been listening to it in nine-hour hauls every weekday, and haven’t heard more than a quarter of the songs I know are there (which makes it really frustrating when the same songs keep coming up).

So I’ve been making connections, learning a lot, and jamming to some kickass tunes. What have you done with your life lately?