Melophobe Months 2012 Music Reviews Walter Biggins This is issue #6 of Afronaut. Published by Afronaut Press, February 2013. Text and design © 2013 Walter Biggins. The following issues are available at Quiet Bubble (http://quietbubble.wordpress.com/zines/): Demo Tapes: Essays by Walter Biggins, 2005-2010 (issues #4 & 5, May 2011). A Tribute to Whitney Balliett (issue #3, October 2010). The Patter of Raindrops: The Wonderful Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki (issue #2, February 2010). Letters to Mr. Konigsberg (issue #1, October 2009). Muñeco: A 24-Hour Comic (issue #0, November 2000). For more information, please contact me at
[email protected] or check out my blog: quietbubble.wordpress.com. Introduction. Something’s happened to me over the last five years. I listen to, and trust, pop music far less than I did in my twenties, and the pop that I still listen to is radically different than what I grew up with. My ears cock, like a cat’s, more toward jazz, avant-garde, and instrumental hip-hop now than to the rock, rap, R&B, and beat-driven fare that sustained me for twenty years. To be fair, jazz was always there, ever since I bought a $20 CD of Miles Davis’s Capitol/Blue Note years in a cold January morning in 1994. I bought it from Sound Warehouse, a chain that’s long gone, because the cover was cool and Davis—with his close-cropped hair and natty suit—looked cooler than I could ever hope for. It was a sophistication to aspire toward, and to try and impress girls with.