Fishing for good music

A fishing trip isn’t all about the fishing, and the best stories from said trip aren’t either. In most cases the stories and trip itself happen to you, without warning.Saturday morning I left Manteca at five for Redding and a weekend on the Upper and Lower Sacramento Rivers. There’d be snow. I expected that. There was the potential for big fish on both. I expected that too. But what really made the trip was something completely unrelated to fishing. Music happened.The overwhelming majority of secular music is dysfunctional and birthed by one of two topics - relationships or substance ingestion. Sometimes both. That doesn’t mean that the rhythm alone isn’t worth paying attention to, but lyrically speaking most of what now qualifies as music is underdeveloped, cliche and ruthlessly void of baseline morality. Sometimes great lyrics are a steak smothered in ketchup-like sound which makes for horrible digestion. Both are very talented no doubt, but if Bass Pro Shops played nothing but Adele and Jason Mraz, I’d start ordering online.That said, there are two songs that are beyond anything that even an optimist like myself can use as a reason to listen.I don’t know the “artist” of either song and if I enter the words into a search engine to find out, I add to the internet “hits”, I help it trend. I become part of the problem. If I found out and told you, you might download it, or share it, or like it, or post it, or tweet it even if you thought it stunk too. I will gladly stay ignorant as to prevent unintentionally promoting the compositions.During the seven total hours I spent driving over the weekend I heard one song three times, the other twice. Misery each time. I gave each a full listen to be fair, but that only validated my shunning and I later turned the station immediately hoping that some intern somewhere made the connection that the song came on and someone on I-5 changed the station. I don’t know why I am so adamantly dismissive of these songs, well maybe I do. I know more Barry Manilow lyrics than I care to admit, I know that Bread isn’t just for sandwiches, that Ice Cube once had a good day, Coolio had a fantastic voyage, Skee-lo wishes he was taller, Alanis Morissette was damaged by ex-boyfriends, Pearl Jam wrote about how Jeremy “spoke” in class, Chingy couldn’t pronounce “there” and everyone knows Jenny’s phone number. There’s also that country song in which the girl goes all tornado metaphor on some dude and you don’t change the station because you don’t want her to come after you. It’s probably impossible, but you don’t want to tempt her. I don’t change some songs just because they are unintentionally funny. Why would Bruno Mars catch a grenade for his lady? Where have you taken your girl on a date where that might be a possibility? If you’re so upset she’s not committed, then why are you with her? Hey Bruno, if I was on a steelhead fishing date in Canada, I’d stab a charging bear for my girl, then wet myself. Take that.Anyway, those artists and songs cover a lot of genres, so no, my distaste for those two particular tracks is not because I am a partisan consumer of music. It’s because unlike the previously mentioned music I cannot find a discernible justification for the energy used to hear those two unnamed songs.By the way, the fishing trip was fun.