205 Drop: Top 10 overexposed stadium audio moments

The premise for today's list is inherently faulty and flawed, because it deals with an idea -- that people do not like repetition and certainty -- which has no basis in reality. My prior career in original music is living proof.

Ever wonder why you don't like most new music that you hear? It's because our first instinct toward anything new is to distrust and/or demean it. That reaction is the safer play. To like something, and more importantly, to admit it out loud, carries a tiny moment of risk. What if the band that plays your new song turns out to be embarrassing later, via one-hit wonder status, terrible interviews or questionable marketing decisions?

But a curious thing happens, usually around the fifth to tenth listen of a song; it becomes familiar to you. You start to wonder why you keep hearing this, and if it's not a matter of blaming some outside entity for inflicting it on you (those damned stadium operators!), you'll figure out some reason why you like it. Listen to that bass line, it's really melodic. I like the way the singer uses their breath noises to serve the rhythm. The chorus has a great hook. And so on.

My band never had what you'd call a radio hit, but we did have songs that people responded to more than others, and certainly, songs we liked more than others, which stayed in our set list for years. The crowds we attracted came to expect those songs in our set and geeked for them, in a fashion; if we played an entire set of new songs, or didn't throw them a bone twice a set with a cover they recognized, it would take a very spot-on performance, or a pretty alcohol-lubricated crowd, to get them whooping along like a good rock and roll audience. People like the familiar; they need it. Until your music is familiar, it's work. The great New York performance artist Laurie Anderson had a term for it: the difficult listening hour. That sums it up nicely.

I believe that listening to new music is an essential part of keeping your brain fresh, and well worth the pain of sifting through the +90% crap that you get. But I also get that many people aren't going to put themselves through that work. It's the reason why, well, the lists always get more traffic than the diatribes.

(Now, user fatigue does exist, and might be quickening up over time. When you've heard a song a few hundred times, I'd argue that you have to be really good at living in your own head and tuning out the world. The Shooter Wife, who stays home with the kids with all of the torturous sounds that childhood entails, is much better at enduring this than me; it's one of the reasons, I think, why parenting is the hardest job you'll ever have. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.)

So you might not think that you like formula and repetition, or that you really need to go along with stomp-stomp-clap, stomp-stomp-clap the next time you hear it in a stadium. But, well, you will.

Just as, if you're still reading me at this point, you're probably reading me again at some point. Though it probably does still feel like work.