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As much as I love busking down in the subway, I hardly feel as authentic and entitled as some of the other guys who play down there.

Phil, Norm & Joe are some great guys who play down there seemingly at all hours. Indeed, someone saw fit to give them their rightful place on the YouTube stage.

You guys are awesome. But lord, find a new band name.

As I was saying, Stanklin & I have been discussing the need for a new term to describe music that you have to learn to love. Stanklin even took it one step further, wondering what to call those pop confections that you can’t get enough of for about two weeks, and then never want to hear again.

His best effort was “appreciation gap.” I thought this was actually pretty good in describing the temporal phenomenon. But it’s a bit limiting to use the same term for the flame-out of bubblegum as for the slow build of a masterwork.

We noticed that Pitchfork uses “grower” for the latter. Neither of us liked that. Too… jam-band. The terms don’t have to sound as derivative of an econ textbook as ours, but certainly someone else has already coined something fitting.

Anyone?

A while back, my friend Stanklin suggested we come up with a term to describe the those artists that take a while to grow on you. The most flagrant example in our own lives needed no mention — Crowded House, of course.

I bought Woodface at a used CD store with Stanklin back in high school. I was blown away by the Beatlesque “It’s Only Natural” (which we’d heard on the then-independent KGSR) and thought it might be worth the $6. An old guy was scouring the bin next to me and couldn’t contain himself. “That’s a great record!”

“Oh… cool, thanks…”

“I don’t know why anyone would return it! I just wish I could go back to when I first discovered it!”

“Wow, well, great, I’m looking forward to it… Um…”

So we took the disk home, pleased at the find and the story about the old man, but also concerned at his zeal. One listen to the record’s disjointed and cheeky opener, “Chocolate Cake,” (“Tammy Baker’s got a lot on her plate”… you get the idea) and we knew this wasn’t going to go well. By the time I got to the syrupy “All I Ask,” I just wrote it off.

Some year or so later, for some unknown reason, I put the disk back in. I skipped track one. And then the record came to life. This time, I heard the brilliant bridge (“the finger of blame has turned upon itself”) in “Fall at Your Feet” (hear it yourself, by the way, over on the band’s website). The plaintive “Four Season in One Day” (most tasteful cursing in a song) seemed poignant and poetic. And I couldn’t get the songs out of my head.

It wasn’t long before Stanklin was on board, too. By the time the follow-up was released, we were hungry converts, pestering people in used CD stores, and praising a wise old man who had once tried to show us the light…

Maybe people just felt relieved to talk about something aside from the presidential race. Or perhaps people are starved for a little bling and red carpet after the writers withheld our dose of “Desperate Housewives” for so long.

Whatever the case, people got excited about the Grammy Awards this year. I heard recaps from friends, coworkers, family. But I didn’t watch. Not only that, I completely forgot it was on. In fact, I wrote off the Grammys years ago. Not out of any bitterness or jealousy, mind you, but simply because they never seem relevant to what I was pursuing musically. Sure, I enjoyed seeing Eminem and Elton duet, but the awards themselves meant nothing.

This year, people seem particularly shocked about Herbie Hancock’s big win. Indeed, Quincy Jones’s disarming exclamation — “unbelievable, man!” — was one of those great award show moments (so great I heard it replayed later). I even know it happened at 10:40pm CST, because I got a euphoric text from Jazzy Jeff.

Hey, good for Herbie! Too bad it wasn’t for one of his more ambitious or landmark records. But this hardly seems such a surprise to me. Remember when Steely Dan won?

Sounds like a 50’s doo-wop group. But The Searchers is a classic John Wayne Western, which we TiVoed the other night.

I haven’t seen many Westerns, largely because of how silly the melodrama and stereotypes seem now — they’d be amusing if they weren’t so boring. This one is good, though, primarily because of what a wackjob Wayne’s character is. It also helps that the movie is told in such a hurry (it’s quite an epic to fit in under two hours), making Wayne seems that much more unpredictable. And all the more iconic that he truly does do the best John Wayne impression.

My favorite part, though, was the opening credits. After a dramatic orchestral swell announced the Duke, the film’s eponymous song abruptly starts, sung in three-part harmony by, presumably, cowboys. It’s awesome.

Cowboy doo-wop. Maybe it’s a good title for the film after all.