Well, that's not actually true. However, I find myself writing almost exclusively about bands, and not about, shall we say, "issues". I hear some music I like and I write about, whereas I haven't felt at all compelled to write about rockism or whatever issue various music websites are up in arms about. In some sense, I think you reach a point where everything becomes subjective and at that point, what other people are saying becomes irrelevant. At that point, certain issues become increasingly trivial. Like this one: Soulseeking
I've felt that need to consume, both in the downloading age and before it. But what happened to Nick a couple of years ago was the need to hear everything, and I haven't felt that in at least ten years (not even everything within a scene or genre). Compared to my teen, it's considerably more fruitless to even attempt such a thing and engage in that sort of completism, since there's so much more music available and it's easier than ever to get hear it. Nick doesn't want to know everything about postpunk and grime -- hey, neither do I! -- and the solution is simple. Don't listen to it, no need for drama, listen to something else. It's that simple. That's the sort of triviality I was referring to. My response is brief and I don't feel the need to discuss it beyond "just listen to whatever you want and leave it at that".
The need to hear everything is foolish, but the need to hear lots and lots is not -- it's a simple addiction just like any other. As I've said on other occasions, I accept the fact that there's practically an infinite pool of music out there that I would absolutely love if I ever got around to hearing it. I'm becoming convinced that the timing of anything I hear is essentially random. Recommendations are everywhere -- I follow through on some right away, some get filed away in my brain for years, and others are simply forgotten. Why? What determines whether a song or album is heard immediately as opposed to never? The crucial question is how much of this depends on factors that I can control (absolute choice over what I hear and when I hear it) and how much of it is pure randomness that is unrelated to music (moods, finding the time, millions of other real life pursuits).
My main objection to the article (which I enjoyed for the most part) is the way it looks toward the past, implying that we are, to some extent, powerless to avoid judging new music (and the feelings we get from hearing that music) with how we felt about music we heard in the past. Why won't new albums don't make him feel like InSides did? A valid concern, perhaps, but that will never happen -- those feelings will never return. You hear music differently at 18 than you do at 26 or 31. Nothing is the same. Kissing a girl isn't the same at 31 as it was at 18. It's not less exciting or less special, it's just different because 18 is not 31. I went through what Nick went through. I used to wonder out loud if I'd ever be truly excited -- heart-palpitation excitement and life-affirming joy -- for any band ever again. Then I discovered Pulp. Again, it felt like the end of something, a conclusion to diehard fandom and I continued to wonder whether those feelings could ever be repeated. That was 1995. If I was incapable of feeling that strongly about a band over a period of ten years, I would have lost interest in hearing new bands several years ago. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this blog clearly shows. A steady stream of comparisons to the past helps to confine the past to a self-enforced higher pedestal that can never compete with the present, and then you're no different from those people who say that nothing can or will ever be better than the Beatles or Zeppelin.
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