Man, don't you have anything better to do with your time ? You've been posting
incessantly sharing your personal opinions on any/every damn thing several times a
day. Get some friends or hobbies or something.
Sorry,
Andrei
Adam Piontek wrote:
quoted 175 lines -----Original Message-----
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Irene McC [mailto:substar@iafrica.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 1:46 PM
> >
> > On 18 Jul 2001, at 7:12, Adam Piontek wrote:
> > > There's something wonderful about being a teenager
> and getting a
> > > new album for the first time in months, taking it
> home and holing
> > > up in your room with the headphones and falling in
> love with new
> > > music.
> >
> > YES YES YES!!! Why doesn't that happen any more?
> Are we just
> > too damn jaded and locked into the eternal quest for
> bigger, better,
> > more?
>
> That's a big part of it for me. I've been trying to
> teach myself lately to tone down my music addiction.
> Trying to remodel my listening/buying habits to be
> like they were when I was "happier" with music. Like,
> back when I was a teenager, I was really into Tori
> Amos, but all I could get was what they sold at Best
> Buy. So, I eventually got a bunch of singles, but
> mostly I would spend months just absorbing the latest
> album. When you spend that much time on one thing,
> you really *know* it.
>
> I'm focusing a lot more on just albums, and not
> worrying so much about all the B-sides, remixes, or
> compilation tracks I might find out there in MP3.
> When I was a teenager, I didn't know so much about the
> existence of B-sides, remixes, compilation tracks,
> etc., and even if I did, it wasn't so easy to have
> them (MP3s). The thing is, if you really like an
> album by artist X, you're not necessarily missing
> anything if that's all you ever hear. Sure, there are
> probably some killer individual "extra" tracks hiding
> out there somewhere, like Four Tet's remix of track 1
> from SAWII. But it's not such a big deal if I don't
> hear that stuff.
>
> > These days, I get new albums, and they're *nice* but
> somehow
> > they never enmesh with every single cell in my body
> like my old
> > music used to.
>
> Same here. Sometimes it's just that the music, while
> I like it, and it's *nice*, it isn't exactly great for
> me. For example, Delarosa & Asora's Agony is a
> well-done album, and I can really appreciate it when I
> listen to it, but it just doesn't make me want to
> listen to it over and over again. Some music just
> does not grow on me, no matter how much I listen to
> it. Whereas Proem's "Negativ" and Chris Clark's
> "Clarence Park" have been hitting me quite hard lately
> - I can't stop listening to these and a few other
> things.
>
> Still, I really think the large part of it is not the
> music itself, but just how much time you spend with
> something. When I first got Aphex's RDJ album, I was
> still very much a "1 album-per-month at most"
> listener, and I just kept listening to that over and
> over. After a while, I knew that album inside and
> out. I still do when I listen to it now, and it makes
> it that much more special to me.
>
> However, in the past couple of years I've become a lot
> more "throw-away consumerist" about music. I'll get a
> bunch of new music, and as I'm listening to it I make
> quick judgements and move on to the next thing because
> there's always *more* to try, and for some reason I
> feel I need to. "What if I'm missing something
> amazing?!" The catch-22 here is that if I find
> something amazing, I'm less likely to recognize it,
> and if I do recognize it, I'm still going to feel as
> if I need to move on either A) because there might be
> something *else* amazing out there that I'm missing,
> or B) because I have so much stuff, and I should
> really try to listen to it all equally.
>
> This is all pretty rediculous, and most people I'm
> sure don't have the same difficulties. You're all
> probably comfortable with how you listen to music.
> I'm just realizing, however, that I'm not comfortable
> anymore with how I've come to listen to music. The
> simple fact for me being that I really really miss
> being as intimate with an album as I am with some of
> my older stuff like the RDJ album or my Tori or TMBG
> albums. I'm not intimate with my newer stuff; I don't
> know Proem's music by heart, even though I absolutely
> love it, simply because I don't allow myself the time
> to truly absorb it. So that's what I'm working
> against now.
>
> >I have some old vinyl dating back, ooh - 20, 25
> > years, that is so deeply engrained that I can
> imagine every crackle
> > and surface scratch before it comes along, and if I
> hear a CD copy
> > of the same album, it somehow lacks the well-worn
> ambience of my
> > beloved original.
>
> Yeah, that can happen, though I've always been a CD
> person, so that doesn't quite apply to me. Although I
> can say that my sister used to have this "Joseph and
> the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" album that was a
> stage recording from England or something, and I
> listened to it a lot. Later on when I wanted to get a
> copy for myself (I went threw an Andrew Lloyd Webber
> phase, so shoot me :P), the Osmond production had
> opened in America and that's all you could find
> anywhere. Sometimes, with musicals or classical
> music, stuff that can be done by many different
> artists so there's all sorts of different "versions"
> or "interpretations," the only one you really like is
> the first one you heard, or at least one specific
> version. Like, I can only listen to a version of
> Carmina Burana that was recorded by one particular
> orchestra. All other versions sound "wrong" to me.
> This, I have no doubt, comes from being so used to
> recorded music. Before recordings, I'm sure this
> didn't happen. People were more into the music itself
> than a particular manifestation of it. Kind of like,
> it was the melody of a hymn or jazz tune itself that
> people liked; not a specific version, because the
> versions they heard were *always* live and *always*
> different. The concept of "live music" wasn't even an
> issue.
>
> Whoah, big rantings in this email. Sorry everyone :P
>
> > I think partly this might be due to my obsession
> with music having
> > become something akin to an addiction, and I'm
> always looking to
> > the next fix, rather than fully enjoying the
> present.
>
> Oh, wait, now I've ranted on and on and gone off on
> tangent after tangent, and you just said it in, like,
> two sentences! Oh well.
>
> > It's also partially a fault of the media, peddling
> music as a mass-
> > market consumable. Gone is the arcane pleasure of
> indulgence.
>
> Yeah, that's also part of it. Kind of like the
> tangent I got off on about "music before it was
> possible to record it" - recording made the music
> "industry" possible, and forever altered what was
> before the "natural" way to hear music. Now it takes
> willpower and a plan to avoid music addiction! Maybe
> there should be a 12 step program?
>
> > Cynical? You bet!
>
> But healthy, too!
>
> -Adam, being particularly pedantic today...
>
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