Extremely belated Christmas music review
Dec. 28th, 2003 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI am doomed to love everything that John Flansburgh is ever involved with. I'd been slowly getting around to listening to the Mono Puff album "It's Fun to Steal" for several years, and can report that it is indeed brilliant. The excellent Robin Goldwasser (Flansburgh's wife) is also on it. The mix of musical styles is pretty similar to what would eventually show up on They Might Be Giants' 2001 album "Mink Car"; sort of a rock-lounge jazz-funk-disco kinda thing, with some completely unclassifiably weird songs. "Night Security" cracks me up uncontrollably. I need to dig up some of their other output.
Increasingly I find myself running years behind the leading edge of hipness. I think that a lot of what people do with their music choices as they get older is backfill the stuff that they started to get interested in earlier, but never got around to. It seems as if they're stuck in time and have stopped listening to anything new, but they're actually still exploring, and have just found a groove in which they are increasingly expert; if they tried listening to the stuff that is now cool, they'd be back at square one and probably unable to find the obscure material that would really interest them.
The basic problem is that, to an even greater extent than most forms of art or entertainment, music rewards connoisseurship beyond the level that a typical person can attain in a human lifetime; the music that gets heavy promotion is usually crap, or at least not to the specialized taste of any given person, and the music you really like ends up coming to your attention through word of mouth or leaps of faith. Years ago I thought it was pretty funny that my father had become an expert on the output of the Coasters, but when he tried getting into Eighties music, just ended up listening to the soundtrack of "Flashdance" over and over. But we all end up there.
Further observations:
1. Stanislaw Lem wrote this same essay about science fiction, about five times, only he was meaner about it and got kicked out of the SFWA.
2. This whole piece is actually an explanation of why I've listened to "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" about a million times this year.
Increasingly I find myself running years behind the leading edge of hipness. I think that a lot of what people do with their music choices as they get older is backfill the stuff that they started to get interested in earlier, but never got around to. It seems as if they're stuck in time and have stopped listening to anything new, but they're actually still exploring, and have just found a groove in which they are increasingly expert; if they tried listening to the stuff that is now cool, they'd be back at square one and probably unable to find the obscure material that would really interest them.
The basic problem is that, to an even greater extent than most forms of art or entertainment, music rewards connoisseurship beyond the level that a typical person can attain in a human lifetime; the music that gets heavy promotion is usually crap, or at least not to the specialized taste of any given person, and the music you really like ends up coming to your attention through word of mouth or leaps of faith. Years ago I thought it was pretty funny that my father had become an expert on the output of the Coasters, but when he tried getting into Eighties music, just ended up listening to the soundtrack of "Flashdance" over and over. But we all end up there.
Further observations:
1. Stanislaw Lem wrote this same essay about science fiction, about five times, only he was meaner about it and got kicked out of the SFWA.
2. This whole piece is actually an explanation of why I've listened to "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" about a million times this year.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-28 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-28 08:24 pm (UTC)Early on it was frustrating reading articles and public statements about this stuff because this was never acknowledged; it was assumed that MP3s meant illegal copying and anything else was just euphemism, nudge wink. Anything that did talk about MP3s encoded from CDs you already own was often written from an an audiophile point of view: to a hardcore audiophile an MP3 at a reasonable bitrate is unlistenable crap compared to CD quality, so why would you ever want to do that?
But most people are not hardcore audiophiles, and the value of having this gigantic jukebox with elaborate playlist manipulation capabilities far outweighs the modest quality loss. (And now hard drives are big enough that you can store a large collection as AIFFs if you really want to.)
no subject
Date: 2003-12-28 08:47 pm (UTC)The nudge-wink phenomenon makes it hard to have rational conversations about this. The system as currently set up turns almost everyone into a criminal, and distinctions get lost:
"I mostly use MP3s to listen to stuff I bought legally."
"Oh, yeah? I'm on to you. Are you willing to sign this sworn affidavit stating that you have never in your life downloaded music for which you did not possess a legally defensible usage license?"
"Well..."
"Ah HA!!!!"
And then there's the tendency to completely ignore legal free downloads, which I suppose cut across demographics. If somebody's giving it away it can't be any good, right? Just like operating systems!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-28 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-28 08:59 pm (UTC)Some artists are worried about the Death of the Album as a consequence of MP3s and pay downloads, but this cuts both ways: it also means that, even if you did pay for it, at least the remainder of an unremarkable album is not an albatross whose unwanted presence drags down the two or three brilliant tracks every time you listen to it.