Too much music?

Woebot

Well-known member
Firstly a nod to franceso's thread here:
http://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2270

and to blissblogger here:
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_blissout_archive.html#112715049092142928

and man like nick southall here:
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=1854

--------

Quite weird to reflect that over the past 6-8 months I've bought almost nothing but:

a) Grime
b) German New Wave

(great parallels between them, but thats another thread)

Thats it. Almost exclusively.

So when I read in Simon's old Pulse piece this:

"And to music-lovers:: if you're lucky enough to get obsessed with something, go with flow, forget about the rest. Music should be precious, not something you channel-surf through."

I can't help but sense again he's reached the same conclusions (this time as much as ten years ago ha ha ha)

One mitigating factor to this massive contraction in my horizons is that I reckon I've really put in the groundwork over the past twenty years. Have really explored lots of stuff, and thus feel as though i've earned the right to (broadly) be as dismissive as i bloomin well like. Also i think having to listen to three CDs a month for The Wire has kind of enforced this sharpening of my own tastes. Theres nothing like HAVING to evaluate music to make you hanker for your own flavours.

Anyway I did have one observation to add to Simon's and Nick's when they complain about the deluge of music. I wanted to remark that its not necessarily the deluge of music thats the root problem here (though yes more and more music is made) its the deluge of opinions and information and discourse about music. After all, what is confusing isnt the choice on offer, its reading other people enthusing about stuff you havent heard.
 

Blackdown

nexKeysound
recently i've been trying to steer myself away of a real purist phase. like you woebot, i've listened widely and so feel i dont need to listen to hours of funky house, uk hip hop (for example) right now, having had things like that rammed down my throat by PRs.

i think the lack of PRs in dubstep and grime was one of the factors that allowed me to sustain the passion for it. after a few years of getting more 'dance' promos than i could possibly listen to, it began to kill my love of music. it's the difference between eating a nice meal, and being force fed 200kg of raw steak with a large stick.

Chris Goss from Hospital records made similar points to me a while ago about too much music in relation the night 'CDr' (where new producers hand in 'work in progress' hours before the night to tony attica blues). his point was it's such a bad idea, being surrounded by too much average, unfinished music.

despite all this purism recently i've been trying to consume more bhangra, bollywood, crunk, reggaeton, dancehall and blues, just to keep discovering new things.
 

bun-u

Trumpet Police
These sentiments resonate with me too….but this might also have something to do with the means of consumption. My guess is that most people here making these observations got into music when they had limited means to access all that they wanted. I’m not talking here about access via formats vrs downloading, but about the resources…cash.

My own experience is that I was pretty stoney broke during the period when I got into music (14-21), so I had to make big choices about what I bought and had to live with the consequences. This gamble/risk factor I’m sure added to the thrill of getting a purchase right.

Nowadays – though not awash with cash – I can pretty much get the purchases I want as well as the ones I’m half sure about.; Then when you add some freebies, downloaded bits and cdr mixes from friends, adds to a whole lot of music with not a lot at stake. I suppose I’m saying there’s alot less ‘sticking your neck on the line’ about the music you opt for these days.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
it's just a matter of prioritising what you want to hear/know about. while i was doing the mega-big i-D piece on houston rap, needing to learn more than i ever thought i would about that stuff in the months preceding me going to texas, i just had to throw my hands up and say: "right, i'm not going to be able to keep up with dancehall for a while."
this is similar to my outlook on grime most of the time. i love this music, but i've had to limit myself to listening to the radio and buying all the mix cds and dvds, rather than sharking around for the latest whites and being absolutely bang up to the minute, because then i won't have time for hip-hop and jamaican stuff. (also with people like martin, ms fiddy and a few others on this board, i really don't feel i need to do this from a professional point of view. a lot of what i write about, i write about coz i really like it and/or people aren't representing it properly, so quite often a lot of conscience goes into what i choose to concentrate on at any given time, but in this instance good people doing good shit means i'm less motivated to cover this stuff in the press and allows me to take pleasure in it as a punter).
i realised long ago that i don't have time to keep up with techno, as much as i enjoy a lot of it, can't really put much time into rock (this is less of a bind) and am destined to have a lot of stuff pass me by, especially when i've chosen to dig round in a lot of obscure global music that takes a bit of time and effort to seek out.
that said, i'm still interested in way more stuff than i have time for, so my approach is more one of focused dilletantism, the focus shifting as and when it needs to or when the music itself shifts.
one thing i will say, though, is that it's also cool to be in a place where i can skim a lot of cream from the top of genres i can't usually accommodate as much as i'd like - for instance picking up a shit-kicking bhangra compilation being sold by a couple of lads in whitechapel as i waited for my bus the other day, the latin comps you can buy on the road in seven sisters etc... i don't know as much about this stuff as its core audience, but speaking as a broadsheet wanker, i think this keeps me a way a head of many of my colleagues.
 
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Paul Hotflush

techno head
It's impossible to keep up with everything. Just have your ears open and when you hear something you like, take the trouble to look it up. That's what I do, anyway.
 

hint

party record with a siren
Blackdown said:
Chris Goss from Hospital records made similar points to me a while ago about too much music in relation the night 'CDr' (where new producers hand in 'work in progress' hours before the night to tony attica blues). his point was it's such a bad idea, being surrounded by too much average, unfinished music.

Well, as much as I have respect for Chris and think he's a nice guy, I think that's a pretty unfair representation of what CDR is about if that is indeed what he said.

It's not really set up as an unsigned music showcase and, as far as I can tell, it's certainly not marketed as such. I'd describe it as an "A+R substitute".

In this era of self-produced and self-released music it's a place where artists can go and:

a) Hear their productions on a big system
b) Get feedback from some people who know what they're talking about

Of course, it's geared towards a certain type of producer and the feedback is only valuable if you respect and admire those giving it.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
I think Stelfox's idea of "focused dilettentism" is a very relevant one - esp. to an arena like this in which hardly anyone is really an actual purist (the performative contradiction in Simon R's position is that for all his championing of purism he remains ridiculously broad in his range of listening; likewise Matt I can't believe you would be prepared not only to limit yourself to buying grime and german and new wave, but to throw away everything you have in your collection which falls outside these genres).

Simultaneously, most people who claim to be dillettantes - to like a "little bit of everything" - are actually usually more focused than they appear... their eclecticism itself is usually a particular aesthetic which from a certain perspective can appear quite purist.

(all this is yet one more reason why i distrust the purist/dillettante opposition, which seems to obscure a lot in order to maintain its oppositional status in my opinion)

"I wanted to remark that its not necessarily the deluge of music thats the root problem here (though yes more and more music is made) its the deluge of opinions and information and discourse about music. After all, what is confusing isnt the choice on offer, its reading other people enthusing about stuff you havent heard."

I agree, but do you think this is necessarily a bad thing, Matt? The critics who have the biggest effect on me are usually the people who inspire me to investigate more deeply stuff I'd previously dismissed for one reason or another by making an argument that is too compelling to laugh off.

Perhaps the point though (which Simon sorta made in another thread) is more that too much discussion around music is hermetically sealed within the pre-established rules and notions of the style of music and its discourse. This is sort of a music criticism-equiv. of the complaint that too much current music is simply genre material, serving a specific purpose for a specific audience. That kind of crit will rarely affect me; the stuff that I can't shake off is that which takes one set of music and ideas-about-music and makes it/them evocatively equivalent to stuff I already truck with. I think to do this you need the broad range and knowledge base of the generalist but the passion and "close reading" which comes from focus.

One final observation and then I'll stop myself from boring you all to death: I assume it's not a coincidence that most of these nostalgic reflections on the scarce listening habits of adolescence just happen to focus on music which the writer still loves (Orbital for Nick Southall; post-punk for Simon) - furthermore, both had the luxury of having to notable-to-ridiculous-good-taste as 15/16 yr olds.

Whereas I couldn't bear to listen to probably well over half the music I loved as a 15/16 yr old (much less talk about it comfortably in an article! Let's just say I was very influenced by Glenn McDonald at The War Against Silence) - it's not been a case of the deluge coming between me and a personal connection with my current favourite music; the deluge is what has allowed for it.

The implied moral of Simon and Nick's pieces is that you'll just find the music that you love intuitively and that music journalism and its attendant discourse just distracts you with smoke and mirrors. Whereas I look at about a quarter of my music collection and realise just how fragile and historically contingent my intuition really is.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
Ha ha I think it's a sign of how guarded I feel posting in a lot of these threads that I have to over-contextualise and -qualify everything. On ILX i'm always posting one-liners...
 

Tim F

Well-known member
No it's not intidimidation... i think fear of being misconstrued maybe. Mark and Matt's threads in particular always feel like they've been created for posterity's sake, like they'll be unearthed in ten years time and reviewed by a panel.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Tim F said:
Whereas I couldn't bear to listen to probably well over half the music I loved as a 15/16 yr old (much less talk about it comfortably in an article! Let's just say I was very influenced by Glenn McDonald at The War Against Silence) -.

you mean to say you were a fan of.... Runrig?!?!?!
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
stelfox said:
well, i hope to god no one unearths mine in 10 years, especially the phil collins one.

Yeh, could be dangerous in inspiring a generation of 'urbanites' to rediscover Collins and record a tribute album to him.

Oh.
 

blunt

shot by both sides
I think Woebot has a point when he says that it's the weight of opinion and discourse surrounding music that contributes to the problem - to which opinions do you listen? which discourses do you recognise as valid? - but at the end of the day, those opinions count as nothing against the sheer volume of new music that's being created every day. Those opinions are *about* something, after all; they don't just float in the ether - tho sometimes they might as well.

When Napster started to bring P2P to the attention of "The Management" in the late 90s, a mate of mine, who now works for Rough Trade but was working for EFA at the time, remarked to me that it wasn't the theft of their revenue stream that scared the majors. It was the fact that their distribution model just couldn't cope with the amount of new stuff coming across their desks - how to categorise it, how to get it to the right market, how to *judge* it at all.

And that's a problem that affects not just The Big 5, but anyone with an interest in music, be it professional or personal - as this thread has already demonstrated.

This explosion of creativity has clearly been facilitated by the emergence of a DIY ethos coupled with the widespread availability of affordable, highly versatile equipment. And the web is now rising to the distributive challenge, with blogs and forums such as this spreading the word, while P2P (or some other form of online distibution) does the grunt work.

So there's lots of it. And there's a lot of chat about it. And it's all very overwhelming.

It strikes me that there's only really a problem if you come from the NME school of music appreciation - the kind that thrives on hyperbole, confusing the word "best" with "favourite" on a daily basis.

I mean, was there really a time when someone could say that they'd heard every fucking tune in the whole history of the world, and that these ones are the best? And even if they *could* say that, would it be anywhere close to being a universal truth? Don't worry, I won't offer an answer to that one; I'll leave that to your own conscience ;)

So yes, there's a lot of shit about; but I do believe that the proportion of good music to bad remains fairly constant. And by that token, I think there's never been a better time to listen to music, both old and new. Read either of Simon's books, and it's full of artists bemoaning the conservative tastes of the contemporary audience and the difficulty of getting stuff heard. Compare that to the here-and-now, and I can't help but think we're living in a fucking golden age. But of course that's just my opinion. Maybe it really is turning to shit and there's not a single tune from the last 2 decades that anyone will remember in 50 years time. But maybe that doesn't matter either.

What I think we *can* say is that, quite generally, we're entering a period in which we're being confronted with the subjective and ephemeral nature of our own existence more than ever before. That's uncomfortable for some people, and the battle lines are very definitely being drawn all around the world.

But if I really had to choose between NME and Dissenus, I know which one I'd go for any day of the week :)

Rant over!
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
This is also worth adding into the mix, it's especially poignant on the difference betweend downloading and buying:

'A cd or a record that I bought fixes itself in my memory with more ease - it has a cover, sleevenotes, an image comprised of all that and all the factors that combined to make me buy it in the first place. Even the transaction involved - if you pull out any album in my collection I could probably tell you which city, which shop and maybe even when I bought it.'

Yes, alll downloads involve the same, difficult-to-differentiate experience of sitting in front of a computer, whereas I could tell you exactly where I bought almost all of my CDs and LPs....

Downloading is entirely different from buying because

1: The fact that no money's involved makes you value the music less. As soon as something costs money it gains in 'symbolic' value. You don't pay for things because they have intrinsic value; on the contrary, because things cost money, they acquire a certain value. The fact that buying involves a scare resource (money) means that any transaction has to be more considered, judicious; with downloading, you can afford to be much less discriminating. The effect of this is corrosive, however. It's not that sound can be divided into 'downloaded' and 'non-downloaded'; all music begins to seem as evanescent and worthless as an MP3.

2: Downloading induces a kind of 'might as well' completism. i.e. since it's free, you 'might as well' download that dodgy album by a band you're never going to listen to, even once. Downloading makes your computer into the completist; as Zizek says of taped films, if the machine has them, you're relieved of the burden of having to watch them. Same with MP3s... if the computer has downloaded them, the pressure to actually listen to them is much reduced.... (Digital replication induces an odd neurosis about backing up too : once one vinyl copy of a record was enough; now I'm not satisfied unless I've got the CD, an MP3 copy on the hard drive and an MP3 back-up on a CD... But with each backing up operation, the actual music comes to seem less and less worthwhile...)
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
'A cd or a record that I bought fixes itself in my memory with more ease - it has a cover, sleevenotes, an image comprised of all that and all the factors that combined to make me buy it in the first place. Even the transaction involved - if you pull out any album in my collection I could probably tell you which city, which shop and maybe even when I bought it.'

very true

or maybe i just have a fetish for the object, the image, etc

k-punk said:
You don't pay for things because they have intrinsic value

not sure if i entirely follow you here

surely the value of the record is the reason you buy it -- i.e., if you thought it was crap, you wouldn't buy it (though you might download it, if you have such "completist" compulsions)

k-punk said:
The fact that buying involves a scare resource (money) means that any transaction has to be more considered, judicious; with downloading, you can afford to be much less discriminating. The effect of this is corrosive, however. It's not that sound can be divided into 'downloaded' and 'non-downloaded'; all music begins to seem as evanescent and worthless as an MP3.

yeah -- the only stuff i've ever downloaded is old rave mp3's off some of the old skool sites -- o/w, i never do it -- though this is a more i function of laziness and technological incompetence on my part than a considered philosophical position

moreover, i hate laptop djs -- something very very boring and vibe-killing about seeing some guy play mp3's off his laptop -- and you begin to suspect he's not too invested in the music and couldn't be bothered to hunt down the actual records -- OR he didn't want to suffer the pain of lugging his records around town to the gig

plus, it always seems to me that mp3's have a low-grade sound (though i'm not too good a judge of sound resolution, so who am i to asy)

the only exception to this rule is when somebody is playing either his own tracks off the laptop or edits he's personally made of another record that he'd be liable for under copyright infringement were he to release it as a 12"
 
C

captain easychord

Guest
MP3's definitely sound like shit, but every DJ i know is switching to them.
 
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