I can’t stress how much devolution in basic cultural acumen re: music taste and history I’ve witnessed amongst similarly aged peers. Ten plus years ago I felt we were all a lot less lazy and a lot more competitive at finding (to our generation) obscure stuff, patiently mapping scenes and comparing their surviving participant’s narratives, piecing together contemporaneous influences, rifling thru label discographies or some older head’s record collection they put up on youtube or mediafire (and with no guarantees of quality and so to often no avail other than character building), priding ourselves on these autodidactic journeys, like having discovered something long before your time and years before it was re-issued was a sign you were on a fruitful path, organizing it all historically, by quality, cultivating different registers of appreciation, and you could do this all over again once you put it all together in one place and figured out when things ossified and vital energies cropped up elsewhere. And maybe this is at a dead-end and there’s a finiteness to these practices as the internet ages… maybe… but jesus christ, the incredulity, the almost intimidated responses I’m met with when I tell these same people now I still ***actually download*** music. What gratuitous effort, what an uphill climb to not have the algorithm, the ‘recommended’ and the robot playlist do all your discovery and curation for you, you must be some kind of pretentious try-hard! So having “everything at your fingertips,” I don’t know if that necessarily destroys a relationship to music… not even using your fucking fingertips anymore, that certainly does.
www.statsignificant.com
