I dig music... I'm on drugs!!! And one look at W fans
Nothing bothers me more than people who say they listen to everything when it comes to music. Because, they don’t. It’s the same thing with people who call them selves political.
I could go on, but really, make a choice people. Take a fucking stand. You are either a fan of hip hop, rap, country, classical, opera, or Gregorian chants. You are either left, right, Neo Con, communist, Anarchist, fundamentalist from religion. Don’t tell me you are in to the whole thing.
When I went home for the period after the 4th of July, I spent a great time with my Uncle talking about all sort of things, but mostly music. I have no restraints about calling myself a music elitist. And this is not a knock everyone else, but a statement to qualify my right to be considered in the mix of those who actually make the canon for music. My uncle and I share a love of music and a passion for all knowledge about it. Maybe it’s the idea that there is some unifying truth about life that is begat by a disaffected youth in their twenties matching melody to words they scribbled on a placemat at a diner nights before (and no doubt in the midst of a tough breakup). Or at least that’s how most of us who cherish music so deeply want to think of it. For one reason or another people like me and my uncle are stuck in a perpetual mode of teenage love for music. Sure we mature and so do our tastes, but it is all founded on the feeling we got we were 15 and listening to the same records over and over.
I once heard my uncle talk about hearing my father play Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way, and how my uncle then proceeded to spin the record over and over again. Not only was an insight into what my father listened to when he was a teenager (it was one of the 20 cds of my dad’s collection I grew to love), but it was an experience I understood. I was one where your eyes, or more specifically your ears, suddenly are more new than they used to be. This may not have been his beginning to his love, but merely the first steps to obsession, it was something else.
Bottom line, my Uncle truly does listen to almost everything. The fact that he can play Flying Burrito Brothers and follow it with Billy Holiday and have it make sense is proof. He is the argument against the undecided.
I believe, as best I can remember, that in the Rolling Stone history of rock and roll, the chapter on The Band has a very personal digression of the author who remembers spending the better part of a year listening to the first two albums of the Band, over and over again, and looking out over the Ohio River in his apartment. There are many bohemian, dreamlike qualities to that sentiment; maybe the best of them all is tying yourself at an age to a place and time, and most romantically, pieces of art. I like to think that maybe my father spent one summer of his life listening to not much else other than Miles Davis.
There is a bit in High Fidelity (the movie, I can’t remember it as well from the book) where Rob is being interviewed by a music journalist, and he throws something out about wanting to be known as a music appreciator. It’s a selfish fantasy, one that requires people to listen to music secondhand; not by the artists themselves, but by those who can frame it for you. It’s a dream of being in a position where your knowledge of a mass (or any kind of, for that matter) media is revered, to somehow dignify one’s countless nights spent in lieu of real experience, but in reflection of your previous life through the spectrum of someone else’s view. You make yourself see a connection between your teenage years and Born To Run. A breakup of a relationship that was never meant to be coalesces with Blood on the Tracks. That life is a system of basic emotions and it all matches to everyone in the world. And I believe that. Not to a point, not in bits, or in cases, but that your life at any moment, and as a whole, can be dissolved into a song or movie.
It may seem that music fans are a depressed lot, which is not an unfair implication. It’s just slightly skewed. It’s that we listen to “sad bastard” music to remind us of our own lives. We listen to songs that allow us to reminisce about other times. We are a happy lot, generally, and back to the wall, we couldn’t be diagnosed as clinically depressed, because we aren’t. We just make ourselves overly emotional to hope that we will finally feel jubilation like we hear in the music we listen to. We are waiting for our “Sergeant Pepper” year.
For me, 1998 was this year for me. I bought Radiohead’s Ok Computer in January, and I can honestly say, I did not go a day with out listening to it start to finish until May of 1999. And it wasn’t just daily, in some cases, it was the only thing I spun all day. There was a trip my class took for the speech class and I couldn’t get 3 songs into an album without switching back to Radiohead. And while I still to this date believe that Ok Computer is the best album I have ever heard, I don’t have anything that I could fairly compare it to, because the next few albums in terms of listen counts (London Calling – 200 times, Murmur 150, the Bends – 350, Exile on Main St – 100, Born to Run 200, Wish you Were here and Dark Side of the Moon- 300 each, Led Zeppelin 4- 500), all of these numbers pale to the number of times I have heard Ok Computer. This is not evidence why Ok Computer is better, but that I will likely never listen to an album as much as I did that one.
And to answer a question, the number of times I have heard Ok Computer is probably around 1500. And that’s in 7 years.
I touched upon this a little in this post
http://ineverlovedyou.blogspot.com/2005/05/eighteen-balding.html
but it’s a fragment of something larger. I will never get over my love of Ok Computer. It was the album that made me care about everything in music, and expanded my life to so many other art forms. Combine the fact that Saving Private Ryan and Rushmore came out in the same year, and that my friends and I played Goldeneye non-stop, no year may ever compare in my memory to 1998. Even though it was not the best year of my life in terms of experience (though it’s in the top 3) I automatically can think of four texts and where I was at that time.
When I think of Rushmore, I think of being in New York to scout NYU, falling in love with the city and having one of the best trips of my life.
When I think of Saving Private Ryan, I think of an entire spring before where my Spielberg friends and I did nothing but talk about the movie. I think of seeing the movie at the college park theaters in Indianapolis at 12:30 in the afternoon with Will Zink and Mike Griffiths, where all of us were speechless when we left the theater, walking by a vet in a wheel chair at the back of the theater dressed in his uniform, barely being able to say goodbye to each other because we couldn’t physically talk, and then sitting in my dad’s suburban crying for about 10 minutes because I literally could not drive from the emotions in my body. I also remember falling asleep during a theater production of Tommy that night with my friend Andrew Appel (for which he bought my tickets for) because I was exhausted from the movie.
When I think of Goldeneye, I think of countless, endless weekend and post test days and night where we would gather in the parking lot and head straight to my or someone else’s house to play the game. We would have parties-with girls no less- where we would have 4 man games where the winner stayed and 3 new guys would jump in.
And when I think of Ok Computer, I think of all the hours alone, sitting in my mom’s basement and my dad’s living room, feeling that someone finally shared my point of view. Not only that, I felt that someone had finally shown me a way to another place of thought.
And for better or worse, it caused me to forever be obsessed with music. I bought countless albums (as aforementioned), spent hours reading online reviews of the band and the album to make sure I wasn’t alone in believing in something, and most of all, listening to the album. My mother always chastised me for always buying too many albums, too many toys, spending too much money towards things I couldn’t appreciate down the line.
But now, looking at my CD cases, I don’t just see a collection of albums. I see points of where I was in my childhood. And all of these CD’s allow me to recall moments of my life. I remember buying London Calling and I have memories tied to it. Same with Exile On Main St, Born to Run and Joshua Tree (both of which I bought twice for the gold edition) Maybe I have a great memory for commerce, or maybe I can simply remember music purchases more because of a heightened sensory experience, but I can honestly remember 90% of every one of the CD’s I ever bought.
My Uncle is opinionated, no doubt, but he is no longer driven by the same conversionary fuel that I am. He now stands as a collector, as a librarian of the music world. He keeps buying albums because he is trying to get more so that he can allow people to call upon his knowledge, not as much for opinion, but for understanding encyclopedic.
I have become a protector, as much as I am a librarian. While I am more than happy to tell you about a band, I am undoubtedly going to tell you what I think. Not because you want to know, but because I view myself (and I try to control this as best as I can now), as someone who can expand your mind. I want you to know, but more so, I want you to feel what I underwent with the albums. I just want you to know as much as you can about something I believe in. It’s inherently didactic, and while I apologize for it, I hope at some point you can come to a place where I am, where you truly believe in music as a saving form. There is a reason I invoked a religious sub theme to my punk opus (which I am probably going to re-edit one of these days), it’s because it’s about getting to a point where you believe in something. I believe in rock and roll, as well as jazz, Beethoven, B.I.G. and movie soundtracks by John Williams. I may believe they are better than what you are listening to, but more so, I believe they are worth your time not to pass up.
I have never understood why we stand by and love mediocrity in music en mass. We may all go to see a crappy movie (think summer movies) but we don’t protect it and argue it. We tend to, on the bigger scale, go to good (while usually not great) films. We don’t go to bad films continually. Looking at the top 100 most successful films:
(http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm)
a great deal of them are fantastic and part of out culture. Out of the 100, I can list maybe 5 I don’t want to see again (Gladiator and how the Grinch Stole X-mas among them). But when compared to the list of the 100 most popular songs of all time, do you really want to hear songs from the soundtracks of Footloose or Titanic. We don’t tend to suffer fools gladly in cinema (even counting Michael Bay) but we do in music. I have always hared the American listening public on this. How can you not love the great songs, why are BSB and N*Sync the top selling first week artists of all time.
I only hope some semblance of quality is attached to yours. I simply desire people to remember Sonic Youth instead of Wang Chung and Milli Vanilli.
I am in one way or another linked in memory of my life to my love of music. My collection is my diary. I only hope that your memory isn’t tied to passing fads.
***On a side note, Bush (43) may be the closest thing to a pop president we have ever had. Most anyone who knows anything about politics has an extreme opinion on the man. But in spite of all of the venom coming out of Hollywood, New York, and Massachusetts, and the fact that the Left is now becoming the party of the intelligent as well as the impoverished, Bush is loved by a great deal of the people. People who often don’t give tremendously compelling arguments for you to believe. Arguing with a person about why they like W. is like talking to a teenager about why they like Simple Plan or Britney Spears or Black Eyed Peas. You are not going to get a reason out of them more than the fact that somehow, they are used to the person and like him for basic levels. And, as I have learned, this is not a sign of a bad person, but it’s basically arguing high art against low art; why should someone who has no interest in the works of a German composer 300 years ago want to hear the 9th over “We belong together.” It’s a losing argument. Their change will have to come from within. Maybe that’s the finest point about why I don’t like Bush (outside of policy or actions), he seems to survive not on the usual conservative support, but on the indifference of the masses who have yet to come to a point where their vocabulary can dignify and explain their support beyond gut feeling. I have met some, and I have liked their points. But this is about %3 of the people I have talked to. Some people don’t want to rationalize their affection for music. It ultimately falls into an ignorance is bliss paradigm, where they are happy where they are. If Bush doesn’t represent what pop/ people who listen to everything for Politics, nothing ever will.
I could go on, but really, make a choice people. Take a fucking stand. You are either a fan of hip hop, rap, country, classical, opera, or Gregorian chants. You are either left, right, Neo Con, communist, Anarchist, fundamentalist from religion. Don’t tell me you are in to the whole thing.
When I went home for the period after the 4th of July, I spent a great time with my Uncle talking about all sort of things, but mostly music. I have no restraints about calling myself a music elitist. And this is not a knock everyone else, but a statement to qualify my right to be considered in the mix of those who actually make the canon for music. My uncle and I share a love of music and a passion for all knowledge about it. Maybe it’s the idea that there is some unifying truth about life that is begat by a disaffected youth in their twenties matching melody to words they scribbled on a placemat at a diner nights before (and no doubt in the midst of a tough breakup). Or at least that’s how most of us who cherish music so deeply want to think of it. For one reason or another people like me and my uncle are stuck in a perpetual mode of teenage love for music. Sure we mature and so do our tastes, but it is all founded on the feeling we got we were 15 and listening to the same records over and over.
I once heard my uncle talk about hearing my father play Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way, and how my uncle then proceeded to spin the record over and over again. Not only was an insight into what my father listened to when he was a teenager (it was one of the 20 cds of my dad’s collection I grew to love), but it was an experience I understood. I was one where your eyes, or more specifically your ears, suddenly are more new than they used to be. This may not have been his beginning to his love, but merely the first steps to obsession, it was something else.
Bottom line, my Uncle truly does listen to almost everything. The fact that he can play Flying Burrito Brothers and follow it with Billy Holiday and have it make sense is proof. He is the argument against the undecided.
I believe, as best I can remember, that in the Rolling Stone history of rock and roll, the chapter on The Band has a very personal digression of the author who remembers spending the better part of a year listening to the first two albums of the Band, over and over again, and looking out over the Ohio River in his apartment. There are many bohemian, dreamlike qualities to that sentiment; maybe the best of them all is tying yourself at an age to a place and time, and most romantically, pieces of art. I like to think that maybe my father spent one summer of his life listening to not much else other than Miles Davis.
There is a bit in High Fidelity (the movie, I can’t remember it as well from the book) where Rob is being interviewed by a music journalist, and he throws something out about wanting to be known as a music appreciator. It’s a selfish fantasy, one that requires people to listen to music secondhand; not by the artists themselves, but by those who can frame it for you. It’s a dream of being in a position where your knowledge of a mass (or any kind of, for that matter) media is revered, to somehow dignify one’s countless nights spent in lieu of real experience, but in reflection of your previous life through the spectrum of someone else’s view. You make yourself see a connection between your teenage years and Born To Run. A breakup of a relationship that was never meant to be coalesces with Blood on the Tracks. That life is a system of basic emotions and it all matches to everyone in the world. And I believe that. Not to a point, not in bits, or in cases, but that your life at any moment, and as a whole, can be dissolved into a song or movie.
It may seem that music fans are a depressed lot, which is not an unfair implication. It’s just slightly skewed. It’s that we listen to “sad bastard” music to remind us of our own lives. We listen to songs that allow us to reminisce about other times. We are a happy lot, generally, and back to the wall, we couldn’t be diagnosed as clinically depressed, because we aren’t. We just make ourselves overly emotional to hope that we will finally feel jubilation like we hear in the music we listen to. We are waiting for our “Sergeant Pepper” year.
For me, 1998 was this year for me. I bought Radiohead’s Ok Computer in January, and I can honestly say, I did not go a day with out listening to it start to finish until May of 1999. And it wasn’t just daily, in some cases, it was the only thing I spun all day. There was a trip my class took for the speech class and I couldn’t get 3 songs into an album without switching back to Radiohead. And while I still to this date believe that Ok Computer is the best album I have ever heard, I don’t have anything that I could fairly compare it to, because the next few albums in terms of listen counts (London Calling – 200 times, Murmur 150, the Bends – 350, Exile on Main St – 100, Born to Run 200, Wish you Were here and Dark Side of the Moon- 300 each, Led Zeppelin 4- 500), all of these numbers pale to the number of times I have heard Ok Computer. This is not evidence why Ok Computer is better, but that I will likely never listen to an album as much as I did that one.
And to answer a question, the number of times I have heard Ok Computer is probably around 1500. And that’s in 7 years.
I touched upon this a little in this post
http://ineverlovedyou.blogspot.com/2005/05/eighteen-balding.html
but it’s a fragment of something larger. I will never get over my love of Ok Computer. It was the album that made me care about everything in music, and expanded my life to so many other art forms. Combine the fact that Saving Private Ryan and Rushmore came out in the same year, and that my friends and I played Goldeneye non-stop, no year may ever compare in my memory to 1998. Even though it was not the best year of my life in terms of experience (though it’s in the top 3) I automatically can think of four texts and where I was at that time.
When I think of Rushmore, I think of being in New York to scout NYU, falling in love with the city and having one of the best trips of my life.
When I think of Saving Private Ryan, I think of an entire spring before where my Spielberg friends and I did nothing but talk about the movie. I think of seeing the movie at the college park theaters in Indianapolis at 12:30 in the afternoon with Will Zink and Mike Griffiths, where all of us were speechless when we left the theater, walking by a vet in a wheel chair at the back of the theater dressed in his uniform, barely being able to say goodbye to each other because we couldn’t physically talk, and then sitting in my dad’s suburban crying for about 10 minutes because I literally could not drive from the emotions in my body. I also remember falling asleep during a theater production of Tommy that night with my friend Andrew Appel (for which he bought my tickets for) because I was exhausted from the movie.
When I think of Goldeneye, I think of countless, endless weekend and post test days and night where we would gather in the parking lot and head straight to my or someone else’s house to play the game. We would have parties-with girls no less- where we would have 4 man games where the winner stayed and 3 new guys would jump in.
And when I think of Ok Computer, I think of all the hours alone, sitting in my mom’s basement and my dad’s living room, feeling that someone finally shared my point of view. Not only that, I felt that someone had finally shown me a way to another place of thought.
And for better or worse, it caused me to forever be obsessed with music. I bought countless albums (as aforementioned), spent hours reading online reviews of the band and the album to make sure I wasn’t alone in believing in something, and most of all, listening to the album. My mother always chastised me for always buying too many albums, too many toys, spending too much money towards things I couldn’t appreciate down the line.
But now, looking at my CD cases, I don’t just see a collection of albums. I see points of where I was in my childhood. And all of these CD’s allow me to recall moments of my life. I remember buying London Calling and I have memories tied to it. Same with Exile On Main St, Born to Run and Joshua Tree (both of which I bought twice for the gold edition) Maybe I have a great memory for commerce, or maybe I can simply remember music purchases more because of a heightened sensory experience, but I can honestly remember 90% of every one of the CD’s I ever bought.
My Uncle is opinionated, no doubt, but he is no longer driven by the same conversionary fuel that I am. He now stands as a collector, as a librarian of the music world. He keeps buying albums because he is trying to get more so that he can allow people to call upon his knowledge, not as much for opinion, but for understanding encyclopedic.
I have become a protector, as much as I am a librarian. While I am more than happy to tell you about a band, I am undoubtedly going to tell you what I think. Not because you want to know, but because I view myself (and I try to control this as best as I can now), as someone who can expand your mind. I want you to know, but more so, I want you to feel what I underwent with the albums. I just want you to know as much as you can about something I believe in. It’s inherently didactic, and while I apologize for it, I hope at some point you can come to a place where I am, where you truly believe in music as a saving form. There is a reason I invoked a religious sub theme to my punk opus (which I am probably going to re-edit one of these days), it’s because it’s about getting to a point where you believe in something. I believe in rock and roll, as well as jazz, Beethoven, B.I.G. and movie soundtracks by John Williams. I may believe they are better than what you are listening to, but more so, I believe they are worth your time not to pass up.
I have never understood why we stand by and love mediocrity in music en mass. We may all go to see a crappy movie (think summer movies) but we don’t protect it and argue it. We tend to, on the bigger scale, go to good (while usually not great) films. We don’t go to bad films continually. Looking at the top 100 most successful films:
(http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm)
a great deal of them are fantastic and part of out culture. Out of the 100, I can list maybe 5 I don’t want to see again (Gladiator and how the Grinch Stole X-mas among them). But when compared to the list of the 100 most popular songs of all time, do you really want to hear songs from the soundtracks of Footloose or Titanic. We don’t tend to suffer fools gladly in cinema (even counting Michael Bay) but we do in music. I have always hared the American listening public on this. How can you not love the great songs, why are BSB and N*Sync the top selling first week artists of all time.
I only hope some semblance of quality is attached to yours. I simply desire people to remember Sonic Youth instead of Wang Chung and Milli Vanilli.
I am in one way or another linked in memory of my life to my love of music. My collection is my diary. I only hope that your memory isn’t tied to passing fads.
***On a side note, Bush (43) may be the closest thing to a pop president we have ever had. Most anyone who knows anything about politics has an extreme opinion on the man. But in spite of all of the venom coming out of Hollywood, New York, and Massachusetts, and the fact that the Left is now becoming the party of the intelligent as well as the impoverished, Bush is loved by a great deal of the people. People who often don’t give tremendously compelling arguments for you to believe. Arguing with a person about why they like W. is like talking to a teenager about why they like Simple Plan or Britney Spears or Black Eyed Peas. You are not going to get a reason out of them more than the fact that somehow, they are used to the person and like him for basic levels. And, as I have learned, this is not a sign of a bad person, but it’s basically arguing high art against low art; why should someone who has no interest in the works of a German composer 300 years ago want to hear the 9th over “We belong together.” It’s a losing argument. Their change will have to come from within. Maybe that’s the finest point about why I don’t like Bush (outside of policy or actions), he seems to survive not on the usual conservative support, but on the indifference of the masses who have yet to come to a point where their vocabulary can dignify and explain their support beyond gut feeling. I have met some, and I have liked their points. But this is about %3 of the people I have talked to. Some people don’t want to rationalize their affection for music. It ultimately falls into an ignorance is bliss paradigm, where they are happy where they are. If Bush doesn’t represent what pop/ people who listen to everything for Politics, nothing ever will.
posted by Indiana at
1:03 AM
1 Comments:
We're doing a radio show tonight for Open Source on Miles Davis. Open Source is a new public radio show/blog. We're trying ot reach into the web as much as possible and blur the line between radio and the internet. We're going to quote this blog tonight!
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Anonymous, at July 25, 2005 12:24 PM
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