...to disappear up their own asses.

That sounds like sarcasm, but I think I mean it. I was just reading through bammer's thread about rap in the early aughts and about halfway through the thread, two things happened:

1) I realized I didn't have enough energy to participate in the discussion, and

2) I thought to myself, "Thank god I have so much shit to listen to nowadays that I can completely* ignore mainstream music to the point that I no longer even have an opinion on it."

* "Completely" in this context really just means "selectively, but in those cases, thoroughly." It means that I no longer have to turn to radio, MTV, or music magazines to get recommendations. I have internet forums, blogs, podcasts, the new releases page on Amazon and emusic. I have a million resources that are genre-specific and go as deep as I'm willing to ride with them. If a bunch of people that sound knowledgeable tell me the new popular album by whoever is good, I'll check it out. But if it's getting no love, I skim right over all posts referring to it, and it's like it doesn't even exist in my universe as a listener.

More and more I will be talking to a friend and they'll mention some insanely popular song of the moment (or last summer, etc.) and I'll say, "Never heard it." "How have you not heard that? It's EVERYWHERE!" ...Well, not on the internet, it's not. Click click clicked right past it.

--

Like what about me screams ADELE!!!
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

She's the most ubiquitous thing in pop music right now, to the degree that eventually I felt like I ought to have an opinion just so I don't look stupid in music conversations with "casuals." I've heard "Rolling in the Deep" a couple times, and samples of the rest of the album, and I think that's it. I'm not sure where I should be to hear her music more often by accident. Starbucks?

The most incidental music I hear now is the neighborhood taqueria. I first heard Lady Gaga a few years ago because "Poker Face" was for some reason really popular on Latino MTV (whatever that's called). It was like, reggaeton/latin hip hop/Mexican guys in cowboy hats playing modernized Norteno/Lady Gaga/back to reggaeton. Weird.

--

which is how you put it in the GD version of that post.

i'm not surprised you don't own any of her stuff or that you haven't spent much time sitting down to listen to her stuff. but i'd be shocked if you hadn't heard her voice at all by this point b/c her stuff has been kinda ubiquitous by current standards and you don't live under a rock so i doubt there's any way you could've not heard her voice at all by now.

i'm not terribly plugged in to radio or video channels or music mags and i've heard her singles in passing. i'm sure you have to. and it turns out you have. you'd understated your familiarity w/her voice in the GD post but the Lesson post admitted that you'd heard the voice but hadn't listened closely.

fuck you.

nor care much to find out, then someone says have you ever heard "Adele" do you say yes?

I mean I don't doubt I've heard her voice, in fact I'm pretty sure someone's played it in our social listening at some point. But I don't remember the first thing about that time, nor have any other reference to say oh you mean the "__________" girl. I have no idea who she is vocally other than popular.
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

sure.

fuck you.

because you make it seem like I'm being insincere.

Now in said post was I making a funny... absolutely, the funny being on me cause I really didn't know the answer at the time though suspected I was reaching which is why I said it in the first place. But was I being insincere about Adele... not at all.

I got a job, a pregnant wife, and two kids. We don't listen to radio. I don't spend time out and about. Don't watch TV besides specific shows I download, and am otherwise able to mediate my intake of pop culture. Considering I have little interest in it, why suggest I'm being insincere. Adele is not a voice I know. STILL.

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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

fuck you.

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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

fuck you.

fuck you.

?

--

...is that when a lot of people disappear up their own asses (and I did that a long time ago even if I hear all the current hits at radio at work; I unfortunately don't have the ability to sit with headphones anymore), there's no "collective" scene/sound you can associate with the era, music that in the future will make people think ''THAT is the sound of the '10's!'' the way people can do with disco or psychedelia or whatever for their respective eras.

As a byproduct, I think less current music will survive which may not be a problem to *me* but it's sort of boring... Basically, if a record (or file or whatever) exists in 100 000 households, if only 10% of the kids dig it, the music will still survive. Without the mass-consciousness, artists are depending on critics or taste-makers to survive (think Stooges or velvet Underground or Shuggie Otis for that matter) and since the music-scene has gotten so incredibly splintered and continue to splinter off with every year, there will be even less general conscensus in the future.

Of course, this is not a problem for you or me but in the long run, I do find it somewhat problematic for the music-scene and the longevity of music as a whole.

our culture is so fragmented now.
it's not just music... it's everything.



everybody used to wach the cosby show at 8:00 PM on thursday.

everybody used to watch the fresh prince of bel air on 8:00 on monday.


in 1989, everybody saw the batman movie.
or at least was familiar w/ the fact that it was coming out.

everybody knew what the moonwalk was in the 80s.




nowadays, even a blockbuster movie like avatar
will get a "what is an avatar?" question from
some of the old folks in the office if you bring it up.


you can mention a new artist or a new movie,
and there's a good chance nobody has ever heard of it
because they were too busy playing "call of duty"
or watching something on netflix to even care.


fragmenteted culture.
lack of shared experiences.


greater isolation in spite of greater connectivity.

etc.

but on the flip side, there might be a significant chunk of the current generation of teenagers who aren't being forcibly subjected to whoever the new Milli Vanilli is. Isn't that some kind of tradeoff?

I'm not sure how to feel about the loss of shared experiences across the entire nation. On the plus side that probably helped us communicate and get along with each other. On the minus side, a lot of those experiences were vacuous and a waste of our mental energy to engage with them and remember them.

It'll make it harder to have a hit show like "I love the 80s" in twenty years, definitely. It'll make it a bit harder to have conversations with random people you meet at work or school or parties. But on the other hand -

1) We still have lots of other shared experiences that aren't musical. American Idol, Jersey Shore (ugh), NFL football, Barack Obama (for or against), Twilight, Harry Potter, etc. It's easy to get caught up exaggerating the increase in splintering when really there are still huge swaths of the population experiencing the same things at least to some extent. (I've never seen or read Twilight, but I know who Bella and Edward and Jacob are, and that werewolves apparently don't like wearing shirts.)

2) We will increasingly look to people with whom we DO share memories and tastes to communicate with. It will be harder to talk to random dude at the gas station, but you might forge tighter bonds with people that have the same fondness as you for grime or whatever else.

--

in fact it almost sounds bad.
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

fuck you.

Like, say, sports. I can talk to people in the office today about the wild card games yesterday and be perfectly happy. I enjoy watching football, so I spent the extra hours on Saturday and Sunday sitting on my couch with the game on while my fiance a) shopped for a dress and b) got her nails done.

I see no reason to subject myself to music and movies that I don't like just to "share the experience." Fuck that, life's too short to be spending my time on shit that doesn't make me happy. Now, I've been doing this since before the Internet was around, so it doesn't really relate to the original post. But I'm much happier this way.

Figuring out what you like and what you don't like and then removing the shit you don't like from your life is part of growing up.

-----------------

www.albumism.com

Checkin' Our Style, Return To Zero:

https://www.mixcloud.com/returntozero/

I would rather pick what interests me and seek out those that share the same interests rather than be part of a larger collective that is being force fed.
_________________________________
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It's quite liberating.

Formulating your own opinion and sticking to what's dope to you with no mainstream "this is what you should like" taint is the shit.

You are your own DJ and YOU decide what's hot and what's not.

True enough you might be missing out on stuff, but SoWhat.....

The isht they don't play on the radio is usually better anyway....

Best part about being a fan of music is doing your own research and making your own discoveries.

Eff the mainstream!

fuck you.

lol...okay.

Apathy is sad.

Accepting what your told and not asking questions is sad.

But eh.....to each his/her own.

fuck you.

I agree that it's cool to have a filter on things that are lame (i found out last week that Coldplay released an album with hit singles and stuff. I've never heard these songs), but that's not how music. or art for that matter works.

It's from being forced to observe what is going on in society and making music or art that reflects that.

That's why some underground rappers make the same 1995 song over and over, cuz they only listen to that type of music, and viciously filter out anything else deemed 'commercial', but back in the day DJ Red ALert didn't do that when we HAD to listen to the radio, Ralph McDaniels didn't do that when we HAD to watch Video Music Box, or the Mayor with Rap City, so you got to see West Coast shit, South shit that we would never have heard if left to our own devices.

Furthermore, the producers you all so love and revere only developed their music talents from being raised in households where they HAD to listen to the Motown pop of their mother or the Funk and Jazz records of their father. You think Q-Tip would have listened to that shit if he had the internet back in 1983? Pete Rock? Marley Marl? Back then radio stations, especially AM Radio (remember that?) used to have all types of melodies and textures from a myriad of genres that STAYED in these people's heads for when they had to bang out beats on their MPC.

The segmentation of music is to people's detriment, and only benefits businesses and marketeers.

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http://adevotedappraisal.tumblr.com - Essays, reviews, short stories and free writes on music, film and life around us.

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

and if I'm not payin for it, and it's wack, i'm deletin' it.

I understand ur point, tho....

But the modern day filter is as easy the push of a button.

Gotta love convenience.

rather than what it could be.

--

of "what the model has been."

I haven't seen too many that you've pointed out from "what it could be"

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

that's not the point of this thread, and I don't give enough of a shit to go down that alley. I'm talking about listeners, not music makers.

--

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

People seem to think that everything is on the internet, and at your fingertips, and that this explosion of information can only have positive effects superceeding the 'old model' as we shall call it now.
But I think that what is happening is that people are actually being led down to narrower paths than they'd like to admit.

It's all about how the information is presented, and the inclusive nature of the information providers. If everyone giving you information are cynically motivated and concerned with their own bottom line, then it will only incentivise keeping people in boxes in order to more competently mine them for money, or data, or both. In short, Having millions of specialised web-sites won't make you more enriched no more than in the the nineties, when we were suddenly exposed to hundreds of specialised, shitty cable channels.

These companies like facebook and twitter and google shape your search results to give you more of what you impulsively want, besed on previous searches and postings. The internet is getting smaller for the user BECAUSE we are all going up our asses, and they know it, because people with masters degrees in media psychology are paid to keep you in a box.

Contrast that with the 'old model', which was more generalised and catholic, where you were exposed to all types of shit from the boring to the exciting, and YOU had to decide what was boring to you and what was exciting to you, and spend the rest of the time imagining better entertainment cuz it wasn't ON all the time like the internet is. I'm saying that led to better art, HUNGRIER art. If you are honest about 20th century American music, you'd see that it was mostly made by poor blacks and whites who didn't HAVE shit, they were simply filling in the gaps with their own imagination. Until the new model finds a way to reconcile or synthesize that advantage, art suffers in my opinion.

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http://adevotedappraisal.tumblr.com - Essays, reviews, short stories and free writes on music, film and life around us.

http://gifsoup.com/view7/2618204/t-d-jakes-i-o.gif

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

If I've ever read some revisionism about the old model this right here is it. And I'm not a dismiss the old because it's old type, or the new is perfect type. But c'mon. Let's not pretend like we had all the music world on our platter when others were curating our experiences.
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

that's the other thing I've never fully gotten... are people assuming that now we got the internet that all the music in the world flows free without any kind of moderation?

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

Which isn't to say personal curation wasn't possible in the past but more tools are at our disposal. Are the most broad reaching of those tools dictated by a big 5 which parallels the big 5 labels of old? Sure. And are the options beyond those big 5 similar the options beyond the big 5 of old? Sure. But that one regional zine every two months for your niche is much different than what exists for your niche today. And finding those options is infinitely more accessible than finding that zine was.

Beyond that though I think I'm most *surprised* by this notion that international corps of the pasts dictating culture was a positive. Like really. Sure we have shared experiences about someone like MJ. But the same could be said for Vanilla Ice. To draw a parallel, I have no impression of Kie$ha other than I don't need to know. If I could have had that with Vanilla Ice I would have welcomed it with open arms. But alas because of the way the industry worked at that time it meant they had access to me whenever they wanted. Now they have to work for their access to me. They have to create something which will work its way into my filters. It's on them now not me, and that is GREAT!!! (not my fault they fail)

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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

I was starting to feel like the lone voice in the wilderness here.

>Beyond that though I think I'm most *surprised* by this notion
>that international corps of the pasts dictating culture was a
>positive.

It's got to be a romanticized version of the past working its magic. If you look at the Billboard charts for any given year 1980-1990, most of that music was bullshite of the highest order - music I would pay money to have Eternal Sunshined right out of my brain if I could. Yet most of that music I can still sing 3/4 of the lyrics, because if you paid any attention to music it was right in front of you, all the time.

--

Not just because I honestly did not think "Ice Ice Baby" was that bad of a song, but the guy also provided lots of great lulz and also played an important part in the shaping of hip-hop culture and the way that we would perceive it from that point on.

I don't think we can (or SHOULD, anyway) seek to isolate ourselves from all kinds of stimuli that we don't necessarily find pleasurable. LIfe is a mix of some good stuff and some bad... and yeah, we gravitate towards what we think is good, but without the bad, the good ultimately becomes mediocre.

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

All I'll say about your Vanilla for the lulz, is that LULZ is what shaped what came after it, and turned music into the biggest media lul of all time. Do I need to run down the 2011 evidence of this or will this suffice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzspsovNvII

>I don't think we can (or SHOULD, anyway) seek to isolate
>ourselves from all kinds of stimuli that we don't necessarily
>find pleasurable. LIfe is a mix of some good stuff and some
>bad... and yeah, we gravitate towards what we think is good,
>but without the bad, the good ultimately becomes mediocre.


But c'mon man this is nonsense. One doesn't isolate oneself, one finds their own place within it all... comfortably. I mean look at hip-hop. Errol talked about how the old video shows kept it diverse. What's the flip side of that though? Artists doing whatever to appeal to the current rather than being themselves. How many artists have fallen prey to *THAT*. And then you get listeners. I mean seriously, I thought Ruff Ryders was the epitome of vicarious hip-hop fandom, but the ish we see today is just insane.

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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

You digging your head in the sand to avoid hearing Vanilla Ice doesn't exactly make him or his effects disappear. It only makes you more ignorant.

>But c'mon man this is nonsense. One doesn't isolate oneself,
>one finds their own place within it all... comfortably.

Finding your place in it *comfortably* != being willfully ignorant of everything else that is out there.

>I
>mean look at hip-hop. Errol talked about how the old video
>shows kept it diverse. What's the flip side of that though?
>Artists doing whatever to appeal to the current rather than
>being themselves.

Come on, man... You're much to smart to seriously use a phrase like "being themselves."

Whether they're trying to court the mainstream or appeal to some niche, artists assume SOME kind of artifice. "Being oneself" is pretty illusive (and oftentimes boring, imho)

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

Why again?

Do I need to watch every season of American Idol?
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

Personally, I'm glad *I* do.

(It's Ke$ha, btw,)

I guess it all depends on your relationship to music and culture, and what kind of role they play in your existence.

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

we've both curated media experiences relative to our interests that work well for us.

But the argument above is that there is something wrong with me because mine doesn't match with yours because yours is more in tune with the broader culture as dictated by the industrial machine. Hmmmmmm....
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

Though he may not have said it directly it's what's being implied.
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

How I read it was that we should probably be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in exchange for some magic beans that seem really cool at first glance.


(Mixed metaphor, I know)

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

but it's closer to that ideal now than it used to be. If you pry your eyes away from the notable curators who stand to cash in, you can find all kinds of crazy shit on the internet and fall down any number of rabbit holes of things you never knew existed. In real life, pre-internet, that used to be very hard to do.

Perfect example: in the mid-80s if you wanted to hear fringe extreme metal, do you know how you heard it? You had to meet someone in the know. Then you had to open up a tape-trading loop with some guys scattered all over the world, and wait weeks on end for them to mail you a dub of a demo tape of whatever obscure band from their hometown. And you'd mail them something back, tapes would get passed around, and over the course of a few years - with lots of time and postage burned - you'd encounter a couple dozen mind-blowing bands doing whatever crazy thing.

In the internet era, you can go from one day thinking "I should listen to some metal... I liked Metallica back in the day," to a year later having heard hundreds of bands, some of whom might have only sold a couple hundred copies of one demo, up to twenty years prior. All it takes is finding those little communities of persons interested in the genre, and you can explore it endlessly, with ready access to recommendations, samples, and if you're so inclined (though I am not), illegal downloads. And almost none of it is coming from people who profit off of your interest; it's just fans. And if you decide one group of fans has gotten too exclusive and too narrow in their tastes, you can always find another one.

--

but i still treasure actually... "earning" knowledge, you know?

On one hand, there is a level of convenience in being able to go metal novice to metal expert within the space of a few days, but a lot of time that kind of knowledge just comes off as extremely facile to me.

>but it's closer to that ideal now than it used to be. If you
>pry your eyes away from the notable curators who stand to cash
>in, you can find all kinds of crazy shit on the internet and
>fall down any number of rabbit holes of things you never knew
>existed. In real life, pre-internet, that used to be very
>hard to do.

True... But it is still curated. Now it's just a different set of curators with a different set of values.

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

But it's definitely sentimental, and perhaps a bit... unexamined. It sounds perilously close to my grandpa telling me how going to school in his day made a better person out of ya because you had to walk five miles, in the snow, uphill...

>On one hand, there is a level of convenience in being able to
>go metal novice to metal expert within the space of a few
>days, but a lot of time that kind of knowledge just comes off
>as extremely facile to me.

Perhaps. I can spot you the term "facile" (I think that needs to explored in depth). But on the other hand, if you're truly interested and inclined, you can gain a depth of REAL knowledge about an astounding array of subjects, and it's only the convenience that makes such a thing possible. It used to be basically impossible to be an in-depth music geek about more than a couple of genres. Even if all you did all day long was that, it was so much work that you couldn't really imagine being an expert on more than your particular one or two things. Since the internet though, I've cycled through several entire genres. They are specific to me, but I've heard and read about probably 80% of the "important" releases in several genres, and gone through at least half in a couple of others. Basically I feel like any time I am willing to devote a year or more to it, I can get a college-level education on a genre of music, because of the internet. There were few ways to do that before. (In fact, one of the only ways I know of was actual college. I took years of classes on jazz and avant garde music as part of my bachelor's, but thanks to the internet I know far more about other genres than I learned about those two, in an equivalent amount of time; and that was with a professor and books focused on educating me!)

--

>But it's definitely sentimental, and perhaps a bit...
>unexamined. It sounds perilously close to my grandpa telling
>me how going to school in his day made a better person out of
>ya because you had to walk five miles, in the snow, uphill...

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

At what point do you cut it off and stop valuing "work" over convenience? The logical endpoint of that argument is that the best possible situation for a music listener or creator was when only one guy on Earth was doing it by beating two stones together, and you had to walk across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska to hear him play, and half your family would die on the journey. But by gum, it made you appreciate the music more, unlike those facile bastards centuries later who just rode the bus downtown and bought Elvis 45s with their pocket money.

--

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

Yeah, sure these resources can be used to cultivate true expertise. But a lot of times I find it being utilized towards dilettantish ends.

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

and anyway, I would doubt that the internet has made dilettantes out of people who, prior to the internet, would have been deeply engaged with one or two particular genres. When you get down to it, some people just have a propensity to dabble and listen casually, and the internet facilitates that - but I don't really believe that it creates it. A friend of mine has been a dabbler and trend-hopper all his long life; the internet didn't make him that way.

--

>People seem to think that everything is on the internet, and
>at your fingertips, and that this explosion of information can
>only have positive effects superceeding the 'old model' as we
>shall call it now.
>But I think that what is happening is that people are actually
>being led down to narrower paths than they'd like to admit.

I suppose it all depends on the person you're talking about. I can't speak for everybody else's internet experience, but I hear way, way more types of music and individual artists now than I did pre-internet, and it's not even close. And most of it comes from user-generated-content sites - discussion forums, for example. I post here and people recommend hip hop I ought to check out. I post at the Metal Archives and the Nuclear War Now forum for metal, and the VIP dancehall forum for reggae/dancehall. I also use discography sites - discogs.com, Metal Archives again, allmusic, several others - to explore outward from artists I already like. What other bands was this guy in? What other bands are on that guy's label? etc. etc.

>It's all about how the information is presented, and the
>inclusive nature of the information providers. If everyone
>giving you information are cynically motivated and concerned
>with their own bottom line, then it will only incentivise
>keeping people in boxes in order to more competently mine them
>for money, or data, or both.

I'm not sure how what you're describing has much to do with most of the user-generated content on the internet.

>These companies like facebook and twitter and google shape
>your search results to give you more of what you impulsively
>want, besed on previous searches and postings.

Yes, but why lean on them? I only use Facebook to talk to my friends. I only use Google to search for restaurants in my town. I only use iTunes to organize my albums. When I go looking for music, I do it on my own terms - I don't just click on the paid, sponsored link right in front of me on one of the four major corporate sites. I would hope that most other serious music listeners are doing likewise.

>Contrast that with the 'old model', which was more generalised
>and catholic, where you were exposed to all types of shit from
>the boring to the exciting, and YOU had to decide what was
>boring to you and what was exciting to you, and spend the rest
>of the time imagining better entertainment cuz it wasn't ON
>all the time like the internet is. I'm saying that led to
>better art, HUNGRIER art.

This is a weird argument. The shit you were exposed to pre-internet was pre-filtered and sorted. You weren't given "all types of shit," you were given a whole lot of like six types of shit and a tiny dribble of a few others. That doesn't seem like a problem? And what is preventing YOU from deciding what is boring or exciting now? I certainly make my own choices. I don't log in to Amazon and wait for their "recommended for you" page to come up, and then say "Yes, overlord, feed me more opinions."

And by the way, speaking of things that aren't new, THAT isn't new. Google and Amazon have new algorithms that make it possible to be more personalized and invasive about it, but the deliberate segmenting of popular culture has gone on for a long time. Classic rock radio, 2 hours of alternative music or hip hop or metal on MTV, hip hop and rock and jazz magazines... all along people have made a business out of, "If you like this, maybe you'll also like this!" And just like with Amazon, a lot of those people directly profited off of dividing up and narrowing your tastes, and marketing to them. We're getting better at it and increasingly more specific, but it's a trend that well pre-dated the internet. However, now as then, you have the choice of branching out whenever you want. You don't have to stick to one web site/one genre of music, and you can ignore the algorithm sites altogether if you like.

Fundamentally, I feel like a lot of the anti-internet/anti-"new model" backlash is just coming from a place of "This is how it used to work, and we don't know how it's going to work going forward... therefore it's probably going to be worse." How can we know that? I think there are a lot of positives to it, and the negatives we're afraid of might not actually turn out to be negatives. It might just be different - not worse, not better.

And I guarantee that with enough digging you can find sentiments much like yours from a decade, two, or five ago. People expressing the same fears about the dawn of recorded music, the dawn of radio, TV, MTV, chain music stores, programming blocks, genre radio stations, etc. But in the current generation(s), we have very little hindsight. Like every other group of people that ever got old together, we just assume that what's coming next is bad and we are permanently losing something better. What makes it better? Because we grew up with it, I guess, and we're used to it.

--

It actually is more a devaluing of individualism, and the belief that people's immediate desires and predilictions are particularly best for them. In the lens of music i'm concerned with the view that falling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of one's devising is a good way of appreciating music, and on the artistic side, could ever lead to useful art ('useful art' is a bitter term I will admit that).

I agree with you that the internet is a needed resource that aided underserved populations greatly (in Barbados, Rap music was verboten until 1994 when Hammer came, and then 2Pac in 96. DJ Clue tapes were a luxury item, shit CDs in general cost 30 US dollars!), and I agree that there was always a bunch of record labels playing shite songs on the radio, but, like Af said above, these shite songs we didn't particularly want to listen to provided a context for the music that worked.

Listening to entire discographies in solitary, torrented strips satisfies an immediate curiousity, but the full impact is lost without some degree of context, whether it's from a fan who talks to you about it in a conversation, or having to hear other, 'lamer' music of that time somehow. Like listening to "Smells like Teen Spirit" isn't enough. You have to hear Warrant's shitty "Cherry Pie" as well(you don't HAVE to truthfully. But it helps.)

Another problem of individualised listening is not being able to gauge cross-generational effects of songs, or being put on to shit by 'older gods' and grand-parents. You can't get that from being on user-generated genre sites all the time. There is an intrusion of sounds and images needed to truly appreciate the subtleties and pompousness of art, intrusions from your surroundings you would not have normally welcomed, shaking one out of their somatic musical journeys. Otherwise it's like living in the Long Island of the internet --safe, but unchallenging (oh lordy, more bitterness).

-------
http://adevotedappraisal.tumblr.com - Essays, reviews, short stories and free writes on music, film and life around us.

>Another problem of individualised listening is not being able
>to gauge cross-generational effects of songs, or being put on
>to shit by 'older gods' and grand-parents. You can't get that
>from being on user-generated genre sites all the time. There
>is an intrusion of sounds and images needed to truly
>appreciate the subtleties and pompousness of art, intrusions
>from your surroundings you would not have normally welcomed,
>shaking one out of their somatic musical journeys. Otherwise
>it's like living in the Long Island of the internet --safe,
>but unchallenging (oh lordy, more bitterness).

if anything it gives them an avenue to expand on what they've picked up from their elders. I've had conversations about music with my daughters their whole lives... it didn't stop just because they got an ipod... if anything it took off.
_________________________________
Reunion Radio Podcasts
Bringing Together Five Decades of R&B/Funk/Soul/Dance

http://reunionradio.blogspot.com/

I just value whatever you say to your daughters more than what the itunes store or the messageboard does. I think the sharing of musical tastes across the internet is important and a very admirable aspect of the internet, but I value the more 'organic' methods of picking up music, from your environment and parents bombarding you with music, or silence. The guy blasting music out the window three houses down. Church bells. Sung nursery rhymes. Metal music in an action movie. All these unwanted things provide a context more valuable to the music you actually like, and in fact informs the music you like, AND the music you create, perhaps more so than the music in your download folder. What i'm about to say sounds like treacle, but we are all connected to each other in communities, cities, countries, etc., and using the internet to constantly follow your own wants instead of sometimes suffering the world (and the shitty songs on the radio and people's cars) is a troubling approach to music, and once again this is not because I particularly LIKE the past.

Everyting in moderation star, is what i'm saying. I'm saying the old model forced you to moderate consumption, while the new model runs the risk of doing the opposite.

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http://adevotedappraisal.tumblr.com - Essays, reviews, short stories and free writes on music, film and life around us.

>I just value whatever you say to your daughters more than
>what the itunes store or the messageboard does. I think the
>sharing of musical tastes across the internet is important and
>a very admirable aspect of the internet, but I value the more
>'organic' methods of picking up music, from your environment
>and parents bombarding you with music, or silence.

I share music with my kids as a way to inspire not program them. In the end what they seek out and gravitate to should be something that speaks to who they are and what they're interested in... not to become a carbon copy of their parents. The internet is just a tool they use to follow their own path.

> The guy
>blasting music out the window three houses down. Church
>bells. Sung nursery rhymes. Metal music in an action movie.
>All these unwanted things provide a context more valuable to
>the music you actually like, and in fact informs the music you
>like, AND the music you create, perhaps more so than the music
>in your download folder. What i'm about to say sounds like
>treacle, but we are all connected to each other in
>communities, cities, countries, etc., and using the internet
>to constantly follow your own wants instead of sometimes
>suffering the world (and the shitty songs on the radio and
>people's cars) is a troubling approach to music, and once
>again this is not because I particularly LIKE the past.
>
>Everyting in moderation star, is what i'm saying. I'm saying
>the old model forced you to moderate consumption, while the
>new model runs the risk of doing the opposite.

Back when I was 18-19 I remember spending time waiting through countless videos on MTV to see one or two I was actually interested in. I've since forgotten the vast majority of the videos I watched that I had no interest in what so ever... I'm sorry I just see no value in being exposed to stuff that isn't moving me or registering enough to even make a dent in my memories. I'd have much rather have had a way to just see what I was waiting for... and use that extra time to seek out more of what I was actually interested in or even learn or improve upon another skill. I'm not saying it's not good to be exposed to unfamiliar things but there comes a point where the cost in time becomes too high. On the internet you will end up being exposed to all kinds of shit... the difference is you're not held hostage by it.
_________________________________
Reunion Radio Podcasts
Bringing Together Five Decades of R&B/Funk/Soul/Dance

http://reunionradio.blogspot.com/

>I agree that it's cool to have a filter on things that are
>lame (i found out last week that Coldplay released an album
>with hit singles and stuff. I've never heard these songs),
>but that's not how music. or art for that matter works.
>
>It's from being forced to observe what is going on in society
>and making music or art that reflects that.
>
>That's why some underground rappers make the same 1995 song
>over and over, cuz they only listen to that type of music, and
>viciously filter out anything else deemed 'commercial', but
>back in the day DJ Red ALert didn't do that when we HAD to
>listen to the radio, Ralph McDaniels didn't do that when we
>HAD to watch Video Music Box, or the Mayor with Rap City, so
>you got to see West Coast shit, South shit that we would never
>have heard if left to our own devices.
>
>Furthermore, the producers you all so love and revere only
>developed their music talents from being raised in households
>where they HAD to listen to the Motown pop of their mother or
>the Funk and Jazz records of their father. You think Q-Tip
>would have listened to that shit if he had the internet back
>in 1983? Pete Rock? Marley Marl? Back then radio stations,
>especially AM Radio (remember that?) used to have all types of
>melodies and textures from a myriad of genres that STAYED in
>these people's heads for when they had to bang out beats on
>their MPC.
>
>The segmentation of music is to people's detriment, and only
>benefits businesses and marketeers.