Popdose: Letter from the Editor: Tuning Out the Static
SB
· 9 months ago
Good article. I thought I was the only one who would dig through mp3.com looking for music that wasn't of the normal bad music of the late 90's era like Britney Spears or cheesy latin pop (She Bangs!).
I still buy cds because I can put them on my ipod and also easily listen to it in my car which doesn't have a way to hook up my ipod easily, but most of the time they have 1 or 2 good songs and that's it. The only CD I really have been into lately is the travelling wilburys which is 20 years old.
Matt
· 9 months ago
Good stuff, and I completely agree....a lot of great points here.
I'm also a note maker these days....usually with a appropriately named doc that sits in Google Docs for me to access it when I need it.
Lots of good brain food here...thanks as always...
Cheers.....
DwDunphy
· 9 months ago
As I've said one too many times, that's why I still buy new vinyl. It forces the listener to concentrate (a little) - That said, a few weeks ago you posted the track from the LEO Alpacas Orgling album and it hooked me so much, I've not only bought the CD but have been listening to it fairly frequently. Sometimes new music still gets through.
steve
· 9 months ago
Damn Giles, it's like you've taken my thoughts and my experiences and put them in writing as your own. Better writing than I could have done.
I was saying "yep, me too" the whole way through your piece, except I have no kids. I find that I'm now a music collector, when I once was more of a music listener and student. I too can't focus on a song sometimes, much less an album. I have almost 70,000 mp3's and admittedly love running WinAmp on 'random' for the whole she-bang, mostly just to see what comes up next. It's my own perfect radio station. Yet it just doesn't feel the same as lying on my bed in 1986 pouring over the liner notes and artwork of the latest Guadalcanal Diary album. Some of that is simply because I was relatively young and hadn't heard it all yet, and now sometimes I just feel I've heard it all. Four chords can only be arranged and rearranged so many times before you feel like you're continually shopping at the same familiar store.
The only times I feel like I can really connect to music is when I listen while trying to go to sleep. Some may think I'm weird, but I put earbuds on in bed, turn out the light, and listen. It actually helps me fall asleep, stragely enough, and I get some good focused listening in until the Sandman takes over.
I don't know how to change my habits, but I do know that I have to slow down my obsession with collecting music and start to focus on listening to it again. And BTW the new Damnwells is really good, I wish it had a few more rockers though. But cheers to them for posting free.
kshane
· 9 months ago
So very well put Jeff. You really touched on something that I've been feeling in recent years. There's just so much music out there now. Much, much more than in rock's '60s heyday. You just can't hear it all, and even if you do, you can't listen much more than once to any one album. When I write my reviews, I listen to each album four or five times, and I begin to resent it when there's so much that I want to listen to.
Recently I've been keeping a to-do list just for my assignments. You're right, it really does help. Once in awhile I take notes, but they're usually just scribbled on the back of envelopes. You've inspired me to get more organized about that.
Thanks for summing up the way I feel so perfectly.
David_E
· 9 months ago
I've found that the best I can do is live by "the drag net and the filter." The former – from iTunes, friends and blogs – collects about 100 new songs a week. Each gets 2-3 listens, then the filter kicks in. Stuff that passes through makes the hard drive. The rest, however unfairly, gets broomed. It's horrible, and it makes me mourn the growers I've no doubt overlooked. But it's the only way I can keep up with the tonnage.
It's kept my iTunes list of songs to under 30,000, when it could easily be triple. But to your point, it's a mixed blessing – the drag net brings me artists like Matt Nathanson or Blood On The Wall or Spouse that I NEVER would have discovered in the LP days. But the filter ... damn, the filter. There are some album cuts off "Ghost In the Machine," for instance, that would *never* pass muster these days. Tracks I really grew to love as I stared at the shitty cassette insert for the fiftieth time in a week.
Every song's on a soundtrack these days. Set to the shit that we do while it plays.
GrayFlannelSuit
· 9 months ago
Excellent piece Jeff. Just last night many of these thoughts occurred to me as I spent about an hour listening to the new Eleni Mandell record and writing my review at the same time. Spending that little time on a review is not really fair to me, my readers, or the artist but I can't think of any other way right now unless I want to only write one review a month (I'm not a professional writer after all, and getting caught writing for my site at work is probably not a hot idea in this economy).
It sucks that I don't have (or feel like I don't have) the time to really sit down and absorb new music anymore, but that's the way it is for now. I do think stuff gets through, but it gets harder and harder.
On the flipside, I do think that the sheer volume of music I can consume now has helped in my appreciation of jazz. When I started listening less than a decade ago I was lost in the wilderness, but thanks to having hundreds of .mp3s at the ready I really do feel like I've crammed years of learning into a much shorter time span.
But I will always miss the days when I would spend days and weeks absorbing just one record or two. Kids my age would look at and lovingly arrange sports cards - I did that with my Kiss albums.
CG
· 9 months ago
Ani DiFranco penned the lyrics "people used to make records, as in a record of an event, the event of people playing music in a room". I had never thought of a "record" like that before. You've gone many steps further and really explored something that, knowingly or not, affects all of us. Great writing, as usual!
mojo
· 9 months ago
Just an aside: The best way I have found to multitask and get that every-day immersive music-listening experience (and that is what this article is about, IMHO, the old editor mutters) is to take an hour's walk and listen to the iPod over the headphones.
I have many thoughts/opinions about which headphones are good and bad (being able to withstand weather is a big part of the mix, if you're committed to this daily) but I will take that offline. Bad headphones or earbuds = nonimmersive listening, in my experience.
This approach saved my butt, literally, as it enabled me to lose some serious poundage I needed to, and it also builds in time to give the stuff I want (and need to) a good deep listen. When I am reviewing something, I can listen to a whole disc on back to back to back days.
Anyway, that's how I deal with the same issue. It's even more efficient when I walk, listen to the iPod, and have a couple of our greyhounds with me, too--so I am exercising *them* on top of it.
arensb
· 9 months ago
Completely off-topic, but I was amused to see that Amazon's page for the Moleskine notebook has a box that says "Tell the Publisher: I'd like to read this book on Kindle".
I followed the link to see what would happen, and apparently it registered that as a vote. So if you see an e-book of 200 blank lined pages, that's my bad. Sorry.
All Comments
I still buy cds because I can put them on my ipod and also easily listen to it in my car which doesn't have a way to hook up my ipod easily, but most of the time they have 1 or 2 good songs and that's it. The only CD I really have been into lately is the travelling wilburys which is 20 years old.
I'm also a note maker these days....usually with a appropriately named doc that sits in Google Docs for me to access it when I need it.
Lots of good brain food here...thanks as always...
Cheers.....
I was saying "yep, me too" the whole way through your piece, except I have no kids. I find that I'm now a music collector, when I once was more of a music listener and student. I too can't focus on a song sometimes, much less an album. I have almost 70,000 mp3's and admittedly love running WinAmp on 'random' for the whole she-bang, mostly just to see what comes up next. It's my own perfect radio station. Yet it just doesn't feel the same as lying on my bed in 1986 pouring over the liner notes and artwork of the latest Guadalcanal Diary album. Some of that is simply because I was relatively young and hadn't heard it all yet, and now sometimes I just feel I've heard it all. Four chords can only be arranged and rearranged so many times before you feel like you're continually shopping at the same familiar store.
The only times I feel like I can really connect to music is when I listen while trying to go to sleep. Some may think I'm weird, but I put earbuds on in bed, turn out the light, and listen. It actually helps me fall asleep, stragely enough, and I get some good focused listening in until the Sandman takes over.
I don't know how to change my habits, but I do know that I have to slow down my obsession with collecting music and start to focus on listening to it again. And BTW the new Damnwells is really good, I wish it had a few more rockers though. But cheers to them for posting free.
Recently I've been keeping a to-do list just for my assignments. You're right, it really does help. Once in awhile I take notes, but they're usually just scribbled on the back of envelopes. You've inspired me to get more organized about that.
Thanks for summing up the way I feel so perfectly.
It's kept my iTunes list of songs to under 30,000, when it could easily be triple. But to your point, it's a mixed blessing – the drag net brings me artists like Matt Nathanson or Blood On The Wall or Spouse that I NEVER would have discovered in the LP days. But the filter ... damn, the filter. There are some album cuts off "Ghost In the Machine," for instance, that would *never* pass muster these days. Tracks I really grew to love as I stared at the shitty cassette insert for the fiftieth time in a week.
Every song's on a soundtrack these days. Set to the shit that we do while it plays.
It sucks that I don't have (or feel like I don't have) the time to really sit down and absorb new music anymore, but that's the way it is for now. I do think stuff gets through, but it gets harder and harder.
On the flipside, I do think that the sheer volume of music I can consume now has helped in my appreciation of jazz. When I started listening less than a decade ago I was lost in the wilderness, but thanks to having hundreds of .mp3s at the ready I really do feel like I've crammed years of learning into a much shorter time span.
But I will always miss the days when I would spend days and weeks absorbing just one record or two. Kids my age would look at and lovingly arrange sports cards - I did that with my Kiss albums.
I have many thoughts/opinions about which headphones are good and bad (being able to withstand weather is a big part of the mix, if you're committed to this daily) but I will take that offline. Bad headphones or earbuds = nonimmersive listening, in my experience.
This approach saved my butt, literally, as it enabled me to lose some serious poundage I needed to, and it also builds in time to give the stuff I want (and need to) a good deep listen. When I am reviewing something, I can listen to a whole disc on back to back to back days.
Anyway, that's how I deal with the same issue. It's even more efficient when I walk, listen to the iPod, and have a couple of our greyhounds with me, too--so I am exercising *them* on top of it.
I followed the link to see what would happen, and apparently it registered that as a vote. So if you see an e-book of 200 blank lined pages, that's my bad. Sorry.
f