Guardian writer Owen Adams listened to old garage rock MP3s more than new records in 2007, records that only a “select few” knew about when they were (almost) new. Which made them special! Perhaps his complicity in enjoying the Internet’s bounty made him feel guilty, because now he’s really worried about, you know, all this musical freedom of choice and dangerous aesthetic input available at the touch of trackpad. Because if records were scarce once again, surely we’d have better music than this pluralistic crud we’re listening to now. Duh?
I’m trying so hard not to make this sound like a “when I were a lad” post but – what the heck – when we didn’t have every conceivable recording from every era and every genre available in some endless eat-what-you-can buffet, when we faced musical starvation and had to really hunt things down to satisfy our hunger, it spurred on much farther-reaching revelations.
Yeah, we get it, kinda, the idea being that when you only had three records, you were supposedly forced to recombine or reinterpret them more imaginatively. (I think. I’ve read this thing about five times now and it really makes no sense at all. The loss of a heterogeneous rock canon is “homogenising artists’ reservoirs of inspiration”? Really?) But aside from the fact that the opening five paragraphs don’t flesh out the beyond-shaky thesis in the slightest, someone’s once again (seriously, I think the Guardian‘s revolving door of aged bloggers does this at least once a week) turning a listener’s problem–having too much music available to process, let alone to love in the way someone supposedly once did when they spent six months tracking down a punk rock import–into a musicians’ problem, who have always had the creative burden of synthesizing their interests in an interesting way, whether they’ve got a 500-gig external hard drive filled with sounds from around the world or only a box full of the same mid-’60s British invasion singles as everyone else. Stop doin’ that!
I feel the same way. But about porn.
I love Sundazed Records!
The real question is how this pertains to the Black Kids/Vampire Weekend hype.
Guardian to World: THEOPHILUS AND QIN SHI HUANG TOTES HAD THE RIGHT IDEA
I wonder if many contemporary artists or poets or filmmakers or philosophers or architects put forward “scarcity is AWESOME for culture” theories.
This is the aging hipster version of the young hipster’s “why is bad music so popular” essay
Les Nessman is Radar O’Reilly grown up
if only the beatles had never listened to ravi shankar and shit, they coulda been as good as paul revere and the raiders.
@iantenna: Yet, Indians benefit regardless, no??
Ok, Idolator, this is the second time (that I’ve seen anyway) you’ve taken a pop at things I’ve written, and what really pisses me off is a. the assumptions you make about me (eg that I am older than you, which I’m not sure I am by your jaded ‘been there, seen it all’ observations), b. taking fragments of my articles out of context and presenting them to your readers as the be-all of the original article, c. not having enough nous to come up with any original ideas, instead distorting mine, d. your incredibly annoying and unoriginal style of writing… I could go on. Your recycled blogs always draw the same kind of conclusion, oh we’re sick of reading this again and again, yawn yawn! In which case, why bother commenting on it or featuring it at all? Right from your intro, you’re inaccurate – I mentioned that right at the END of 2007 I was listening to more garage than new music, not the entire year… and you offer no plausible conclusion either – musicians are listeners too, in case you hadn’t realised. Why don’t you just give it up if you haven’t got anything interesting to say, Jess.
@StuntKockSteeev: nice one.