Something to mull over if you want to think about music this weekend (but please, do it away from the computer, unless your area of the country is going to be as oppressively hot as the NYC area is slated to be and the only climate-controlled option you have is a tiny room with nothing but a glowing MacBook): Is the increased capacity of MP3 players, and the resultant passivity a listener can engage in when listening to their record collection, resulting in people actually listening–really listening–to less music, and subtly narrowing their tastes? The Phoenix New Times thought about this recently, and as luck would have it, I have been too.
So, some good news: Idolator HQ has finally hooked up its turntable post-move (hey, it only took a few months!), and as a result I’ve been listening to more vinyl. And having to change over the sides of LPs or singles has seemingly resulted in me being more engaged with what I’m listening to than, say, just putting iTunes on shuffle or even putting five CDs in a changer. It made me realize how the download-then-import model wasn’t always successful as far as getting people to remember everything lurking within their music library, although truth be told I’d also forget that I owned certain albums, too. Maybe it’s just the idea of too much stuff being out there, and the resultant data smog, that results in people hearing less, whether the “stuff” in question is on vinyl or streaming from a MySpace page.
(This quote, I thought, was also notable given my recent chafing against the tunnel-vision of music blogs: Barry Schwartz, who wrote The Paradox Of Choice, told the Phoenix New Times “Less album listening means that people aren’t forced to listen to things that don’t turn them on right away, and as a result, tastes change less.” Which certainly dovetails nicely with the thesis of the book he’s still flogging, but could it be true? I know that if I’m in the mood for background noise, I’m certainly more likely to put on Music Choice’s classic-jams-heavy R & B Hits station than something I have to really listen to. And one can’t help but wonder if that sort of comfort-listening spills over to matters of taste in newer music, etc.)
The whole “could more be less?” idea sort of dovetails, I think, with the cover story in the most recent Atlantic Monthly about the Internet’s seemingly endless capacity for shortening attention spans (not online yet, ho ho irony), which would certainly help explain the “intellectualism is so 20th-century” attitude that’s been creeping out of certain quarters. Part of me thinks it boils down to the fact that despite the promise of the Internet–which I do believe in, to a point–society as a whole is quite stressed out, exhausted, and agitated. But that could also be my “hey, it’s been a long, cranky Friday and I’m still trying to gut out a post at 6 p.m.” feeling talking. I’d love to hear the Idolator assemblage’s feelings on this, as I’ve found that you all are really good at helping me flesh out the half-formed thoughts that fill up my brain while I’m looking for hilarious headline fodder. (But get outside this weekend! Seriously.)
When every song ever recorded fits on your MP3 player, will you listen to any of them? [Phoenix New Times via Velvet Rope]
[Photo: Valerie Loiseleux]
you really want to hear my voice?
tl;dr
@GhostOfDuane: you didn’t spell that phonetically.
actually I do agree with the premise here, based on my own experience. I have no clue what it was like to buy a record and throw it on in breathless anticipation, since any album I’m desperate to hear (not that there’s very many of them coming out these days), I’ll probably have heard some streamed tracks already, if not heard the whole thing.
plus, I have a memory like some sort of really ineffective steel trap (perhaps, one with holes in it). so I put things on my iPod and can’t remember what’s on there for the train ride home, so I end up just listening to Tonight’s The Night for the 500,000th time. Like The Sword album that someone told me is like Sabbath v.2. I’m totally skeptical, but I’ve been meaning to hear it for the past few weeks, and yet as soon as I go for the iPod, I’m paralyzed with indecision, so I shuffle and hope that jogs my memory. funny how that never works though.
@Maura Johnston: sorry, i just learned that today, i need to start with that before i advance to 2.0.
@GhostOfDuane: haha, it’s ok.
i also have an increasingly worse memory. there is so much that i want to listen to and i often wind up coming to a lot of newer stuff accidentally, whether in public spaces or, uh, on a side stage at a festival.
The process of listening to music, the excitement and anticipation with which I once listened to it, has weaned due to the overwhelming excess of access. I never imagined a time in my life where I would want to intentionally walk away from listening to music entirely for weeks at a time. I did that this year, and when I got back to it I found myself refreshed.
However, I now feel like I’m glutted. My friends have heard me overuse the term “favorite band”, “favorite album” and “favorite song” repeatedly about things I’ve just discovered — a disturbing trend that I attribute to recognition of the wall of cd’s, records, and mp3s which are always around me.
Where, in days of yore, that might be true for a record executive or a concert promoter or a music journo, I think it’s true for pretty much everyone out there. As a result, there are all these needles in haystacks waiting to be found that may never surface.
In the last ten years, it’s just gotten so much worse. I can’t think of when I’ve been able to really find the album that I grow to love the way I grew to love Gish or Purple Rain or Sly & The Family Stone’s Fresh — albums I owned on vinyl and spent a lot of time with.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I don’t think I’m alone. I can’t seem to translate my passion for music to people who really “don’t give a crap what’s on as long as it’s not country”.
When every song ever recorded fits on your MP3 player, will you listen to any of them?
I’ll have to read this whole thing again later to comment on the main question posed by Maura, but to answer the question posed in the title of the source article, yes.
Ever since I got my ipod, I have this strange OCD where I feel compelled to listen to everything on it, which is hard because it has over 16,000 songs. I think its because of the Play Count and Last Date listened features. In the past, I had no idea how many years it had been since I listened to some random James album, or popped in some old school rap. But now I know for a fact that I haven’t listend to EPMD since late-2006. That makes me think, “I own that and its good, I shoud listen again.” As a consequence, I have a playlist of songs I last listened to in 2007, and have another 5500 songs to listen to before my self-imposed end-of-the-year deadline. Why would I give myself such a deadline? Beats me, but my OCD makes me listen to at least a few songs a day instead of say, Santogold again.
I actually have experienced an upswing in actually digesting newer albums since I got my external hard drive. Mainly, I’m too fucking lazy too hook it up unless it’s for work, so I only update my iPod once a month or so. Couple that with about 90 minutes of train riding a day, and I’m getting deep into shit that I haven’t really explored to the degree that I should. It’s not always new shit, but in any event, it’s reminding me of the tape deck in my old car, where it was such a fucking labor to whittle an album down to a 45 minute side that I had no choice but to obsess over it’s every detail.
Hey, that Santogold album really opens up on repeat listens.
As one of THE YOOF I think the Phoenix new Times article rather unfairly maligns, I definitely have trouble sorting through all the new music I have. I found Ratatat’s as-yet-unreleased LP3 in my iTunes Recently Added playlist just now but I can’t remember adding it to my iTunes, or why. I have Ratatat’s entire discography even though I’m not even that fond of them. I don’t know why. I think it’s some sort of weird completism fetish.
That’s the extreme, though. The day-to-day detriment is that like loudersoft I find myself polarizing my opinions just because there is always the promise of new music. I hate things or they are amazing (note my careful use of opinion for things I don’t like and fact for things I do like; very unassailable). Oftentimes I’ll have to shamefacedly tell people that I really do, actually, like that band, or that song, long after my private hype cycle has ended. And I find myself listening to the new albums I do like far more intensely and often because I doubt my ear for “good/bad.”
Yes, I know, teal deer.
I find myself suprised by random songs in my ipod all the time. Stuff i added and forgot, lists i made and never used, etc…
it’s like finding old boxes in storage from the move and discovering 200 CDs i forgot i owned…. or stuff i haven’t listened to in a decade (really).
This strikes me as one of those questions all those music-and-the-brain people need to tackle, if they haven’t already. (If they have, I’d love to see where, esp. if it’s linkable.)
(also, for the record, the Karla Starr piece actually first appeared in Seattle Weekly a little bit ago. not that it isn’t always a good time to ask these questions.)
There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t want to just hit Ctrl+A and delete all the mp3s on my computer, but I always stop short and find an album I forgot about, or some 12-inch extended version that I just don’t want to hunt down again. No matter what, there’s always a reason stopping me (thank goodness?), and I just get up and go to my stereo and listen to a whole record front to back (thank goodness for the Pernice Brothers), which is just too soothing for words.
Since I spend most of my time either online or in a car, I’ve kept away from even buying an I-Pod, somehow, but I do find myself buying clearance cds and listening to each and every song all the way home. I think this breakdown has to do with my mind’s sad capability to hit either the fast forward or reverse buttons more than anything else just for luxury/correctness sake (like, uh, Click), which is a filthy habit that I’ve somehow broken over the past couple of months. Was that a synthesizer squeal before the chorus, and did John Doe just say “handsome” or “had some”? I’ll just wait until the disc repeats from the beginning, 45 minutes later, possibly tomorrow.
As for Music Choice, back when I lived bachelor-style with my Dad a few years back, the two of us would buy a king’s feast worth of mexican take-out and spend three or four hours every Saturday just listening and talking about the R&B/Soul station’s picks (back when the advertising was nil and our speakers were less ratty), parsing out our weeks’ stories and always making lists for the Sunday record store jaunt to follow. I try to stay computer/mp3 free on my weekends since, though it does get the best of me, especially in this 24-hour window of leak culture we all find ourselves in now. It’s nice to have the advantage, but some amount of restraint keeps it all interesting.
also the weather in Seattle TOTALLY FRIGGING SUCKS and therefore is not inclining me to get out all that much, sadly
When I was 18, back in 1981, I might have had a hundred LPs, but I knew them intimately. Now I have thousands of albums on CD and mp3 and I know there’s tons of stuff I downloaded and got partway through once and forgot to go back to.
Just a couple weeks ago I read Bowie in Berlin, coming across a mention of a guitar solo in a song on Low, thinking “I don’t remember a guitar solo in that song,” and mentally playing back the whole song until the guitar solo came in and I realized, oh, yeah, that guitar solo. These days I’m more likely to hear something somewhere and think hey, I like that, and, on finding out what it is, realize that I have it already.
I can only really speak from personal experience, but Maura’s post doesn’t really ring true for me. Perhaps because I’m a journalist by trade or just inquisitive by nature, but I still get off on digging beneath the surface of albums or songs.
I’m always looking for music that fits a particular mood, and sometimes it’s easier to look through the thousands of songs I already have because dammit, something’s gotta be in there. Sometimes I’ll just throw together a playlist on a particular theme, which forces me to listen to music I normally skip in order to find “new” stuff that fits.
But then again, Last.fm tells me I listen to the Scissor Sisters ALL THE FREAKING TIME.
I feel torn between to very different mindsets depending on the day.
1. Keeping up with current music and the general HYPEMACHINE of the internet (I will NOT say ‘blogosphere’). This is exhausting, and I can’t stay in that state for more than a week or so at a time. Part of me does just want to live in the now and embrace music as it happens, rather than always have an eye cocked over my shoulder at everything that’s happened prior…seems like a very ‘modern’ thing to do, but the potential for horrible abuse. It’s very easy to buy into novelty and strong first-impressions.
2. Being absorbed in niche genres long past is fun, it’s an experience/fantasy/education and it, I think, can give one a greater appreciation for the arc and reflexivity of music history. The problem with that is becoming a crotchety, elitist, fuddy-duddy who shuns anything new as passe and spends their time building canons no one gives a shit about.
I try to maintain a balance, but ultimately whatever the subconscious demands gets played.
Also, Maura, I love that these sorts of posts you’ve been making lately parallel weirdly with this zine portfolio project I’m working on… you like Helium, wanna go roller-dancing?
I definitely don’t listen to music the same way I did in 2000. I’ve been trying to figure out for a while why–is it mp3s? Is it because people’s attention spans are going to shit? Is it because now I mostly listen to music while sitting in traffic or at my hateful desk at my hateful job? Either way–it’s crazy to me that I can barely sing along with the songs on some of my favorite albums of the year so far, whereas a few years ago I would have had all the lyrics memorized down to the background wailing.
iPod random play makes me listen to stuff I otherwise wouldn’t (not at that moment, anyway) with fresh ears and I love that.
@DavidWatts: I don’t think people have ever had that relationship with music.
Actually, fear of this phenomenon (and a fondness for whole albums) are the reason I’ve more or less avoided downloading entirely. I tend to be a slow listener who doesn’t like to put something away until I feel like I know it front to back; when I get a new record, I’ll usually listen to it almost exclusively for at least a week. I’ve got un-listened-to CDs that have been sitting on my shelves since ‘05. Do I miss a helluva lot of stuff? Ungodly amounts. But these days nobody gets it all anyways, and I’ve got a list of older artists I don’t have anything by that runs 9 pages in MS Word.
I dunno, Lax — there’s pink colored vinyl and all.
My only observation to add — and I have been outside today, thanks ;-) — comes from last night at a show, where the headliners I knew v. well (the Mountain Goats) but the openers I didn’t know at all (the Annuals). As I told friends with me, even though I knew I could have easily heard everything I wanted to hear from the Annuals through their sites or whatever if I was so inclined, I didn’t do that precisely so I could be surprised when I finally heard them. As it turned out they didn’t impress me all that much — they like their Arcade Fire and Flaming Lips and etc. and don’t add to any of it, at least on first blush — but it was still good to be able to come in ‘cold’ that way, and just deal with them as is. Larger point if there is one — there’s still a capacity for surprise and being entranced (or, as in this case, not) even in the saturated world, and there’s no reason why one’s engagement with it can’t be just as clearly defined by what you allow yourself distance from as much as what you let in. I think this dynamic is sometimes lost in a more all-or-nothing framing of netkultur in general.
Of course kids like classic rock. It’s been force-fed to them from the womb. I like it too but it’s not all I like, because it isn’t all I know. Music is something you have to be acculturated to as much as hear, after all.
I have less trouble with pick-and-mix MP3-ism than I might because I adapted to it fairly early, and I was always interested in singles as much as albums. That said, on my May road trip (when I did the most recent Project X w/my family), I listened almost exclusively to singles and compilations. (The albums I played were usually for assignments or, a few times, the most recent Spoon, which has become my favorite comfort-food album of the past year.) When I got back to Seattle and had a month’s worth of mail waiting for me, I did nothing for a week but play albums. What a relief it was! The same artist and/or idea for an hour at a time!
I think the secret is not to panic. I want singles and I want albums; I want big ideas and I want one-shots. They don’t cancel each other out; they enrich each other.
I can’t speak for myself, because I’ve always been an obsessive listener regardless of format, but I did notice one really disturbing phenomenon recently. A few weekends back I went to my niece’s college graduation party and was kind of shocked to find that she and all her cohorts were listening to nothing but classic rock - and I don’t mean deep catalog, hipster, Duane Allman style classic rock. But plain old vanilla Zep-Beatles-Who jock jamz classic rock. Essentially these kids were listening exclusively to their parents music. So I got a few of them together and subtly asked WTF? What they told me was kind of amazing - most of them didn’t really like hip-hop or r&b, because it was all “lame and stupid now” (one kid liked the Roots, but that was it), they all thought indie rock was “boring” and “whiny” and “weird” - or else didn’t really know that it existed. And they weren’t really interested in discovering new music because “there’s so much of it” and it kind of overhwhlems them. Some of them copped to liking Nirvana and some modern rock, but they didn’t seem especially interested in seeking out new music. Basically these kids were more than happy to listen to Bruce and Tom Petty records that we recorded before they were born and had zero interest in carving out a musical generational niche of their own.
Is that normal with the kids today?
And now I’m going outside to bake my brains in the heatwave.
@Ned Raggett: White covered vinyl and we’re in trouble.
*coloured, oops
@Clevertrousers: I think it’s more common with the kids who aren’t that into music anyway. And even among them, there’s still quite a few who probably know (and maybe even like) some of whatever songs are hits/were sung on AI.
(I think. I obsessively look for new music, so I’m not one of them.)
I will say that as my music collection has grown, I spend less time getting into new albums as they come, before I go to back shuffling/playlists or whatever newer album I’ve picked up. (New could be just new-to-me, not necessarily recent releases. For example, I’ve been trying to fix my sad lack of Supergrass lately.) Though I generally take it as a sign of a good album if I go back and try to listen to it/understand it more a few weeks later. (Right now, Santogold seems to passing this test.)
Also helping with my music listening was taking classes on the opposite side of the city, at the same time the CTA was working on tons of construction. This meant time for plenty of albums and novels.
I think this all goes back to what I am going to call “The Brian Slade Experience.” In Velvet Goldmine, depressed and misunderstood bisexual suburban teen Christian Bale goes out to buy the new Brian Slade record, and he pores over the packaging and listens to the record, and masturbates looking at Slade laid out on a chaise lounge on the sleeve, because omg he just wants to live in this world that Slade has conjured into reality!! People just do not have this relationship with music any more, the value of it in the popular consciousness is way down, and people in general just don’t care to really get deep into records. I think it has more to do with this than with what you listen to the music on. When even
this blog seems most hyped about music in a commercial than any particular record, I think you’d have to agree with me.
@Lax: Oh, I love digging. I just feel like it’s rare that I have enough time I guess.
(And yes I know I’m not taking my own advice.)
@westartedthis: This is a challenge that I’ve been trying to address for a while. There are certain artists and albums that simply don’t work piecemeal through earbuds while you’re on the subway. I’ve actually created a playlist called “albums to sample” as a way to keep new music in its whole form until I’ve had a chance to fully digest.
It makes it difficult, though, to distinguish between “favorite songs” (singles) and what are essentially “favorite passages” from larger, cohesive, works.
which is not to say that some of those “challenging” albums are not, in fact, boatloads of unlistenable wankery.
@Halfwit: (See: The Field album, which was better as an EP.)
Also, @ Lax (link-quote is not working for you): They’re called Smiths fans.
i’m as susceptible to the “shuffle” urge as anyone else. in fact, it sometimes seems like i will put something on wanting to hear it, but i’m sick of it and pressing >>| within less than a minute. i don’t know what to do about it, really. so far my solution has been to add more shit to my ipod…
that said, the past several years have seen most of my favorite records of the year being “front-to-backers” - albums that you really can’t pick apart. and while there have been plenty of great “every song could be a single” records, it seems i’ve been more drawn to the ones that demand repeated, close listening. Scott Walker, Joanna Newsom, Portishead, Boris, Mammatus, the Field, etc.
while almost all of these records were critically adored, there was also a contingent who wanted to call them “unlistenable”, “willfully difficult” or just plain “boring” and i wonder if short attention spans and the urge to, after 1 or 2 listens, abandon an album to the stygian depths of a 500gb external hard drive, never to be listened to again have something to do with those opinions.
Seems like it all comes down to the relationship that we choose to have with the music that surrounds us. Even though it feels like that choice is eliminated sometimes with the sheer volume at our fingertips, we make our own relationship with the music that we hear.
I used to believe that the music I like was one of the things which defined me as a person. I’ve come to believe that making such narrow definitions leads us to the place where satisfaction is balanced on the fragility of art and artists, most of whom spend their lives stuck in the constant search for a kind of calm that most of us will never know.
This is why I never got an MP3 player. Even though my listening venue is at home where my LPs are, I still find I can listen to quite a bit of music.
I thought Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic Monthly, about the Internet’s impact on his skimming vs. reading habits is a fairly effortless analogy to today’s ‘hearing of’ vs. ‘listening to’ music habits: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
In addition to the, im my opinion, more-than-just-a-semantic-debate of hearing vs. listening, I’ve found the studies by Adrian C. North, albeit at times a touch academic, to be consistently fascinating. For example, here’s one blog’s reference to North’s studies on “The influence of in-store music on wine selections.”
Other studies of his are more on-point to the topic at hand (e.g. The importance of music to adolescents and Is music important?), but they can be hard to come by without a subscription to LexisNexis or the Journal of Applied Psychology.
As far as my $0.02 are concerned: I agree with loudersoft that it’s ultimately one’s own choice and choices that help define one’s relationship to and with music.
In other words, recognizing that it isn’t actually to your benefit to have your entire library at your disposal–at all times–to be lost adrift your poorly indexed iPod and repeatedly replaying the same familiar tunes.
To me, it seems to be about discipline(d listening). About making an effort. Defining your own experience. For example, might it make more sense to have an iPod of less memory with less music that you swap out regularly to make room for something new-to-you, like you once did with your Walkman and your tapes and CDs?
Is it really better for you and your music to have it at all at your easy and portable yet seemingly disposable access at all times? It seems that here, in this instance, more means less (attentive) listening but more (as in too much) time hoarding and (inattentive) hearing.
@hangoverblack: “For example, might it make more sense to have an iPod of less memory with less music that you swap out regularly to make room for something new-to-you, like you once did with your Walkman and your tapes and CDs”
This is exactly what I do. I listen to every album I have front to back. I also have a seperate playlist for stuff I pull from blogs to find new music. (Setting your Ipod onto album shuffle is the way to go) I do this because the music glut was making me a horrible DJ. I found that my memory for certain songs and sounds was getting very very thin, and I have a bit of OCD in the first place, so i’ve been stuck so many times with a “what the hell should I play next?” panic attack while DJing. All this information available is making me horribly anxious, and I just keep trying to find better ways to compartmentalize everything.