Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment in Dedicated Listening
npr.org
npr.org
My goal is to get back to the state where I am actually bored sometimes, because being bored is an opportunity to think and let my brain work through some of the information I've already jammed into my short-term memory.
Insulating myself from media works, but it's a choice, and that choice itself has a cost. Before smartphones and the Internet, I could be in a state where I wasn't overloaded with information and I wasn't spending an iota of effort to maintain that state. I can be in that state now, but I am constantly paying a mental tax to keep those shields up. Don't install the app, don't let myself spend too much time on reddit (or here for that matter...).
It may be that there is no solution to this problem short of radically excising myself from modern society. But I do hope we come up with broader solutions to it than what we have now where it's all on each of us to maintain constant, exhausting, vigilance against the tide of data that seeks to wash us away.
It's a bit cliche, but if you were to die soon, what things would you seek to finish before you die so you can die content? What do you want your legacy to be? The stoic practice of meditating on your eventual death is a great way to put things into perspective.
I'm age 60, but have lived/worked in/on the net since modem bulletin boards were hot. I have no problem culling way more than 99% of what's e-published or e-shared, revisiting only a few reliable e-sources daily. If I've learned anything in my decades as a net denizen, it's that very little out there deserves my rapt attention.
Why is self-isolation from the e-barrage necessary? Is the siren song of every fresh bit of e-drivel really that intoxicating? My modest suggestion: hold your e-sources to a higher standard; budget your time when jacked-in so that you're not just killing time whenever you go virtual.
If we've learned anything from the politics of 2016, it's that media and social streams are nothing but noise -- a perpetual loop that repeats ad finitum and ad nauseum.
Yes, it is. Media and the apps that provide it have had literally billions of dollars invested in learning how to manipulate our psychology and capture as much of our attention as possible. Clickbait, notifications, automated A/B testing to determine which thumbnail images maximize clicks, etc. There is a giant, incredibly well-funded machine whose turbines are running 24/7 to suck our attention into it.
> My modest suggestion: hold your e-sources to a higher standard; budget your time when jacked-in so that you're not just killing time whenever you go virtual.
I think maybe you missed the point of my comment. The verbs you use there -- "hold" and "budget" -- are exactly the problem. I am doing that, but performing those actions themselves has a cost. I can either be drained because the Internet/social media thing sucked away all of my attention, or drained because I spent all of my energy standing fast against the tide.
Either way I'm drained.
Anecdotally at least, I can see an objective drop in the amount of songs I listen to now on my Spotify account versus eight years ago on my iPod. When I had to download individual mp3s and transfer them with a cable to my iPod I would probably have made a playlist of new songs every few weeks or so. Now the only time I ever 'make a playlist' is perhaps once a year. In fact, if there isn't a long trip I'm going on sometimes I don't make a new playlist for an entire year. Part of the problem in this is that there are simply too many songs to add to a new playlist. If I go back through just my spotify likes there could easily be three hundred+ I would need to collate and that's not including Soundcloud or YouTube. This means that when I've finally gathered together a playlist of songs I want listen to it can be 300/400 songs long, meaning I can listen to it for an entire year and some songs will only have been listened to once and others not at all.
This, like the author, strikes me as being so much worse than when I was deeply listening to, if not albums, playlists over and over again for a couple of weeks. They might have only had a dozen or so songs but I knew each of them well and enjoyed them too. Now I can't think of one song in my last mega-playlist that I could recall offhand.
What's even worse is that this clearly applies to more than music. I have an enormous goodreads list that I will almost certainly never finish. A year of Netflix shows that I am perpetually behind on, and a Pocket list that still has articles from the 2016 election.
I don't know what the solution to this is, but there is definitely something weirdly limiting to having an unlimited number of x.
I have pretty anomalous/extreme music listening patterns. I've listened to every album in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (all editions of it...) at least once. When I was working remotely, I listened to about 16 hours of music every day, about 2/3 of that time spent listening to new music. I've done experiments where I've listened exclusively to Billboard & Oricon chart records for years at a time. I listened to Meshuggah's Catch 33 at least 4 times a day every day for a year and a half. Lately, I tend to spend my time devouring entire genres, learning all of the major talents & producers and the connections between them. My knowledge has become somewhat encyclopedic -- like a more-expansive, more-complete, mental version of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music.
Once I learned that lyrics don't matter to me, I stopped reading them along with listening. I stopped reading liner notes. I haven't picked up a physical copy of an album in at least 9 years. If anything, the changing music consumption patterns have enabled me to appreciate more music in a manner that I prefer. Maybe it's okay for people to appreciate music the way they want and not to have to put albums on some pedestal anymore like people did with 70s Prog Rock.
Through all of this, I've retained my ability to be critical of music. Heck, I'm a cohost of a podcast where all we do is critique music. I would argue that it's not the change in consumption pattern that's to blame here, but rather a lack of tastemakers in public society and extremely negative reactions to criticism of any sort. Critical opinions are faux pas in our culture pretty much universally these days.
I would call this a good thing. I despise the idea of someone telling me what I should or shouldn't like, as though I have no mind of my own to decide what I do or don't like, and as though they are somehow superior and have some kind of enlightened outlook on things that I could never hope to achieve.
I don't think media is some egalitarian process where everyone is celebrated just for doing something. There's a lot out there in popular culture that is just outright technically flawed. Or just crap -- trust me, I've listened to more crap music and watched more crap movies than probably anyone (I much prefer to talk about the stuff I love though). We should be celebrating the stuff that's truly outstanding, not just because it's popular. Some really outstanding work isn't comfortable for the viewer/listener either.
Do you even know what you really like anymore? A lot of stuff is just rammed down our throats. Your brain triggers that dopamine hit just for recognizing the pattern regardless. It's good for business, but is it _good_?
I guess it all depends on how you about whether you feel media is artwork or entertainment.
I like to know if something is widely liked or just appeals to my taste.
What does happen to me is that every 2 years or so I find that I get on a particular kick to listen to a certain type of music. This happened to me with baroque/classical/romantic orchestral music recently, but again I eventually reached a point where I had found about 15-20 pieces that I would repeatedly listen to and no longer needed new pieces as I was so satisfied with what I had found.
It's not that I don't love music. I do, and each day I listen to it for 2-3 hours.
For music, the pieces I find myself listening to repeatedly have a particular quality that I can't really describe, but they just sound so good, so perfect, that they make me feel transcendent .. it's honestly like sex. I like all music and I'm cool with having anything on in the background while I'm doing work, but when I'm really determined to focus on what I'm listening to I need to listen to the music I love, and the list of that music is very short.
i found after getting a new laptop that i really only listend to 2-3 records i bought ages ago.
iTunes can confirm, it says i only listened to 7 files (4songs and 3 albums) this past year
I suspect what you are is normal. I recall reading an article somewhere about how the average person over 30 or 40 listens to no new music, ever, at least in the purposeful sense. Hence the stereotype of "Grandpa", who insists that the best music just happens to have been the stuff that he listened to from ages 12-22 or so, and never moves. It seems that people over that age who seek out new music at all are already outliers.
I find personally that I do "consume" music. Not too quickly. My favorite albums probably had a good 50-100 plays in them, and I still like them well enough when I revisit them. But over the course of months and years, yeah, I do like being able to find new stuff.
I guess there's people who collect music and then there's others who listen to the records they collect.
Call me weird, but I'd feel ashamed to get a record and never listen to it. All of the 34,000+ songs in my music library has graced my ears at least once.
If that "at least once" was actually "just once" for most of then, then you're not that different from those other people then, as songs as meant for multiple listens. A cursory single listen (and perhaps while doing something else at the time too, or with skipping forward) it's not much different than no listen at all.
Most music is worth exactly one listen. You can tell right away if you're going to need to hear it again.
What any object is "meant for" shouldn't dictate how you use it.
Ours obviously. Only trivial pop can be dismissed (or ear-worm its way) on a single listen. And the best works, the ones with the most depth, take multiple listenings to even begin to fully appreciate.
One might not care about all this, and drop stuff they bought/downloaded to listen summarily in one listening. It's a free country, and nobody says they should be forced to do otherwise.
But then -- and that's my argument, that person is not that different than people amassing tons of music and not hearing most of it even once. They might be slightly more involved, but not much more.
>What any object is "meant for" shouldn't dictate how you use it
Well, that's one viewpoint, a modern consumerist, where it's all about the individual and their whims, where their taste, consumption habits, and choices shouldn't be questioned.
I opt for another, older viewpoint, where the individual should raise themselves to appreciate culture (music, books, movies, etc) and their choices can always be questioned and improved, and they can (and should) always strive to be better educated on them. In other words, a master work of art, does very much dictate how people use it, and if they're ever gonna get it, they should follow that path.
But on subsequent listenings you start to notice things, things become familiar and you start liking it. And the crazy thing is that a lot of the time those albums (or artists) are the ones that get catapulted into "best album of all time" statuses.
Definitely some of my top artists/albums of all time are ones that did not appeal to me on the first few listens.
I get what you are saying though.
Before, I was the quintessential hoarder, I bought CDs, bought albums on Bandcamp and torrented a ton of music. Why only get one album, when you can get the whole discography?
On Spotify, because everything is just available right there with basically no effort, I don't have to find and collect anything. I just listen to the music, and click "save" on the songs I like. The daily mixes help me listen to those same songs again, or I just put all of my saved songs on shuffle.
I'll also save favorite albums as playlists, and I've listened to those a whole lot more than when I was listening to locally-stored MP3s.
I do have a "albums to check out" list still, but it's significantly smaller than what I used to have.
'claimed that we only ever really love 10 albums, and we spend the rest of our listening lives seeking facsimiles of those 10, pursuing the initial rush, so to speak'
I too did the calculation from article about how much music I had amassed and could never listen to all of it. Good stuff.
Old news but recent to me :)
At this point, I totally don't like any "prog rock" other than Rush (unless you want to count Primus).
What you write is super relatable.
I grew up listening to a lot of punk rock and older stuff including a lot of Zep, Beatles, Rush, Yes and all kinds of stuff.
I just turned 40 and I'd much rather play and listen to old jazz or country. Most of my guitar and piano playing ends up being blues, though it's fun to cover Hendrix on a piano. Hell, I'd rather listen to my kid's vaporwave stuff or, say, Neon Indian, than make another pass through Zep IV.
I play a lot of bluegrass (guitar, upright bass, banjo, dobro, etc) but can't hardly stand to listen to it. About the only stuff I can stand to listen to and work on playing at the same time is the Dead and related groups. Maybe that's like jazz but for late 20th century rock... I dunno.
I think that provides enough inversion while still hitting the right points in my brain.
But, I didn't "get it" until about the 3rd listen. Part of what made Rush so great to me, was that I felt like I got more out of it the more I listened to it.
You might not be looking for something that sounds like 2112, but rather looking for something that puts you in the same mindset 2112 did the first time.
I think it could also be taken to mean what you initially liked about those 10 albums influences what you consider "good music". You could rephrase it as something like "your music taste is largely based off of about 10 albums".
Kind of like I do with videogames and bundles.
Yeah downloading every mp3 in the world was easy, which I think is the point of the article.
I've got a backlog of books on my kindle. Over 14 years I've acquired games on Steam a few at a time to an extent that I could take a few years off work to play them.
The problem is you can't listen to all the music that came out today, and then listen to all the music that comes out tomorrow and listen to your favorites from yesteryear too. Some people don't temper their buying habits to reflect that, at least not optimumly.
One day I realized my music tastes were determined by random chance and I was just listening to more of the same. So I started seeking out critically acclaimed albums, and listening to them repeatedly until they "click".
Some albums take longer to click than others, but they all click eventually. In some cases, I'll have to temporarily give up on a difficult album. Listen to a few dozen other albums and let them click. Then come back to the difficult album, and bang, "This is amazing! How could I be so blind!" It's like you have to level up your musical appreciation stat.
I'll never, ever trust my playlist to some recommendation engine. If I'd done that instead of seeking out classics, I'd've missed so much amazing music!
The author seems to have taken up some kind of impossible geas as a countermeasure. Imagine if you thought you talked too much in conversations and so you took a vow of silence. It's a bit extreme. I take a different approach: my music library is sorted by purchase date, and anything at the top will only get pushed out after a few listens. I don't have to force myself to do anything, I'm just too lazy to look past the first page very often. This works equally well with iTunes and with physical media, and it gives me a chance to really fall in love with new albums, even if I don't get the same feeling I got when I was 15.
Technology may have radically changed the way we consume music but our relationship to music is largely the same. The only difference is that you're older. Loving someone feels different at 15 and 30, and loving music is the same way.
Edit: The part about novels is a bit weird. Remember that Brothers Karamazov was published as a serial. Moby Dick was a flop and didn't sell well until it was republished 40 years later, after Melville's death. So if anything, those examples illustrate the point that literary fiction doorstops have never been that popular. However, these days we have monstrous epics dominating genre fiction. Rowling proved that young children will pay good money to read a 3,400 story across seven books, the same way you'd binge Netflix, and I've known a few people who as children had to replace their hardbound Harry Potter books just from ordinary use. Page counts are, if anything, ballooning in genre fiction and the shelves are dominated by trilogies and longer series.
I absolutely hate this fetishization of the music creation process, and I think this might be the writer's real problem.
These stories about the studio and the producer and the band members' favorite flavor ice cream sell records and give context for the music, but they aren't the music. To obsess over these details is to not see the forest for the trees.
The turning point for me happened recently on a road trip when I opened up my music library and tried to find something to play. While I have "liked" a large number of songs and albums in the last year which now show up in my "library", it turns out that the majority of them are not something that I would choose to go back to after a listen or two. I can't even remember what a surprising number of albums in my library are! And so it happened that with my library of 130-ish new albums that I've added in the past year, I couldn't find anything that I wanted to listen to, and listened to the radio instead.
My plan is to take the $10/mo that I was spending on my subscription, buy a new album every month or two, and really listen to it before moving on to the next new thing.
The solution is to be a lot more critical about which songs you save. All of those other songs are still there, you can find them quickly if you want to listen to them again. But your saved songs should be the absolute favorites.
After 6 months, I have 718 saved tracks, and the rate at which I add new songs has significantly tapered off. I occasionally stumble across a song that makes me go "why did I save that?", and off the list it goes.
For the past couple of weeks, I've been on a massive Miles Davis kick - particularly the Agharta album (which, in the author's terms, is one of the ten albums for me, that thing you want all other music to be). I'm trying hard to grok certain Miles phrases harmonically, and capture the tonality of his trumpet with a guitar, which is very challenging.
Work has given me a 300 mile each way commute this week, so I decided to spend the long highway hours listening to the collected works of Wilco (I have every Wilco album), beginning to end. This gets me listening to albums I usually ignore, like A.M., and hearing the evolution of the music. Highway drives are also a good time to dig into progressive rock albums - the musical equivalent of 800 page novels, that reward close, long listens.
I get the idea here: wanting to have a deeper familiarity with some albums you've only heard once (personally, I listen to albums/EPs before passing any judgement) maybe some of them by a band that has produced one of your "masterpiece" records.
But, on the other hand, I don't get why subjecting yourself strictly to some music would be good. I find it better to listen to new music or music I have not digested yet along with music that I love already.
Just make it part of your routine. Do you want to listen to that obscure album? Just put it between some other music you enjoy or make that one your first listen of the day. Making it part of your routine is a good idea but variety is good and, in the case of the author, unavoidable. Especially because the author is a record producer.
This is a no-go idea for me.
In some ways, it is kind of like how learning programming can change the way you view a computer.
Of course, I’m assuming he isn’t based on no mention of it in the article.
The natural result of observing and loving something is the desire to copy it. That’s what humans do.
Such a lopsided preference for consumption over production suggests to me that the author has some extreme repression, fear, etc. around making music, and that energy is being channeled into this weird need to consume and judge other people’s music.
I’d probably be this way if I didn’t make anything too.
Just my 2 cents.
I realized this about myself a year or so back... I'd collected a lot of guitars, some reasonably rare, but most of them weren't getting played, and were sitting in their cases or on the wall. Given the amount of free time I have, there's no way I can really play a dozen guitars.
I'd turned into a collector rather than a guitar player. So I'm in the process of selling most of them, leaving me with one of each type - 6 and 12-string acoustic, National resonator, a lap steel and an acoustic bass. And the weird thing is that I'm playing more and thinking about the music more and the 'stuff' less.
I have a strange relationship with recorded music. I find I know stuff off by heart after 3 or 4 listens, and it lasts in memory. I can replay tracks in my head, separate out the separate instrumental parts... I could sing you the bass lines to any tune from 'Heavy Weather', even though I haven't listened to it for years. And this remembered music plays pretty continuously on my internal player, whether I want it to or not - anyone else find that?
There are a few tunes/songs that are in some way 'perfect'... I can listen to them endlessly and they have a physical effect, but they are few and far between.