like, all the people who really do love music, but at some point stop seeking more. what are they all about?

I dunno, I tend to have even less patience for a lot of mature work as such now.

33, married with a 3 month old daughter, full time job, part time music business and going back to school.

At this point my life feels like I have to shove 10 pounds of crap into a five pound bag. Oddly, I feel the opposite about finding new music. I hardly have time to listen to it, so when I can find a couple hours to listen to and organize records in my studio it feels like heaven.

The flip side of that is that I cannot engage with digital media, CD's or LP's for that matter. The only format I can really get into is the single. I don't have the time or attention span to engage with larger works. When I listen to music I usually just throw on a handful of sides and listen to them.

I also find myself not engaging in new music inside of my genre as much at the moment. I think that has more to do with me not having access to a decent physical record store that stocks what I am into at the moment. I still can't get my head around download stores or getting mp3 promos of new records. If it isn't on vinyl, it isn't real to me right now. Limiting myself to vinyl is the only way I can deal with the flood of music that is out there right now.

I did come across a huge collection of dance records from 1980 to about 1996 at a local store out here recently. It came from a distributor who went under and a closed used record shop in NYC, and the records sat in a warehouse for about 15 years. I bought about eight linear feet of this collection for about two dollars a record. I feel like it is going to take me about a year to know all of these records that I bought. It feels great to dig through these records and find a great track on one of the records. The thrill is definitely still there, I just wish there was more time in my day to chase that thrill.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is a lot of great music out there and there is more being made every day. I only wish I had time to engage with more of it. I am one of those people who really needs to spend a lot of time with a piece of music before I feel like can appreciate and enjoy all the nuances of a piece of music. My listening habits were never in line with the ipod music experience. Even when I was young I felt it was better to know a few records really well, I just wish there was more time to invest in entering other people's musical worlds.

I still can't get my head around download stores or getting mp3 promos of new records. If it isn't on vinyl, it isn't real to me right now. Limiting myself to vinyl is the only way I can deal with the flood of music that is out there right now.

You actually touch upon something that has been one of my best strategies for recent years, namely knowing where to draw limits -- or rather, knowing that limits drawn, however potentially arbitrary, are often necessary to create a context and space. Not that we haven't talked about it before on here on other threads, but I've tended to apply it broadly in various areas of culture, not just musically. It's a slight recognition on my part that a little caution prevents against going off a deep end.

i think it has a lot to do with curiosity. some people maintain it about music (and fashion and other stuff deemed adolescent by people who don't care about it), and others don't.

The fashion comparison is an interesting one to me.

Obv there are some people who go from being interested in fashion to actually not caring at all - fashion becomes

entirely

And then there's a lot of people whose interest in fashion gets channelled through very functional and accordingly restrictive (even staid) channels - e.g. if you're a guy who works professionally, it's likely that your thoughts about fashion as it applies to you become more heavily focused on suits, shirts, ties etc. You might still have strong ideas of what is stylish and what is not but the broader context is one of functionalism.

more generally what you see, even with casual fashion, is that for most people as they get older their taste stops changing so much. "Youth fashion" changes heaps, but the stuff that's marketed at the 30-50 bracket (male and female) changes very little, occasionally receiving the outer ripples of some big splash elsewhere but that's about it (e.g. the 30-50 hetero male bracket have almost entirely resisted the trend back towards skinny-leg jeans and pants). These people might still care about what they wear and about looking good, and may spend as much or more on their clothes than they did when they were young, but the notion of "keeping up" with trends stops mattering so much - indeed, these people might start to talk about (or at least agree with the idea of) certain styles being "timeless".

And of course there are lots of middle-aged people who do keep up with fashion pretty obsessively, who are the fashion equiv. of adults keeping up with the charts or with generalist music magazines or websites.

And people who keep up with a particular strand of changing taste while ignoring the rest (e.g. they jumped onto the trend towards fishermen's pants 8-10 years ago but have ignored the skinny jeans trend) - these are like people who follow jazz or folk or whatevs pretty closely and almost exclusively, go to live gigs etc.

And people who seem stuck in a fashion timewarp (you know the music equiv).

But the largest group I think fall within that "timeless" category.

The commonality on both sides of the equation is that the importance of taste comes down to two possible motivants:

1) your relationship to the object of taste; and

2) changes in your own life, regardless of their relationship to the object of taste; and

Taste never stops mattering, but the need to reform or develop your taste is most urgent when your personality/life in general is in upheaval (or at least development), as per (2) above.

If/When your persona firms up, e.g. "I am Tim who works at this job and lives in this suburb and am in a long term relationship with that person" then (2) starts to recede. Your taste at that point is likely only to continue to transform on a regular basis if the firmed-up-persona already and still considers the relationship to the object of taste to be a relatively central fact of yr existence. The jazz (or whatever) fan who still keeps up with developments in jazz but ignores the rest is someone to whom "keeping up with jazz" is important but "keeping up" in general is anything but.

The justifications for not keeping up are entirely subjective of course and it comes down to utility to one's own life and the way in which taste is received and judged socially. A 50 year old guy is likely to look better in a suit than in skinny jeans and a t-shirt featuring a photo of a young river phoenix, but this is basically a matter of social convention rather than expressive of some ultimate core "truth" about fashion.

It seems like at some point discovering the years' hottest new album or best new band, or even hearing "great new music" from any era, seems to mean less, and maybe that's because the adolescent's lust for sensation and thrills starts to fade, or the pride in being on top of the music scene and knowing what's new and good doesn't mean as much, or even make sense, when you're older.

The law of diminishing returns am i rite

― Cunga, Monday, June 28, 2010 10:00 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark

dunno, I find that the more I learn from an era makes the whole picture of music seem richer and more fleshed out. My love is 12" dance records from 1975 to today. The more I learn about those old records, the more I enjoy the whole spectrum of dance music. The tapestry of the music gets richer and richer the more I know.

That being said, I have spend the last six years in places where my interests in music had virtually no social value whatsoever. I had to be motivated by the reward of enriching my own inner world because there was no way I could discuss my interests without seeming either pretentious or just plain weird.

I think you can love music purely for it's own sake. That being said, I don't think that is the only valid way to listen to music. There is nothing wrong with using music as a badge for your place in youth culture. There is nothing wrong with outgrowing music. Life is a great big place, it isn't anyone's place to judge others when they arrive at different destinations in life with different priorities. Do people who are super into food look down on us because we obsess over bits of plastic rather than really good local organic food?

Oh ilx I just log off for a few hours and there's now 127 comments posted in less than six hours.

I'll give a cookie to anyone who has been reading the whole thread and can tell who has posted the most OTM comments so far.

The usual suspects.

I dunno if this resonates with anyone else, but TV got really good, and it's much, much easier now to find the good TV than the good almost-anything-else.

The social capital afforded by loving music really dropped off for me after high school. I don't think it was age---as soon as I went to college, everyone was into different things besides music & so it's been a pretty personal journey since. I don't have any other pop arty interests (no tv, no film) but I notice that those buy a lot more social capital in my peer groups, i.e. you can talk about Glee or The Wire with people, but if I want to talk about e.g. Taylor Swift then I'm outta luck. (Hence why I come here.)

If/When your persona firms up, e.g. "I am Tim who works at this job and lives in this suburb and am in a long term relationship with that person" then (2) starts to recede. Your taste at that point is likely only to continue to transform on a regular basis if the firmed-up-persona already and still considers the relationship to the object of taste to be a relatively central fact of yr existence.

Great post, Tim. I would call this some kind of "comfort zone". Of course, I - try to - fight against it. Of course it's inevitable at some point. But it seems very silly, very non critical to surrender too. Does not always work, and i always end up seeing at some point i'm fooling myself, or being intellectually dishonest. I think that anyone who - or try to - resists it really can be critical at some degree.

agree very much w/ tim's point, but i think the process can perhaps be at least slightly less dependent on psychological need, on how we conceptualize ourselves. i mean, i'm a 40+ music fan, and i know that a big part of what keeps me engaged w/ new music is my desire to feel current, up-to-date, "hip", or whatever. i can't deny that. the same impulse makes me wary of nostalgia & habit, so i refuse to spend too much of my time with the music i've loved the best and longest.

but there's also the fact that, for me, the rewards of music change over time. no music is infinitely capable of providing "that feeling". it gets played out, becomes weirdly dry and distant with time. that can't be avoided, but the more i engage with new music & culture, the more i find that my entire frame of reference changes and keeps changing. i absolutely LOVED early grunge & retro garage rock in the late 80s and early 90s, and i kept that love burning for quite a while. but over the past decade or so, it's started to fade. i still like the songs i used to like, but can't help viewing the musical choices involved differently. the cock-rock excess and bombastic production that seemed so funny and intuitively correct way back when now often strike me as foolish, unimaginative and dull. same goes for richer, less formally derivative music that i loved even more: the pixies, sonic youth, etc., though in different ways and to a lesser extent.

i have changed, and so the music changes, and in doing so, almost always seems to move away from me. as a result, i can only keep myself interested by finding new things to be interested in, and i love being interested, being excited. in this regard, feeding novel ideas into the system is crucial. novelty keeps my concept of musical reality off balance, forces it to constantly reorient itself. this allows me to continually experience a shock i find pleasurable, but it also keeps me from ever becoming too comfortable in relation to older stuff. my point being that my relationship to music has at least as much to do with the function and effect of music in my life as with defending my sense of the kind of person i am.

If you've grown up equating knowledge with self-worth, which is a natural enough defense mechanism for a lot of smart, awkward kids, it can be liberating to take some time off from keeping up with the new stuff. It's a way of saying you no longer feel like you have anything to prove. (Also, taking a break from increasing your breadth of knowledge gives you time to concentrate on depth.)

Tim is otm about the relationship between stability in your life/ persona and the development of your tastes, but I think I would take it further and say that the role of your tastes in the formation of your identity is only part of the equation. Barring a soporifically comfortable life, I think fear of becoming intellectually stagnant is just as powerful a motivator as the degree to which a person's tastes are part of their identity. Once you've established the habit of turning to music for intellectual stimulation and novelty, it seems likely that devoting all your energies to simply consolidating your tastes will eventually become unsatisfying, and you'll get restless and start craving newness.

Or at least I did, anyways. By the time I finished a lengthy consolidation period in my 20s (almost no new music for two years!), I was craving novelty, strangeness, and unfamiliarity, just as contenderizer describes above. Resolving the depth (consolidation of your established tastes) vs. breadth (familiarizing yourself with new things) problem is one of the most fun parts of being "a person who really loves music", really: seeking out new things without becoming a mere follower of trends, enjoying old things without becoming stuck in the past.

I guess my comparison with fashion can imply it's all in the mind and that all choices are arbitrary and meaningless.

but of course someone actually into fashion would really contest this.

my point being that my relationship to music has at least as much to do with the function and effect of music in my life as with defending my sense of the kind of person i am.

I guess the question is where does the first part of this sentence start and the second part finish? or vice versa. "who I am" and "the function and effect of music in my life" seem pretty inextricable to me.

I dunno, I think "music as something fun to talk about with other people" ≠ "music as a definition of who I am". Which is just to say that "the function and effect of music in my life" is a pretty broad category and includes "instrumental" functions such as promoting conversation (thought of as an end in itself).

i'm surprised so much of this thread has focused on our personal reactions to music, how a song can affect us individually, rather than the importance of general cultural awareness, whereby "keeping up with music" is basically the same as "keeping up with current affairs" (given that i am - we are - people ho take an interest in culture as a general thing, not just specific bits and pieces of it)

"Keeping up with current affairs" doesn't necessarily make a person more political or a deep thinker about the world and what's going on in it. It's quite possible to have a superficial pub quiz knowledge of current events, but even then what you're usually talking about is a very specific set of talking points covered by a limited number of media. I'd argue that even a reasonably diligent news junkie only has the most partial grasp of what's going on in the world. News is a selective snapshot I think, not a mirror into how most people are living their lives on any given day.

Likewise with your idea of keeping up with what's current in music, I think. There's too much going on to really be "keeping in touch" with anything other than a slice of what's maybe relevant to you and your social/cultural circle. But that's not the whole world, and a lot of the world will be more taken up with music that's old or music that's outside of the media altogether. Defining what's "now" in music seems a very subjective and sort of doomed task to me.

I agree that a certain kind of curmudgeonly back-turning on any modern culture is usually the mark of a reactionary idiot, but culture isn't events - culture can be thousands of years old and still maintain currency, because it's shaped by whoever's using it right now.

I hardly listen to anything I already know I like, outside of classical music, by the way - I consider this part of the music collector sickness, & I'm OK with that

Heh, even when I put on old stuff I know I like it's because I can barely remember what it sounded like - up to about age 17 stuff is pretty firmly imprinted on my brain, after that it is "oh, that was a good record I bought at the same time as 10 other ok-to-good records, now what the hell did it sound like?"

think I have a special musical amnesia (gave up on learning the guitar because if a song wasn't in my head I couldn't manage to play it at all) but still, for all I can remember of most albums I go back to, I may as well be back in the record shop picking them up unheard except for one track or the vague knowledge that someone once said they were a bit like someone else

i went through a phase about 5-10 years ago (i'm 35 now) where i rarely sought out new music because there was so much out there, i had some pathological fear of buying (or buying into) the "wrong thing." i eventually concluded that it was okay to admit ignorance, be a dilettante, and like what i found pleasurable, as opposed to thinking, "i am this kind of person, i should like this music and not like this other music."

i don't know if this unusual here, but most of my irl are musicians or involved in various music scenes in different ways, so listening to music, talking about music, and going to shows is a significant part of feeling socially "connected." i've lost track of how many times i've had similar conversations with people irl as i've had (or read) on ilx.

last week, i and two other friends, both in their mid-30s were trying to understand what chillwave is. In my social circle, there's a good faith effort to be aware of what's going on in more mainstream music culture, but it isn't a priority, because most of the attention is paid to people's own work and that of their friends and peers, and folks a few steps above or below in the cultural "ecosystem." So, it's okay to not know what chillwave is, and it's okay to express curiosity about it.

Hrrmmm. Wonder if it is very much hormonal during adolescence - then is my current "OMG, I want to hear MOAR AND MOAR NEW TYPES OF MUSIKS!!!" rush that I'm on equally hormonal, due to the menopause being in the post?

i would think that menopause, for most women, does not correlate with a need to hear new music.

New experiences, though - because it often gets bundled up with Empty Nest Syndrome, and that's when yr Stereotypical Woman takes up basket-weaving, dumps their husband and flies off to Greece and other such cliches. Because my chosen experiential preference is music, that's how I experience it, perhaps?

yeah, that's just what i was thinking - pursuing one's passions? Like when my mom hit menopause it was all about taking extended learning classes about modern European history at Stanford and taking frequent trips to France and trying as many different kinds of cheese as she could.

the research into musical taste & brain chemistry that aerosmith cites upthread is discussed at length in this fascinating book:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_JbTmZQDvs7Y/SEOE-3WI6sI/AAAAAAAAA8E/dGaenZ8m9mE/s320/this+is+your+brain+on+music+daniel+levitin.jpg

^^^^ I mean to read that, after reading Oliver Sacks Musicophilia.

On a personal level: I was going to say I stopped "seeking more music" a while ago but this isn't really true...its more the way I seek music has changed...I don't 'actively seek' in a way where I MUST hear xyz. And yet since I became more languid about this, I've heard more great new music than before. I wouldn't say my approach is passive exactly but I seem to hear the things I want to hear...a new thing opens the door to some other new things, but I don't feel like I'm chasing things, they just come

i'm surprised so much of this thread has focused on our personal reactions to music, how a song can affect us individually, rather than the importance of general cultural awareness, whereby "keeping up with music" is basically the same as "keeping up with current affairs" (given that i am - we are - people ho take an interest in culture as a general thing, not just specific bits and pieces of it)

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend),

But yes on a wider level this has come somewhat at the expense of general cultural awareness. Was talking about this with a friend the other week...there was a period of time when I did this more...but at that time felt like there was an subconscious internal pressure to have an opinion on all these things when actually I didn't have much of an opinion on them at all...ended up hearing lots of things I neither liked nor disliked

xpost

Musicophilia is v. good too, more anecdotal/personal. Levitin zeros in on the questions raised here in great detail. research indicates that the brain uses music to encode all kinds of memory. studies suggest there is a point in late adolescence/early adulthood when our physical capacity for processing new music peaks (or begins to deteriorate...)*

*wildly inaccurate paraphrase

I'm happy to let other people curate 'new music' for me, so in a few years time I can revisit and explore the cream of the crop, as it were. That's what I've been doing anyway ever since I formed my 'taste' as such - going back to influences, to find what I missed, etc. Even looking backwards can open new doors.

In any case I already do it, to a greater or lesser extent, with books (I've got a shelf full of 'em, only a few 'new' when they were purchased), movies and television (DVD box sets ahoy), so why not music?

As you can tell, I don't really care too much for 'cultural awareness'; I find I absorb enough the web and TV that I can make a passing guess at what's happening, but I don't consider that integral to my own private experience.

That should be 'enough FROM the web'

"you must keep up with music just like current affairs"

this is like knowing the football scores so you can chat with people at work or w/e

don't keep up with contemporary dance/architecture/___________

too busy keeping up with stuff i want to keep up with

Fantastic thread.

I definitely identify with the idea that your window for seismic, life-changing experiences with music closes after a certain point. But I bet it has as much to do with brain chemistry as the realistic fact that as you get older, you become more familiar with various sounds and styles. I got excited about Pavement and Sonic Youth in high school, and Stereolab and Tortoise in college, because I had never really heard anything like these bands. And it was also exciting to think that there was so much else left to explore. Now that I'm in my 30s, there's still a ton of music I haven't heard, but I've heard enough that little really blows me away as an amazing new discovery. For better or worse, I'm more able to put it into context.

I feel like I've had two phases of being a serious music fan. When I was younger and interested in identity formation, I felt like part of seeking out music was in order to refine my tastes. So once I began to gravitate toward a certain set of sounds, I only really listened to those sounds for a while. I wanted to be able to point to very specific bands and say, "This. This is me."

After college, I self-consciously tried to expand out of this dead end, but it wasn't really until I discovered ILM at age 24 that I adopted my current mp3-collector dilettantist approach. The idea of being somewhat knowledgeable about a wide variety of music and genres appealed to the librarian-archivist in me, and the technological environment of the '00s made it more possible than ever. Make no mistake, this was still identity-driven to an extent: I took a fair amount of pride in my catholicism and in challenging friends who dared to dismiss entire musical genres. At the same time, I never felt like I had enough time or energy to really dig far beyond what I discovered on a handful of blogs or websites, and lately, I have even less. I'm still hearing far more than most people I know, but at this point I'm mostly just keeping up with new releases (which are easily downloadable) rather than going out of my way to investigate older stuff I haven't heard.

i still love music but ive become kinda jaded about it, both as i find most modern pop to just be forgettable, hip hop and R&B no longer do much for me, the last big thing i was into was grime. i also find i just have less time to really get into albums like before. and i generally hate listening on my ipod as i hate mp3s (though i still do it). this is all prob just because im getting older, dont want to be as obsessed with music as i used to be when it was EVERYTHING to me and i would spend most of my days thinking about it (i find im trying to read/find out more about other arts), and also as i cant really seem to find any way of making money from working with/in music like i used to, so im probably a bit pissed off/cynical from that pov. but the music itself just doesnt do it for me like it did. apart from a few things like uk funky etc. its actually a bit sad to me how i dont spend nearly as much time listening deeply to music like i used to. but i dont want to listen only to old stuff forever, and i dont want to hear most of the new stuff cos it often feels so inessential really. decent, nice, etc, but just not that vital.

I know a lot of people who do that, they usually have satellite radio or use their television or internet radio, which is more passive but it isn't necessarily "stop seeking more". People are busy, not all of them can have music in their offices either.

My brother loves music and has it on all the time but he would rather let someone else select music for him. Is this bad??

Of course it's not "bad". It's just the idea that one doesn't seek out art but rather accepts whatever art is pushed on them makes me sad... Having said that, I'm making a huge assumption that most people passively accept anything put in front of them and that's clearly not true.

Accepts whatever is pushed on them, or embraces the element of chance and engages without prejudice? You can use whatever phrase you like, it's about some inner logic of your own, not the act of listening.

Some people "accept whatever is pushed on them" because they just enjoy the social feeling of listening to a radio and knowing that its what a bunch of other people are out there listening to. That may not be on the forefront their mind, but its probably similar to the feeling of just having a TV on to keep you company.

It's a terrible phrase, I agree. Most people are not uncritical, either.

but many are.

My brother loves music and has it on all the time but he would rather let someone else select music for him. Is this bad??

i've heard the arguments for this but personally i find it completely incomprehensible. and i especially don't get how someone who claims to love music would let someone else select it ALL the time.

cos sometimes you wanna hear the radio to see if you hear anything you dont already know.

Personally I've gone through tons of phases in my taste, so much so that the shifts don't really seem all that seismic for the most part.

I remember one specific afternoon in eighth grade I was home alone after I had moved to a very small rural town and didn't have any new friends yet; I was watching MTV2 and I saw the videos for Daft Punk - One More Time and Radiohead - Pyramid Song. I wanted to know more so I got on the internet and discovered that I could read about any band I wanted and that opened up the floodgates. I'd always loved music, but on that day I suddenly became obsessed with reading about and discovering new music. It was a very personal thing and my social circle never really grew all that much so my tastes were pretty free to evolve as I became bored, rather than certain sounds becoming deeply tangled up with my persona, although the act of constantly discovering new music, and particularly always having something to put on that "felt right" for that moment or mood did become part of my identity. I devoured all different shades of punk along with various off-shoots of catchy rock-based music, then I discovered indie and post-punk, then I started delving into bits of electronica (Aphex Twin obv, Daft Punk, Ellen Allien, Basement Jaxx) and hip hop and grime.

In college I discovered ILM and parties, both of which presented a new way of engaging with music. I started gravitating towards things that worked well in a social context, DFA and such, and I fell in love with the sound of music with disco in its DNA. This led me to Get Physical and minimal house, and from there I've been forging through loosely disco-based music ever since(I define it that way because I find that when electronic dance music strays from the relatively slower tempos and regular beat of disco/house I tend to lose interest,) with detours into ambient, kraut, pop, hip hop, soul, afrobeat, etc. I haven't had any interest in aggressive rock music since high school, though, and looking back that feels like the least "me" thing I was ever into.

Sorry if that was a long, boring way of answering the thread question, but I feel like looking at the narrative and method of one's engagement with music goes a long way towards explaining why and how people stop feeling like music is all that vital to their life. I think the brain chemistry thing is part of it, but like Tim F said, it isn't specific to music really. I think people just come upon a certain definition of themselves and a habitual way of relating to the world and whether or not discovering new music is a part of that is somewhat incidental. Personally it would take too many words to tease out exactly why finding new music is still important to me, but a big part of it is that I'm just generally fascinated by how music can effect my perception of the world. I'm interested in how the combination of music and visuals (visuals being the world around me) makes me feel. Similar to how a movie soundtrack gives the audience cues for how to feel about a scene. It sounds weird, and maybe overly simplistic, but I love the effect of music and natural light together.

I remember one specific afternoon in eighth grade I was home alone after I had moved to a very small rural town and didn't have any new friends yet; I was watching MTV2 and I saw the videos for Daft Punk - One More Time and Radiohead - Pyramid Song. I wanted to know more so I got on the internet and discovered that I could read about any band I wanted and that opened up the floodgates.

Stories like this have been told before but I enjoy hearing them all the more now, since by default this was very different to my own experience and approach to discovering music. I will be interested to see how this shift continues to play out now with the eighth graders of today and how they're finding out and what that results in.

As others have said above, I'm still interested in hearing new music but it's likely to be new old music, i.e. old stuff that I haven't heard before rather than stuff being made today. My suspicion is that there is already enough music in the world and I'm not convinced that there is a need for any more.

Every time I vaguely think something like that the pieces get put together in a different way again.

also music is not produced in a vacuum, and i don't live in the 1970s, so ideally i'm always going to be looking for something that both comments on and reflects the culture of the moment, if only to help make sense of it. (it helps if it sounds good, too.)

I hate to argue nothing-new-under-the-sun, but I do think at some point you start to feel, if not that you've heard it all, at least that you've heard most of it before. I remember when I was getting into the Chicago Thrill Jockey type stuff for the first time I read negative reviews of Isotope 217 complaining that they sounded like watered-down 70s Miles Davis. At the time I thought the reviewers were a bunch of cranks, but I hadn't really fully delved into the 70s Miles catalog either. At this point I still think those reviewers were wrong, but I sort of understand where they were coming from. I'm increasingly skeptical of claims that a band is doing something genuinely fresh as I tend to be disappointed by those claims 99 times out of 100. A lot of new music, particularly in the indie vein, seems to do superficial sonic variations on a tired formula. Not to say that there isn't new music that sounds genuinely new. Dirty Projectors certainly sounded fresh to me, e.g. Occasionally new hip-hop sounds fresh to me.

I gotta admit I've never understood people like that. I have no clue why anyone would close their ears to new sounds.

new is not necessarily better. hip hop sounds like shit these days imho

I gotta admit I've never understood people like that. I have no clue why anyone would close their ears to new sounds.

― ImprovSpirit, Tuesday, June 29, 2010 12:16 PM Bookmark

Yeah. Probably better to just ignore an entire thread of insights into the phenomenon so we can go on feeling clever classless and free huh?

lex's brave efforts to soldier on under the delusion that paying attention to pop charts is somehow essential to maintaining a connection to other people/the larger social world never fails to amuse