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

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

its not that i think ive heard it before, i havent, but ive heard it better. lots of hip hop/pop/R&B sounds brand spanking new cos of the tech theyre using but it doesnt mean its not shit.

Hurting 2 should definitely enlighten us all as to what we feel. I had no idea I felt those things & I am definitely refreshed and uplifted by this knowledge.

I haven't read this whole thread so sorry if this is redundant but this is really just all about identity, right? Like a certain small group of people self-identify as being "really into music" and part of that identity is the idea that you keep up on all the new music and have something to say about all the new bands. But often people's identities change over time and they change so that there are things they consider more important to their lives and their self-conceptions than making the effort to listen to every single new band. My wife is like this, she loves music and sometimes she'll latch on to some new band I'm listening to but if left to her own devices she'd pretty much just listen to the Pixies and Throwing Muses and other stuff she liked in college. Over the past few years, she's been a lot more interested in getting pregnant and being a good mom, and I think her dominant identity right now is "mother to be" rather than "music fan," which seems healthy and normal. It's not really that unusual to change as a person over time.

Personally, I kinda quit paying attention to music around ten years ago when I started playing in my own bands and getting involved in the local music scene. Over that time I'v pretty much focused all my attention on local artists, CDr releases, 7"s, 3 or 4 gigs a week, etc. Some of my high school favorites I still keep track of (Flaming Lips for example) but I really haven't heard anything that interested me as much as something one of my friends made.

On that note, I can see if I ever have a kid or end up with a full-time job again, I'll probably slip away from those connections.

re: levitin's this is your brain on music, i'm a big fan of dumbed-down-for-masses books but in this case, I think it might be worth seeking out the primary sources --
I don't know if Levitin still teaches, but if you can get ahold of his course materials, they are a lot richer without being harder to digest.

Well, the reason I'm interested in the Levitin book is because I read the Sacks book (which was a lot of primary source type stuff) and found it almost too dense and technical in places. (And I'm a happy devourer of quite technical SCIENCE! books.) So I kinda want to read the dumbed down populist version as well.

the Levitin book is good if dry in spots.

i've definitely had periods of not being interested in any new music at all, but lately i've been genuinely enjoying "keeping up", and i that's due to 1) trying to finish a record over the past year made me feel like i had some sort of stake in what's going on, at least in certain niches, and 2) being discerning about the full-length records i actually listen to. it's easier than ever to check out one or two tracks from a band, but if i torrented everything just because it might be interesting i would go f'n insane from the media overload. i've really been enjoying getting one or two records a month that i'm pretty sure i'll be really into, and actually listening to them (like in high school, kinda).

I haven't read this whole thread so sorry if this is redundant but this is really just all about identity, right?

see i don't really agree w/this in the sense that you are talking about--music is v. personal for me, i really only listen to it while alone, almost never talk about it irl with my gf or anyone else, don't feel the need to "keep up" so i'm part of something or have something to say--it's p. much just a fulfilling hobby for me and something to do when i walk or drive somewhere. i guess if you ask ppl who know me they all know i have fucktons of records but i don't feel like my "identity" is tied up in that.

I kind of disliked the Levitin book? Seemed too basic.

there was a tapeop interview with Levitin that was pretty good -- and his college lectures were good as well, without being overly technical -- to the point that I wished he had released a compilation of things like that instead of the book.