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

Well, true, but lots of novelists and musicians who were awful people, sadly, needed a marriage and children to exploit for their best work. Not a position I endorse.

I don't know I'd call it "reactionary." I guess at a certain age some people feel like they don't need to travel and explore the world, learn other cultures and languages, and try new foods. They might also accept erectile dysfunction as just another phase of their lives. To each their own, I guess.

there's a case to be made for all of these - to argue that the asked-and-answered question is "one must always be seeking new experiences" is, yes, a reactionary position imo

like, the person whose position is "rather than know all there is to know about one area, I must keep learning about many others" is properly called a dilettante, and few would consider that a flattering term

this happened to me after a couple years of doing weekly college radio shows, where I encountered new music faster than I could process and form opinions about it; playing whichever track from this random new sublime frequencies release had the coolest-sounding title got old after a while and so I pretty much stopped seeking out new stuff. but I'm always happy to listen to anything that crosses my path.

lol is dilettanteism (musical or otherwise) still considered a "bad" thing?

Shakey - my split is roughly the same as I seem to dig up post-punk nuggets and obscuro Aussie garage-punk bands annually but my ability to LOVE new music has diminished (but not extinguished). Part of it I attribute to simply having been exposed to that much more music by age 40 than age 20. Something that might've sounded fresh 20 years ago makes me think "that's a female-fronted Buzzcocks", which isn't bad just not something I'm going to fall in love with.

I'd rather be a dilettante than a reactionary, honestly.

Word.

btw if people because of how they're wired or whatever are going to tell me how much new music sucks, i don't really have a problem taking a "reactionary" position in return.

lol is dilettanteism (musical or otherwise) still considered a "bad" thing?

valid question! to me - actually, yeah, I gotta be honest - somebody who can't speak with authority about anything but can weigh in with a sort of enough-to-pass opinion isn't really somebody in whose opinion I'm interested; I would rather hear from people who've gone to the trouble to know what they're talking about. but I think we kinda live in a dilettante world, Google/Wikipedia rather settles the question, anybody who wants to know enough about anything to argue about it can copy & paste to their heart's content

but to my mind yeah a dilettante is a person who's not seriously engaged with anything = a dull person

btw if people because of how they're wired or whatever are going to tell me how much new music sucks, i don't really have a problem taking a "reactionary" position in return.

not clear as to why one needs any kind of reciprocal position tho

because one is having the discussion, i guess.

re: first point i would rather hear from people that know what they're talking about too! but i have minimal interest in projecting my opinion about many topics onto others--i'd only say i "speak with authority" on 2 or 3 topics and music isn't one--i love it, am constantly seeking out more, but would rather listen to the best afrofunk record than 10 3rd tier death metal records or whatever comparison you like. so i have no ish with dilettanteism being applied to me in some fields.

(btw yes i do have a rarely-used music tumblr and it is essentially written for my friends for whom the title of this thread is extremely applicable)

I don't mind "dilettantism" if it's part of a fox vs hedgehog continuum.

Maybe it takes being older to realize you can have new experiences with what you have. Otherwise, maybe people of a certain age, kids-having or not, are too busy traveling, eating new foods, learning other languages, having sex, etc., to worry about new music?

Either way, I have glimpsed the value of patience--you'll get into stuff when you get into it.

I have glimpsed the value of patience--you'll get into stuff when you get into it.

Preach on! Music will be there, waiting for you, when you're ready...

lol had to look that up alfred but i see what you mean

Maybe it takes being older to realize you can have new experiences with what you have.

sorta like a cross between madeleine-eating proust and john woo's phillip k. dick's PAYCHECK

I will try to locate the key study, it sort of confirmed something everybody kind of already knows intuitively i.e. the music you loved most from 16-22 will always seem like the best music to you.

We've had discussions of this before and I think that's far too sweeping. it's definitely not true in my case. In many ways I see my teen and early 20s taste as aberrations, with my pre-teen and 30s on taste as being more me. (This is not to say I like nothing from me teens and early 20s or that I don't continue to like some new music that builds on what I listened to then. But overall I don't think it's held up for me.) I have not really followed a normal developmental pattern though.

So I don't intuitively know this, but it may very well be true for most people.

alternately, yr teen/early 20s self might view your current self as an appalling sellout

anything is possible!

i feel this way about dubstep/wonky/purple fans

alternately, yr teen/early 20s self might view your current self as an appalling sellout

If my teenage self were to come back and tell me I'm a sellout it wouldn't be because of the music I listen to, it would be because I am not in jail for participating in anti-war civil disobedience or something of that sort.

And fuck him, because if anything I wish I had sold out more by putting more value on money.

my teenage self would tell me I sold out by not being dead yet and I gotta hand it to him, he's right

so true.

I'm still too close to my teenage self to have much perspective on this but I imagine any interaction with him would be Sad and Quiet

Sad and Quiet was like my bread and butter

... but man, did I ever listen to some fuckin' music!

I think that my teenage self would be incredibly fucking annoying to be around.

I just got a full time job and have been feeling lately like new music sucks. I blamed it on a weak start to 2010 but OMG IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME???

2010 has been great for new music, so . . . ?

you can trust me on this, because i'm old.

I'm 38, with a wife, 2 kids a mortgage and a buttload of bills. That hasn't stopped me from seeking out and enjoying new music. I don't feel like I'm too old to listen to Sleigh Bells, MIA or any other cool band. I've even willed myself into liking Animal Collective. I draw the line at Grizzly Bear though.

But I don't feel like what's coming out now is "my" music, the way I felt about Daydream Nation, Nevermind, Slanted & Enchanted and Loveless when they all came out.

And forget out live music. Seeing bands has pretty much gone out the window.

there's a wealth of music in the underground scene for all generations if they make the effort and have a clue where to look for new music

thing is, you're going to have a hell of a time making a moral argument for why it's important to expend effort in this particular direction, especially when the alternatives become things like "reading to your children"

one thing I think about often is that if you're someone who really likes music, there may come a point in your life where you already really love more songs and albums than you'd have time to listen to even once a year, or longer, and I imagine that at that point the burning desire to find, evaluate, and get into new things is going to fade, for some people. (I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to listen to your all-time favorite music on, say, a six-year loop, each one with this whole patina of sudden memories accreting around it)

the thing that keeps me from trending toward that is the fact that I don't get so much enjoyment from a lot of stuff I used to like -- and in a utilitarian sense it's hard to claim that's a good thing! I mean, do you realize how much time and money it would save if we could just continue liking everything as much as we always did? some people do, I think! they are richer than us and getting more exercise and learning new things!

I'm 38, with a wife, 2 kids a mortgage and a buttload of bills. That hasn't stopped me from seeking out and enjoying new music. I don't feel like I'm too old to listen to Sleigh Bells, MIA or any other cool band. I've even willed myself into liking Animal Collective. I draw the line at Grizzly Bear though.

But I don't feel like what's coming out now is "my" music, the way I felt about Daydream Nation, Nevermind, Slanted & Enchanted and Loveless when they all came out.

yeah this IIRC is what the study was about - not "you stop being interested in music," but you stop connecting to stuff that's new-to-you as strongly: your ability to classify something as "life-changing" dwindles, not to say dies out entirely. i.e., nothing that comes along after a certain age is likely to join your pantheon of Greatest Bands of All Time. to really control for this, you'd need to have some research subjects who were shielded from canonical stuff & then exposed to it after some targeted age: does a person who's never heard the Beatles really find them that mindblowing if his first exposure to them is in his mid-thirties? etc. experiments like this will necessarily involve almost inhuman cruelty, but I'll do anything for science.

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

As a possible counterpoint to kornrulez6969's post, I'm 39, single, bill and mortgage free, etc., and still seek out new music and so forth -- or even more accurately, am assisted by the fact (which still bemuses me but at the same time is kinda what I wanted, after all) that I'll have a steady stream of new music sent to me due to my work, in combination with those things I search on my own. Yet the change I experienced is less one of thinking that new stuff isn't 'my' music -- not really the case, I find -- as it is a more general redirection towards a collage of other interests, some new and some dormant then reawakened in recent years. I think the biggest change can be measured simply by the fact that years ago I would never not have something playing in the background, where over time simple silence is its own reward. The mind redirects and the results can be surprising but just as satisfying. In turn, the volcanic impact of that first hearing of "Soon" may never be repeated for me, per underrated aerosmith's posts, but I'm glad I had it rather than never having had it at all.

so do ppl stop being interested in music because they don't "connect to it the same way" anymore? i mean i freely admit nothing will mean as much to me as shit i heard when i was 17 but that doesn't stop me from seeking new stuff i might just really, really like.

Not sure if this answers your question, but I was going back through my mp3 archives from 2003/2004, maybe the last period when I totally lived for music and I have hundreds of immaculately organized folders sorted by label, artist, genre, etc. Now if I ever do download music it just joins the unregulated clusterfuck in my "Home" folder. I sold of all my CDs (thousands of them) last year, bought a new turntable and have a tiny almost portable selection of LPs (all of them bought for cheap) that I play over and over, most of it far from "new" music. I still love music, I just don't have TIME to put WORK into hearing music anymore.

But I don't feel like what's coming out now is "my" music, the way I felt about Daydream Nation, Nevermind, Slanted & Enchanted and Loveless when they all came out.

(grizzly bear would suck no matter when u heard it, tho)

xxxpost -- ha -- I totally understand why not-listening-backwards goes with "collecting" -- like it's this impulse to keep absorbing and assimilating more stuff into your world, and having a physical record of it -- but it's also kinda funny and paradoxical: if someone doesn't go back to music they already know, they can save a lot of storage space by just digesting it and then tossing or selling it

I'm sure there's a relevant borges story but I can't decide which one it would be. maybe "the book of sand"?

adamrl this is for a different thread but it's really, really easy to hear new music these days

maybe, sure

But you know, it's all shit =D

that's more like it!

I quite like that DJ Sprinkles thing

anyway...

Haha but then I was also standing in Origami the other day and marvelling that they have re-released all the Mudhoney records on vinyl! I had to convince myself that I don't really NEED to buy Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge for a second time just because I loved it when I was 14 and haven't even thought about it for over a decade. I'm sure there's plenty of new music better than that record. What have I/we become?

Aren't you the guy who said his wife tended to listen to her box set of The Police only when he wasn't around, or was that someone else?

oh yeah AC/DC and the Police are perennial bones of contention between us tis true

I've been following this thread and meaning to post since yesterday...all the comments about relationships and musical first loves and only having so much time for everything also speak to my situation.

At the moment I'm not really seeking out any new music, but at the beginning of the year I went through a voracious phase of loading 20 albums at a time on Spotify and making financially irresponsible batch album purchases. I'm sure the desire will drift back but right now my spare thoughts are focused on planning my next camping trip or working out a better way of stopping the earwigs from eating my bean plants rather than hearing every album on Olde English Spelling Bee. I've been passionate about music for about 15 years now, it seems strange to think that there's a virtue in never shifting my focus to things I know less about. I have accumulated more musical knowledge over the years than is socially acceptable, but pretty much everyone on my street knows more about gardening than I do - suggesting I should put more energy into the latter than the former.

Another reason people tend to get less interested in new music---when you start discovering all these bands, everybody in them is much older and presumably much cooler than you are. Some of them are from another generation entirely like John Lennon/Bob Dylan.

But then as you get older, the bands become closer to your age. Then younger. It gets really depressing when the bands that are considered "old" are all made up of people fucking ten years younger than you are.

Ten years? Try twenty...or more.

i was pleasantly surprised to note that the bands who made my three favourite records of last year are all older than me (and i'm no spring chicken). i'm pretty sure that's coincidental..

Paul Weller is older than me, so everything's ok in 2010...