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

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?

It's just really not that important, the whole thing. That doesn't make for interesting discussion, but that's what I think. It matters very little. People need culture and art, but exactly "how much" and which particular cultural stuff is a very open question in my mind. There are lots of ways to live. If I'm going to wring my hands over something, it's going to be people's not doing more to inform themselves about current events/politics. That's what I feel actual pressure to spend more time on. Music is mostly for kicks and for therapy (a drug, in other words).

I like for at least some people to pay attention to music, because it's something that I pay attention to and that makes something to talk about and share, but important--nah.

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to listen to your all-time favorite music on, say, a six-year loop

I'm kinda attempting to do this - I've got a full 160gb iPod and over the last 2 years I've listened to about 35% of it. I figure it's another 3 years before I've listened to everything once (according to my play stats - I've listened to all of it at some point). I must admit the thrill of queuing up some old favorite or why-have-I-played-that-in-two-years album crowds out my bands-to-check-out R&D activities.

Music also has this social currency ,for better or for worse, if you're part of a group of people who actively listen to and discuss new music, you're more likely to seek it out. Or maybe instead you're one of the two OLD dudes broing down over OLD jungle tunes on Youtube after everyone else has left the party/fallen asleep. uhhh....=/

lol admrl

so sad to me that jungle tunes -- a genre that hadn't been invented when i was growing up -- is for the OLD crowd.

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.

I think this is right - that people have a certain sort of experience of music that's so transformative & self-defining that when, after awhile, no music has provided them with that experience for some time, they conclude either that music isn't as good as it used to be or that since they aren't getting from music what they used, they've outgrown it. to me both of these are kinda weird responses - there isn't a single experience aesthetic or otherwise that will be experienced the same way throughout life - food, drink, work, social life, love, everything over time will meet different needs for the person who eats/drinks/works/hangs out/loves, etc. because the person and his needs are always changing, and so his relation to the things in his life/environment also change. some of us though, having had at some point catastrophic/traumatic/peak/life-changing experiences with music, or having somehow defined ourselves in relationship to to it, always include the pursuit of new musical experiences in our overall picture. I personally don't think it's right or wrong to do so or to not do so, or that a person is "missing" anything if they decide, instead, to put their focus elsewhere, any more than I think model trains are a better habit that philately, though when I was a kid, when people would say they didn't have a favorite band or weren't that into music, they might as well have been telling me that they were from Mars and that they had been born there to their parents, Mr & Mrs The Devil

^^^this stuff is creed for me, basically - always pursue, always evolve, always be raving about something to anyone who'll listen

like, for me, discovering Cardiacs was *the* moment of scales-from-eyes wonder and it hasn't been matched per se, but instead it's been amplified and reverberated by subsequent discoveries whose brilliance is manifested in a musical consciousness heavily shaped by Cardiacs but also a myriad other wondrous bands - and my knowledge that this consciousness is ever refining, ever improving, ever broadening makes me more and more confident in my instincts, and in the fact that each new discovery is to be treasured. it's a cumulative widening of the eyes.

Okay. What I'm all about:
1. Childrearing.
2. Already love more music than I can listen to and appreciate over a five-year span.
2a. The knowledge that, as I integrate more new music into my collection, the old stuff-- that I dearly love, and that is so much a part of me still-- will get listened to less and less. And I know I would miss it.
3. The fact that much of my spare time is spent playing in a covers band-- and our musical focus is to play the songs that please the crowds who are older than I am. (!)
4. (and perhaps most important) I listen to music too intently. I can't multitask when I listen to unfamiliar music, because my mind is totally focused on the music, learning it, teasing it out, getting to the bottom of it. Which means that I can't listen to new music when I'm at work, or when I'm talking to my spouse, or when I'm spending time with my child. Which means that the amount of time I can spend listening to new music is down about 90+% from when I was in my twenties (when I had both more time to focus on new music, and better ability to do same).

xxpost -- At one point I would have agreed with that but I now think it's far more key to balance the motion with reflection. The two work in tandem.

I touch on this same stuff here.

I think it's hard to replicate the kind of attachment-forming musical experiences you have when you're a teenager or in college. It may partly be a certain loss of romanticism as you get older. Like I remember smoking up and listening to Coltrane at the Village Vanguard for the first time, and reading the liner notes, and just thinking that it was all like some great cosmic statement or something, and forcing myself to focus intently on every chorus of Chasin the Trane and getting giddy about it. It's hard for me to imagine bringing that same kind of intensity to a new musical experience now.

Certain kinds of musical drugs also just lose potency after a while, like the surprise of a jarring prog rock change or the heaviness of a fuzzed out psych riff. I mean those things are still great, but when you've heard enough of them they stop giving you the same high.

Much of the new music that I'm exposed to sounds perfectly pleasant, which is not criticism, but also points up why it doesn't stay with me. The music that stays with you isn't "perfectly pleasant"--it's NECESSARY.

I believe my view is entirely because I'm old, and the psychic space that most new music would fill (for me) is already taken up by some other, older (not necessarily better) music.

41, wife, child, mortagage, bills. Pretty sure that a lot of what made music seem so magical and compelling in my 20's was the idea that it was going to open up on some other, more interesting and wonderful and possibly technicolor, world: that if I bought the right el release I'd suddenly find myself in Paris discussing film theory with some beautiful and famous music reviewer (because music reviewers all live glamorous lives). The realization that it pretty much doesn't probably puts a bit of a damper on things.

Still seek out new stuff (bless you Rhapsody), but much more interested in filling in gaps. Kind of crazy when you realize that you could probably spend a lifetime tracking down every worthwhile release from like May through June of 1983.

*the ultimate moment of scales-from-eyes wonder, was meant to be the stress there - I've had numerous Damascene overtakings

Oh, not that I don't interleave discovery with COPIOUS re-listens! All the time I'm going back, manically repeating something, luxuriating in a brilliance I know to be there. But I never stay still for too long, and I shift my phases.

Hurting - that's the great thing! I feel mature enough to truly know the music I listen to, to appreciate how it was made, why it was made and who made it - and also revel in it as mental stimulation. I'm also keenly aware I'll never hear all the good music ever made, so these jarring changes and heavy switch-ups and whatever elses will always leap out at me in different permutations, with different narrative imports. Anything that adds vocabulary and idiom is of worth.

This discussion is making me think one of the best quotes on music I've read -- Andrew Eldritch, at the beginning of a 'ten favorite albums ever' piece for Q almost two decades back, said before he ran through his list that he had barely listened to said albums for years and years, instead noting that in his case all he had to do was look at the sleeves and everything about them (and the times spent listening to them) would come back. This is mostly where I'm at now; the newest musical obsessions I have where I am actually listening to the music are quite new indeed, for me if not necessarily general for others.

Oh man, I would love to read that, for the quote & to see what Eldritch picked!

haven't read the thread but I've always suspected my biggest chunks of music consumption (retail, library, borrowing, dl) were when I was pretty much the most miserable.

been pretty happy lately so about once a month I dig deeper into my own collection and start weeding out what I'm not super stoked on. makes the ipod less of a chore to listen to, that is for sure.

Oh man, I would love to read that, for the quote & to see what Eldritch picked!

I can't seem to find my copy of that around and initial searching online turns up nothing, which honestly is surprising me quite a bit!

Lady GaGa isn't being marketed to 40yo heteros, knowhutimean - in a lot of ways new music isn't MADE for old people. it's made by young people, written about by young people, bought by young people, the market continually demands a ferocious rate of turnover and always new new NEW stuff - you can see how this might be unapealling/uninviting to older folks

That's much less true than it used to be i think: my parents were in their 40s during the '60s, and sneered at the Beatles/ Stones etc, and by the time i got into Bowie in my early teens they were just disgusted - it would have been impossible then for people their age to grasp what was going on, I think - whereas I'm 50 this year, and while I don't buy lots of new stuff, my daughter acquires stuff, I hear it, we talk about it in the same terms. Although she find a lot of what I like to be too 'out there' .....

And I still get into new things - although more new to me, even if recorded 50 years ago, than new new.

I'm sure there's a relevant borges story but I can't decide which one it would be.

it's the Library of Babel! the first time each of those librarians found a coherent text, it was probably life-changing. and then I think this thread has already identified all the types: the ones who keep searching for a master catalog, the ones who jump down the airshafts, the ones who decide it's all just random and what's the point ...

pretty much what everyone else has said to one degree or another minus the stuff about kids but especially the bits about too much out there and limited free time i have to split between competing interests and the "high" wearing off to some degree. the junkie phase is over now; hearing something Brand New and Kinda Good no longer does shit for me. but the stuff i've heard (and continue to hear) over the years that lingers, that "has staying power" for whatever reason, i find the experience deepens with each listen. which certainly helps with the process of weeding out shasta describes above.

(you'd think this would be complicated by the fact that i get paid to write about music but once i stopped thinking that i actually got paid to "keep up" with music (versus actually writing about it) things became much, much easier (however much this is actually true given how the writing-about-music economy actually works now).)

Much of the new music that I'm exposed to sounds perfectly pleasant, which is not criticism, but also points up why it doesn't stay with me. The music that stays with you isn't "perfectly pleasant"--it's NECESSARY.

I believe my view is entirely because I'm old, and the psychic space that most new music would fill (for me) is already taken up by some other, older (not necessarily better) music.

THIS. I think this is the best summary of what I've been feeling and trying to express, thanks Slim! I still have annual experiences which either point to "Where has THIS been all my life!" or just thrilling new bands. Not nearly as often as I used to, but it still happens and the yearning for that experience keeps me going.

Kind of crazy when you realize that you could probably spend a lifetime tracking down every worthwhile release from like May through June of 1983.

This too! I'm a post-punk junkie, I just keep mining that fertile territory and little nuggets keep appearing. But this perspective is true for anyone whose interest in a particular era runs deep - look at how many garage rock comps there are out there, with more each year!

all he had to do was look at the sleeves and everything about them (and the times spent listening to them) would come back.

Lastly, this BIG TIME. At my current rate of listening I may only pull out one of my all-time top 10 albums maybe ten more times in my lifetime, that's alright. It's playing randomly in my brain all the time.

all he had to do was look at the sleeves

What's a sleeve? lol