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

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

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

Brand New and Kinda Good no longer does shit for me

Goddamn I love you all. I can't have this conversation with more than a few people in real life, they just don't understand where I'm coming from.

OTOH I have found new musical thrills in understanding what it really means to need a certain maturity to appreciate certain music. I mean I used to think this was some kind of bullshit thing like swirling wine in your mouth and naming the fruits you taste. But then at a certain age you hear a certain Joni Mitchell or Steely Dan song and say "Yes! I get this!" and it's really an amazing comfort.

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)