Meet the new boss, David Lowery tackles the internet and the past while Ted Lucas gets past around

kinda want someone to write a piece arguing that olds want to stop youngs from easily and freely accessing music because they want to be the sole guardians of "cool music," and if kids can easily hear all the "cool music" themselves and form their own opinions about it then they won't need the guardians/gatekeepers anymore to tell them what's cool. like the flipside of a system where people have to pay for everything is going back to what travis morrison touches on in that article which is facing a huge collection of all of history's music and not being able to hear most of it (how i felt when i was a kid). so much music would fade away because people would have to choose what to buy and what to ignore. anyways i wouldn't read that piece because it would be dumb but someone should write it.

going back to lowery's article, it seems like he's "right" about most of that stuff but he's really annoying and a crappy writer

he's a mathematician!

facing a huge collection of all of history's music and not being able to hear most of it

kids today don't even face it, most of them don't give a shit

like, they know it's all out there, but they don't want to bother wading through it

oh c'mon there are a TON of wikipedia experts who think they can hear and appreciate everything worth appreciating, and try, no matter how misguided or unwittingly narrow their attempts are

if you are a little kid and your parents get you a computer and you go online and there is all this music everywhere and your friends tell you about cool sites with music you can download and you download all the music and you grow up this way why the hell would you care about anything ever? it would just be normal to download cool albums and maybe you wouldn't even know that people paid for music. it takes a village...

"no one said five. except Philip."

five feels like a bunch. like if i bought a bunch of grapes, how many grapes is that? maybe five grapes. i don' think i've ever stolen more than five grapes before.

as someone who grew up on MTV and major label CDs bought at chain outlets i personally feel no right to tell a younger generation that their way of discovering music lacks the kind of character and excitement that turned me into a sophisticated music lover

i have no ideas wtf you guys are talking about, but if i felt that feeling 20 years ago of being in a record store and wanting to hear like 100 albums that were there just based on band names and covers and vague things i'd read about them, i sincerely doubt that impulse has completely evaporated over like one generation

like the extension of what scott and shakey mo are saying is that kids nowadays don't care about music anymore? which is demonstrably untrue

kids are dumber now though. cuzza the corn syrup.

^ great post

http://www.thenoobdad.com/wp-content/uploads/Dumb-Kid.jpeg

it's not that - it's that they're largely separated/isolated from any historical narrative about music.

xp

1. that's not what you said
2. so what?

someone has his arguing pants on!

it's not that - it's that they're largely separated/isolated from any historical narrative about music.

xp

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, June 21, 2012 5:00 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if anything kids today have way too much historical narrative about music. they're up to their eyeballs in Beatles/Nirvana/Biggie lore.

plus i didn't say that kids don't care about music just that they have grown up not paying for music. its normal for kids now to not pay for music. that is the norm.

if they don't pay for music we'll make em pay for ringtones

i mean i have witnessed a decade of ilx skweeeeeeeeeeesoulseekoinkinvitespotifylastfm etc etc etc decadence. and you will all pay in the afterlife.

and before anyone gets on my case I'm speaking from anecdotal experience of course - kids don't go into a store and see things laid out in chronological order by artist, or hear about things from music "authorities" (be they Xgau or Bangs or the snobby indie guy behind the counter). The internet disperses content such that everything is available all the time, but it's largely context-free. They discover and absorb small pieces of the musical landscape but have no idea about the larger map - which is how I wind up with younger colleagues who for some reason know a bunch of old Carter Family songs but have never heard the White Album.

This is way different (not saying worse or better) from when I was younger and was accutely aware of the history of music - either from magazines, or record store clerks, or older relatives - but had limited access.

xp

and if they don't pay for ringtones we'll make em pay for zwinkies

I seriously have too many zwinkies I just need to get rid of them

if i were 14 or 15 now i would have 400 million albums on my computer. i stole everything that wasn't nailed down when i was that age. i didn't give a shit.

so you guys didn't have bmg and columbia house?

of course if i were 14 or 15 now i would never make it to 16 what with all the free porn out there on the web. i would have a serious coronary episode. jesus i was like a monkey back then i shudder to think...

it was pretty funny talking to my pre-teen cousins (who all have computers, ipads, etc.) about music a couple weeks ago. i learned that:

1. they know some michael jackson songs, but think he's "ok"
2. "rappers are really in right now", like nicki minaj, flo rida, and lmfao (?)
3. not so into adele, because too many of her songs are boring and slow

they weren't steeped in too many (any) historical narratives about pop music. one had a change jar that she had to put money in every time she bought a song off iTunes using her mom's account.

xp

between the bath salts and the meth and the porn and the corn syrup man oh man i was really lucky to be born when i was.

the one narrative I hear from kids is that all the best music was made a long time ago. exactly when and where and by who tends to vary.

dadstep

like hearing one of my college-age cousin complain about how all modern music sucks and all his peers want to listen to is the Dave Matthews Band (still!) was sort of depressing. He wanted to copy all my 70s soul MP3s.

kids don't go into a store and see things laid out in chronological order by artist

Does this mean that the record stores you went into had things laid out in chronological order by artist?

Also, what do arguing pants look like?

"Does this mean that the record stores you went into had things laid out in chronological order by artist?"

No it means that kids these days organize things really anally on their harddrives.

believe it or not, records/tapes/CDs used to contain information about when they were released! kids downloading shit don't necessarily get any of that.

Then how can they organize things really anally on their harddrives?

the information on my BMG order form told me stone temple pilots was in a genre known as "grindcore"...

personally I don't know any kids with hard drives of music. it's all on their ipods or phones or streamed from services and it isn't organized at all.

xp

but that's just my world of young people

and before anyone gets on my case I'm speaking from anecdotal experience of course - kids don't go into a store and see things laid out in chronological order by artist, or hear about things from music "authorities" (be they Xgau or Bangs or the snobby indie guy behind the counter). The internet disperses content such that everything is available all the time, but it's largely context-free. They discover and absorb small pieces of the musical landscape but have no idea about the larger map - which is how I wind up with younger colleagues who for some reason know a bunch of old Carter Family songs but have never heard the White Album.

This is way different (not saying worse or better) from when I was younger and was accutely aware of the history of music - either from magazines, or record store clerks, or older relatives - but had limited access.

xp

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, June 21, 2012 5:06 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark

ehhhh i was only a big music consumer for maybe 5 years before getting on the internet and 10 years before it was really easy to google almost anything you wanted to know about any record/musician -- by comparison the '90s felt like a lot of groping around in the dark for info, patching together discographies bit by bit and then realizing that there was a whole album before that that i didn't know existed, etc. and that was cool, i enjoyed the hell out of it, but i think you're romanticizing the time when people had to work a little harder for information into some absurd scenario where they actually absorbed more info than they do now.

but that's just my world of young people

"The Sandusky defense rests."

n/a and some dude otm. Nothing more depressing than standing in a Sam Goody store in the nineties with only $20 to spend and the Suede album is $18.99.

how about when you heard that suede album

i remember buying my first 7 cds and it costing me close to $140 w/tax. saved up my money for weeks!

how about when you heard that suede album

it took me o-vah

I'm not trying to romanticize anything, it's just different now

it was super-annoying to not be able to afford/find stuff! I hated having to save up money and then drive an hour to find a fucking Velvet Underground CD

even so:

some absurd scenario where they actually absorbed more info than they do now

people remember things that require effort! in lots of ways, something that doesn't require effort has no value.

It's better now! I don't know how I survived the eighties and nineties without Wikipedia.

LIFE IS PAIN

like, why learn anything about music? it's all out there for free and you can look up whatever you want whenever you're bored and then forget about it as soon as oh hey look what's that over there

xp