Jupiter drops (three).
Momus—that creepy Scottish guy? world’s smartest pop star?—Momus wants to take your iTunes away.
That’s not an apt comparison, because literature is not a time-based medium that hogs bandwidth and restricts the other things you can do with sound while it’s “playing.” The comparison between an iPod and a book is a slightly better one, and I do note approvingly the iPod’s tendency to “privatize” the listener’s taste.
Well. Not so much take your iTunes away. Certainly not your earbuds. But your Limewire? Your BitTorrent? Your 60-gig hard drive? Your wall of CDs? Your ten thousand songs every one of which instantly sortable by title or artist or key words or album or genre or folksonomic tags or play count? Your Friday random tens? Your MP3 blogs? Your rack of audiophilic equipment capable of reading wax ripples or lit-up bits or magnetic tape and running the signals through knee-high speakers placed in the room just so?
Music’s availability, streamability etc seems to be liberating, but when other people have the same access to, and control over, music that I do it can lead to a kind of sound hell. I’d say a parallel situation is cars: sure, if I get a car I get more mobility, more freedom of movement. But if everyone has a car, not only do we all end up in horrible conflictual gridlock, the environment suffers. We are now reaching car saturation, and music saturation, car gridlock and music gridlock.
Well, not quite so much them, either. Not as such. There’s rhetoric, and there’s praxis. —But still, puritanical trickster that he is, he’s after some way to pull music back to a one true only—
But for whatever reason, Steve and Rupert and the others have squeezed music into every blank bit of space in our lives. We are rapidly reaching the limits of our own ears (tinnitus, my headphoned friend?) and the saturation point at which music becomes utterly unremarkable, and thus, effectively, inaudible.
As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I’m aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory) “I’m beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!”
current music: “Alegria,” Kirsty MacColl
I’m somewhat disturbed by the ubiquity of Massive Personal Music Libraries that people Never Stop Listening To. It seems a little bit sick to me.
I’ve been trying to cut down on my music consumption, for exactly that reason—-I only listen to music if I have a real REASON to, or need to.
Better to have moderated amounts of music that matter deeply to you, then flocks of it that fly numbly past.
I miss singing in a chorus. It helps to give a deep value to music that doesn’t exist even in attending a concert, much less hearing a recording.
I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!
What on earth is he thinking of? The nearest abbey, chapel, monastary, university—music was available for free, pretty much anytime, from at least the sixth century on.
Street musicians were so popular that there were three separate guilds, plus two guilds for instrument-makers.
Non-professional musicians were so common that there are jokes about them in the interludes, and that the cycle dramas have bits for them. The metrical romances and lays were accompanied by musicians, in fact poetry went hand in hand with music.
But that’s it y’know? When music becomes ubiquitous; becomes part of the endless noise then we only actual hear what we like when we have time. I pass through the environmental buzz and rarely notice it. I only hear it when I turn my attention to it. Outside regulation is unneeded.
Well, yes, and no. But I’m hoping I’ll get to that.
Lisa: I would note that, as far as I can tell, Eno hasn’t said anything of the sort himself, and that Momus is currently engaged as the Unreliable Tour Guide at the Whitney Biennial; while one would not go so far as to implicate him in having deliberately mispoken, one might allow as how he’s colored his rhetoric with some unfortunate hyperbole, and excuse him insofar as one is thereby inclined.
My reaction matched Lisa’s. Music has always been quite more common than Momus implies, it just wasn’t the simulacral stuff of CD and MP3 ones and zeroes.
Regardless, concerts, today, are events still (for the most part) unmatched by the more secluded, reproducible environment in which digitized music dwells.
well… in a striking case of conflict between personal and private music tastes, a british asian was held for playing procol harum,
led zep along with the clash and beatles to a taxi driver.
link here
Sorry, this struck me less as insightful than as whinging.
There’s too much music is not a new complaint.