At my new work a bunch of people have music shares via this Linux music software called Amarok. Often I browse through these shares and listen. I've been able to listen to a lot of stuff I would never have gotten around to had I had to hunt them down myself.
Firstly, is Bob Dylan the most overrated musician ever? I listened to Blonde and Blonde and Blowing in the Wind and wondered "Who is this talentless windbag?" Yet National Radio listeners love .
Speaking of people who don't deliver, I listened to Beck's most recent album too. The tunes were awesome, the attitude hip, but the overall feeling... meh. It's interesting comparing him with my personal flavour of the month, Thom Yorke. Listening to Radiohead, I know I'm listening to something of substance, even if the substance is quite impenetrable. With Beck, however, I just get the feeling I'm listening to an incredibly talented individual just pissing about.
Also went back and listened to some Nirvana. They say the past is another country, but Nirvana feels to me like another galaxy, with all that raw emotion and variation of loud and quiet bits... mein Gott! A lot of the album material is filler, and it seems obvious in retrospect (always does, I guess) that Cobain was going to top himself. As with Joy Division, listening to Nirvana always feels creepy to me - like reading someone's psychiatric report.
Also, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms is a wall to wall brilliant album. Equally also, King Crimson's Court of the Crimson King is a fabulous disk.
Disk? But there is no disk! The scary thing is that I could listen to all this music without ever having to think about where it all came from. There was no blowing dust off a record, or even admiring the rainbows in a CD. Not even trying to untangle a cassette. I think that to have value, music has to have a physical presence - either the musicians in person or a proxy artefact. Without anything, without even having to pick a station, it's disembodied and impotent. No wonder no one under 30 shells out for recorded music no more.
As an aside it struck me for the first time that vinyl really is the only music format that can challenge the MP3. This is ironic given my record collection spans a mere dozen discs, most of them ex library. And I have no record player. But the CD with its (usually) crappy jewel case and miserable little sleeve has been debased by the infinite number of CD-Rs and DVD-roms sitting around the place. Something so commonplace really fails to excite. As for the noble cassette, well it was always a stand in for some other, more real thing - a handy but obviously deficient fake. These lacklustre media have nothing on MP3's weightless, volumeless convenience.
But to me, vinyl, with its fragile form, its warm imperfection, its expansive sleeve, and, above all, its imposing physical presence, retains the integrity that CDs have lost (if they ever had it).
For many years I've craved the thought of having my own music released on CD. I kind of did that, and it was kind of dull. Now I realise that my dream is to press my own 12", 33 1/3rpm, 40 minute LP. Cost a fortune, no one will pay for it, but it will be real.
Posted by stuart at January 26, 2008 10:52 PM