Premier Rock Forum

lemur68 wrote:Remember back before teleportation, when touring the country meant three months away from home driving from city to city?

Understanding that this is just a Lemurism, but look at it as a metaphor. With teleportation, you can see all the sites in a matter of seconds, sure, and you can lay claim to that, but the beauty of the cross-country-by-jalopy adventure is lost on all young teleporters.

Again, no one needs to make the argument to me that free downloads are greatly beneficial, but isn't there something lost with overexposure?

I don't think there's such thing as being overexposed to a good way of finding, and trying music. It's there if you want, and you still have other options.

JDanger wrote:...look at it as a metaphor. With teleportation, you can see all the sites in a matter of seconds, sure, and you can lay claim to that, but the beauty of the cross-country-by-jalopy adventure is lost on all young teleporters.

Let me see if I have this metaphor straight...

The beauty of buying records is not enjoying the music, but taking the bus across town then slogging several blocks through the snow and slush just to buy about an hour's worth of material?

JDanger wrote:

lemur68 wrote:Remember back before teleportation, when touring the country meant three months away from home driving from city to city?

Understanding that this is just a Lemurism, but look at it as a metaphor. With teleportation, you can see all the sites in a matter of seconds, sure, and you can lay claim to that, but the beauty of the cross-country-by-jalopy adventure is lost on all young teleporters.

That actually was the thought behind it.

tommydski wrote:My friend likes to ski. She is very good at it but does not expect to one day be paid for doing so, irregardless of the fact that an absolute minority of people that ski have made a career from doing so. This is most likely because she considers it to be a hobby. In fact, this hobby costs her a good deal of money every year but she continues to do it anyhow. Never once have I heard her grumble about the fact that nobody has ever allowed her to pursue a career in skiing. Nor does she particularly care that people have in the past and continue to make a living from skiing. If I decided to put a video of her skiing on the internet, it would not in any way prevent her from skiing.

Is she hot?

Skronk wrote:I don't think there's such thing as being overexposed to a good way of finding, and trying music. It's there if you want, and you still have other options.

I suppose my concerns are with the invoulantary effects of overexposure. You can choose to listen to whole albums on your Ipod, sure. But if you've grown up in the Ipod age, why would you? I am a fanatic for noise, but if I hadn't been required to listen to certain albums because of a significant lack of other quality albums, would I have developed the appreciation for the finer points of those albums?

This is my fear: I have a younger cousin who's getting into music. He asks me, "Hey who is this Tortoise band? Can you send me something by them?" So I feel the need to withhold parts of their catalouge from him, so he can sit with each one, and learn it properly. If he hits up the blogosphere, he'll rip right through it in a matter of days, hearing nothing.

Edited for punctuation.

i have to admit that the internetz post-napster/high-speed has changed the way i listen to music. i want to reverse it but it's tough once you've gotten used to it. just 8 years ago when i would buy a record i'd listen to it 20 or 30 times before adding it to my usual rotation/mix; even if i didn't like a record i'd listen to it at least 10 times before selling it back to a cd/record store. these days, even if i LIKE a record i've heard (on the nets) i'll listen to it for a couple of days before burning to an mp3 data disk (which is basically a music graveyard). the world wide web is great for finding anything i want (although i still run into dead ends, for instance my recent search for anna magnani) but anything i want is too damn much. everything is a distant memory; records are collected for mix cd's i never make or only half complete. only once every 6 months do i actually sit back and listen to something on repeat for a couple of days. too bad.


music & internet: i think george carlin would say it's bad for ya.

i generally find out about bands through friends, and shows. sometimes i do a little reading/listening on the interweb, but not much.i listen to music very sparingly these days. i play more than i listen.

i have a bunch of my own opinions on music.

1. it should not be a product or commodity.
2. the goal of making money off it is retarded.
3. it's very easy to do these days and it seems the more of it there is, the more quality seems to suffer.
4. it is art, and art is communication. too much of it seems indifferent to this cause. i.e.-it says nothing.

the ease of access these days seems a good thing, but in reality i find it mostly a disappointing thing. "wow, there are a lot of bands these days...wow...a lot of them are awful."

music is just another market to sell, to be sold, and to be sold to. guitar centers and sam ashes are crap. people are being sold the items but not the ideals. so, we do wind up with a lot of empty, pointless, hollow, soulless things being recorded and distributed all for dollars. it's commodification. its cultural impact being diluted.

making it free is counteractive to this, to a degree. the increased ease makes for a glut of bands but disperses the attention. many will get tired of dumping their money into it with little payout, except the ones who believe in what they do and do it for the love and not the money.

the only issue is the majority of the world is retarded when it comes to art. so, more and more (as is already observable and has been for some time) the shit rises to the top while the great drown in obscurity. the internet and free music saves us again. you want something great these days, you have to hunt, but now the hunting is easier. much easier.

this thread and the "too many bands" thread collide on a couple things, in my mind.

I haven't bought a record in years, but I am happy to go to a show without even checking the bands myspace page if I have heard good things about them.

Live music is much more important for me nowadays.

ERawk wrote:
Your fear seems to me a bit unfounded and seems to be based on your cousin not hearing what you hear in their music. Generation gap or not, that will happen.

My fear is not based at all on wheather or not he hears what I hear in the music, that is irrelevant, but wheather he listens to it fully, and at length, before being sidetracked by the next download.

If I'm being honest with myself, if I had the internet when I was seventeen I'm fairly certain I would have rifled through and dismissed most of the influential albums of my youth and moved on. Mainly, Engine Takes To Water comes to mind. That album rescued me from cookie-cutter, formulated punk rock and opened the floodgates to braver things. But it happened slowly. At that age, initially I loathed it, but I had to play it, because of the investment, and because it was one ofthe few I owned.