Old Dude Wants New Bands To Stop Listening To So Much Music For The Good Of The Medium
Guardian writer Owen Adams listened to old garage rock MP3s more than new records in 2007, records that only a “select few” knew about when they were (almost) new. Which made them special! Perhaps his complicity in enjoying the Internet’s bounty made him feel guilty, because now he’s really worried about, you know, all this musical freedom of choice and dangerous aesthetic input available at the touch of trackpad. Because if records were scarce once again, surely we’d have better music than this pluralistic crud we’re listening to now. Duh?
I’m trying so hard not to make this sound like a “when I were a lad” post but – what the heck – when we didn’t have every conceivable recording from every era and every genre available in some endless eat-what-you-can buffet, when we faced musical starvation and had to really hunt things down to satisfy our hunger, it spurred on much farther-reaching revelations.
Yeah, we get it, kinda, the idea being that when you only had three records, you were supposedly forced to recombine or reinterpret them more imaginatively. (I think. I’ve read this thing about five times now and it really makes no sense at all. The loss of a heterogeneous rock canon is “homogenising artists’ reservoirs of inspiration”? Really?) But aside from the fact that the opening five paragraphs don’t flesh out the beyond-shaky thesis in the slightest, someone’s once again (seriously, I think the Guardian‘s revolving door of aged bloggers does this at least once a week) turning a listener’s problem–having too much music available to process, let alone to love in the way someone supposedly once did when they spent six months tracking down a punk rock import–into a musicians’ problem, who have always had the creative burden of synthesizing their interests in an interesting way, whether they’ve got a 500-gig external hard drive filled with sounds from around the world or only a box full of the same mid-’60s British invasion singles as everyone else. Stop doin’ that!
