rotation fatigue?
Item: An afternoon drive in the New Hampshire countryside, and a copy of Rosanne Cash's latest record, The List. After the first few songs, the thought: I like this enough to hear the whole thing. Which I do, continuing to like it all the way through. I can't honestly say I love it, but it's pretty and thoughtful and has plenty going on to hold the interest and suspend the snark. When it's over, I replace it in the case, thinking: Listened, liked...and will in all likelihood not listen again. The enjoyment has been real, but the experience doesn't beg to be repeated.
Item: An afternoon drive to the post office, and a copy of Live at Bob's, by my good friend John Sieger. This one I start to love, and I leave it in the player for the rest of the week, looking forward to every little auto outing. It's a record that revisits some of John's best songs from the last 20-odd years, clothing them in minimal instruments and presenting them to a minimal living-room crowd. For these reasons -- its touching on previous, half-recalled experience, and its leaving some space to the imagination -- I listen 5 or 6 times consecutively, with keen pleasure. Then I realize I've listened enough, and I put it away, maybe for good.
From my first store-bought record (age 6, Blood Sweat and Tears's first) to about age 40, much of my music listening has been on a kind of serious-dating-with-marriage-in-mind model. You ardently search out promising pieces of music, feeling out their virtues and beauties and dark corners with thoroughness and care; the good ones become part of your identity, and are returned to eagerly and continually. With age and itunes, the gates seem to be closing. The idea of repeated listening -- ten, fifty, hundreds of times -- actually galls. I think I still love music, and I hope I love it as much as I ever did, but I don't want to marry it.
With Edison's amazing invention, music attained the frozen status of the verbal and visual arts. Leaving aside the perspective of the observer and the vehicle of delivery, music, in document form, was now an unchanging half of an enduring and evolving relationship. A great record could be enjoyed as a great book. À la recherche du temps perdu is a different experience every ten years or so, and so you keep it on your shelf for periodic invigoration as you age. Same with Hank Williams.
But no matter how young and fresh you strive to keep your aesthetic receptors, with the accumulation of years and listening, the senses dull and the standards rise. Very little that comes before your ears, you start to notice, can fairly be called Proustian. Nearly everything good you hear can be taken in in a listen or a couple, and nearly everything bad can be sussed out in a half-minute and left for dead. What's more, asking the creators of records to come up with five good minutes of music is asking a lot; who can really compose a solid 50 or 60 minutes' worth, year after year? The convergence of the singer-songwriter model with the LP/CD era, which carried the music industry along for 40 years of the last 50, looks increasingly absurd -- more of a method for creating jobs than lasting music. And as for "lasting," if it means a work's ability to withstand a hundred hard encounters with the same set of ears, is that really an attribute we should be attaching to good music? The heavy-rotation approach to music degrades it, placing on it masturbatory expectations, that it serve as the handmaiden for listeners' banal nostalgias, briefly restoring lost times and selves. A song, though provisionally tool-like, is not a tool -- nor a woman -- and I for one feel no compunction in ravishing it a time or two, then, having taken my pleasure in it, casting it breezily upon the groaning shuffle pile.
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9 comments
When I discovered the Oak Ridge Boys all my aural cynicism melted away
As always a thought provoking piece Robbie. I think age is the biggest factor in this. One of my personal mottos is "life is too short to listen to shitty music". That being said even moderately good music has to fight for time in a progressively busy world. With age comes nostalgia so when a song or album you loved in your youth hits your ears you immediately conjure the "where were you when this meant so much to you"? I too hope that the next Springsteen record will be so good that I'll wear it out. Ok bad example because at least for me Bruce's last 2 records still did that for me, but in most cases unless the music speaks to me in a profound way and immediately, the chance it will get a lot of spins is pretty minimal. I buy every Willie Nelson CD but no matter how good they are I still play Red Headed Stranger, Stardust or Willie & Leon(Russell)twice as much as any of the new ones. One time I decided to seriously put together a desert island list of CD's and when I looked at my top ten I realized I could live without most of them simply because they are so ingrained in my consciousness that I really don't need to hear them again. If I want I could sit on my island and sing them at the top of my lungs from start to finish without the benefit of an instrument to aid me. Would I miss hearing the violin/piano intro to Thunder Road? Of course, but the feeling I get when I hear it is so much a part of me that I can conjure the feeling it gives me just by thinking about it. So we still love music Robbie and although we still listen to new music hoping to hear something that is going to carve out a place in our hearts, the speed of life makes that possibility slimmer and slimmer every day. Now where's that Hank Williams CD?
So since I find Nathaniel Rateliff chalenging in a way that sometimes makes my throat tighten and my eyes water, I'm going to go blind! (if that's what lasting music is) to borrow an exhasperation, Oh Brother!
This article doesn't relate directly to what you're talking about, but it does touch on the lasting value of proven music, and what can still be done with it.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2010/09/06/100906crmu_music_frerejones
Nice to have you holding forth again.
Nice post. When I listen to music, I want to feel a thrill and I find that as I get older that feeling gets less frequent. Thanks for putting this into words Robbie.
Maybe you and music should consider an open relationship.
Sure standards grow stiffer but bones and arteries even more so. I am nostalgic but not for the set of habits and measurements that I used to be so much as the ability and willingness to be bowled over that I used to have. It's mostly gone. When I am too dulled to care about my food that's when I will yield my tiny island to the floodwaters.
I wonder what it's like to be Aaron Robison.
I just pile everything onto one of my four iPods, choose one, put it on shuffle and stand back. There's always a "skip" function.
You have eloquently put forth what has been in my head and heart for some time.
It pains me, but it's true.
And I look at those younger than me and think, "fools."
When I get to your last paragraph, I sense that you are indirectly describing how many good musicians are able to keep going in new directions and not get stuck on what they have done in the past.
We non-performing listeners are approaching the music from an entirely different mindset.
It's somewhat ironic that I read your post right after buying and listening to the 3rd or 4th version I've purchased in my life of Mott The Hoople's - "All The Young Dudes"(original album classics). Although the 7 additional tracks were the reason for buying the CD, I enjoyed hearing the original release songs other than "Sweet Jane" and "All The Young Dudes" after many years of forgetting about them.