"hey, new beck album this year (while I’m at it, I think I’ll get a drink from the toilet.)"

I'm almost beginning to see the act of committing yourself to liking music right now, engaging with music right NOW, being the active/ commenting listener through and through as it happens, as its own weird parallel to hypercapitalism in the sense of one must always be up to scratch, training oneself in endless classes on material outdated in two years, prepared to work for any number of employers at the drop of a hat, never resting, always work work work, keep the cell phone on for the most recent developments and god help you if you go away from your e-mail for even a day or two. I am not fond of that world and don't like its implications that my rather different viewpoint on things is automatically invalid, the more so because it assumes that its own view of reality is all that matters and all we can do is deal with it on that level. And I do not want to work for my pleasure.

Let us honestly look at the question: how many recs do we expect that they'll contain something new a year? I would say five to 10 out of thousands, if that! But also you look at this recs within a pop context. you want surprises within a song. And personally, i think it's too much to ask (at least there could be but it takes time).

There was a thread on ILM abt another jaded music fan who asked for new listening suggestions but, as I recall, he wanted something not too experimental. I made a couple of jokes and didn't bother with actually answering it properly because he wanted something new but I bet something to sing along too, something tasteful. what jess has written is in the same ballpark.

''they’re wry and clever and good, but also say nothing (new) to me about my life. it still all seems terminally tasteful to me: at no point do you expect this music to go careening off into an area of total shock, disquiet, or discovery. and that’s fine; there is nothing which says that it necessarily has to.''

But you want recs to do that don't you. I mean, it would be better for you. Can't you get more surprises from life experience maybe. I mean, you've prob got many recs so it's quite logical that the surprises won't come up w/the same frequency.

overall, i suggest a radical change in record buying. I suggest taking risks rather than waiting for the media or the singles market to give you surprises. or even a complete stop in record buying and just go to gigs and enjoy the experience of seeing music live (try and choose diff types of music, just go and see).

I'm happy to say I haven't bothered to keep up w/music 'trends' in the last 3-5 years but i have bought many more records because i don't restrict myself to the song.

Do it now. Otherwise you'll start turning into Simon reynolds and wishing for rave punk.

Then personally I think you have mistaken a lot of what Jess is aiming at in his piece, and I suggest you actually go back and read it.

As for taking risks in terms of searching out music not otherwise being promoted here there and everywhere -- I can't speak for Jess, but I suspect he's in the same boat as myself, where in fact having the musical world on a platter thanks to mp3s and worldwide recommendations and the like, means we can take plenty of chances but are still burned out.

grrr i've been reading that pea-brain attali all day, can you tell?

(sorry nath)

if you guys are 'burned out' thenm I would look at how many recs you buy and so on. I mean, if you keep working at yr job everyday on assignments and so on, you will get burmed out and will need to get a break from it all.

But with music of course you don't want to miss something big during that proposed 'break' i suppose. so in the end it's a tough call.

erm Ned, I've enjoyed thinking about and talking about music more this year than last year, that means basically new things not old things

But y'know maybe YOU need to go back and reconfigure yr relationship to yr own database: my problem before was that I plunged into the archives to research my book, and when I emerged six years later I was completely adrift from the present, and stuck how to re-access it. My writer's block and/or depression were directly related to that, I think. And they're over. I have no idea how I'd feel about music this year if I'd been cheek-by-jowl with the now of whenever w/o a pause: probably less chipper. There's no shame in a little R&R.

I'm sure Jess knows far more than me. And as a reader (not a writer) I like his writing. and he has heard far more music for a start. The 'avant-garde' has only so many surprises up to a point, like everything else, the shock of the new will fade but I didn't specifically say he should try 'fuck off noise' etc but try to take risks and go for things he wouldn't normally not go for. there's a lot of music out there...the whining tone of his argument is what grates at the end.

Indeed.

but I get the impressions he wants songs and yet he wants those songs to 'shock' him in some way and i do think it's a lot to expect.

Songs in specific need not mean musical impact in general -- I realize that's a fine line, but I think there's a sense in which one can distinguish between, "Ah, this is a great song" and "Holy shit, my world has just been knocked out from underneath me and I love it," thus my question to Mark, possibly poorly phrased. Andy wisely notes that age and experience inevitably have something to do with it, and I won't contest that myself. Someone out there could be listening to "Soon" right now and be experiencing the same sense of stupefied awe I did -- or listening to something else more recent, sounding completely different, and feeling the same thing. But I'm with Jess completely in the sense that I'm getting no sense of real surprise in general from things.

if you keep working at yr job everyday on assignments and so on, you will get burmed out and will need to get a break from it all.

But with music of course you don't want to miss something big during that proposed 'break' i suppose. so in the end it's a tough call.

Precisely the point of my example above.

don't work too hard mark s or your brain will explode! First time i heard borbetomagus say I didn't know what to expect. But once you hear it you can't be shocked again but I admire the beautiful violence of thier sound. It won't radically change from record to record but I listen to it because i enjoy it (as with all music). I don't expect shocks until they are happening.

GOTH!!!

Which is, indeed, peachy keen. :-)

But y'know maybe YOU need to go back and reconfigure yr relationship to yr own database

I see your point (and there are more relative parallels than might be guessed between our situations), but like I noted and Julio restated, there's a certain form of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't involved here. I do not wish to disconnect fully with the present, but neither do I wish to feel -- as I often currently do -- like my dissatisfaction with much of it is more than a personal malaise. There's a disconnected, floating aura of disapproval -- something in the vision and rhetoric of wanting to show that one is not an 'old fart,' if you like -- that informs my finding so much particularly wanting right now, or being tired of the endless reflective surfaces. A transference from personal feeling to judged fault, if you like, though I fear I am not being clear.

There's no shame in a little R&R.

But I think of all the time that is lost and cannot be regained -- and how much more the backlog of whatever assembles itself.

There's a lot of music made in the present, of all types.

I, of course, listen to old music. Improv, free jazz, borbetomagus, etc.

I could be the 'old-fart' you're describing above Ned but i don't care. I only listen to music i enjoy and i find a lot of IDM, UK garage, a lot 'avant-' rock boring as fuck and though I try to keep an eye out there it isn't necessary to me.

But also 'new' ideas could be in the past as well...

blimey my mac indexer just started also: "snowman" "alien" "tennis" what is this shit, i have no file called "tennis"!!

The term wasn't being used to describe you or anyone else, but a chimeric mindset we're all seen to fight against, actually regardless of our age -- the person [or the strawman] who so completely disconnects or is out of anything current that to become such a person is a fate worse than death. To even slightly end up like such a person could therefore be a right royal pain, though Mark S has a different and equally worthy take on the need to step back.

oh well i must get it off you once i get back...if you find attali too much of a grind now then you must keep it for when we meet.

there is no guarantee that i will wake up tomorrow and feel the same way. what i left out of the "piece" [urgh, i hate that...it's not a "piece"...a piece is something i hand to someone else to publish...this is masturbation, intellectual or otherwise] was the fact that i have been listening to just as much music as before, if a little more desultorily, having several hundred cd's which hardly get played. i'm not at a loss for the actual physical objects.)

Truly it is said, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."

I feel like the important developments are too subtle to be examined properly and will only be noticed years in retrospect.

I haven't been blind to the phenemonon, but I'm more philosophical and optimistic maybe - what seemed like a great year for music last year was really just the completion of the convergence of a number of different slowly coalescing positions into a consensus that acted as a magnet, drawing lots of disparate and often great records together. But by the end of last year that consensus was already breaking down under the realisation that the last thing anyone needed was a new canon. The shattering can only be a good thing - Tom in particular has inspired me to really start getting into Bollywood.

So, yeah, nothing amazing has risen up instead that can be seen from this vantage point (though it'll be hard enough to judge 2002 in July 2003! - '97 and '98 might now be seen as part of a pop golden age by some, but where were the pop evangalists then?!? Listening to Mercury Rev, probably, and there's nothing wrong with that) but curiously I'm finding that quite nice. I don't feel pressure to discover a new paradigm any time soon as long as the glowing embers of all the old ones still offer such warmth. Too, it's a great time to discover records that I would have dismissed out of hand in the throes of paradigm- proselytising: DJ Shadow and Ani DiFranco's last records have both been affecting me heaps using approaches I thought I'd soured on.

BTW Ned, I'm confused by your current anti-pop position, if only because it never occurred to me that you were so heavily invested in chart-pop to begin with. Are your expectations for current pop *so high* (or, alternatively, is the pro-pop line *so all- dominating*) that this shortfall in quality you're sensing is actually debilitating? What happened to all the post-shoegaze stuff you're supposed to be listening to? ;-)

No i don't but I don't expect to get shocks that often. I've been buying recs for 7 years now, and especially in the last 3.

The thing abt 'shocks' is the reason why i value it is because it's rare thing. It's nice to be shocked, and once you get it can set you oiff in a direction for a long while. Getting 'thrills' out of music is much more common, of course.

''but a serious question (probably not articulated well): are we too bound to the linear structure of time in our approach to music and life in general? Does the ethos of constantly "moving things forward" lead to unreal expectations?''

This is where 'But also 'new' ideas could be in the past as well... ' line comes from (above in the thread somewhere).

when you keep buying records it's quite difficult to see new developments, etc. because a huge development for some will be small steps to you if you start saying things like 'this is so 1997' then i think that's what it is. but i suspect there are things going on. It's just that the ppl doing them are not 'known' yet prob. (I don't anything amazing is gonna come from DJ shadow for instance), so the thing to do is to dig deep, maybe, on those MP3s.

''as to julio's charge of whining, i can only say, no shit sherlock. it' a fucking blog, man. that's what they're for. "what kind of art isn’t driven by petty obsessions?"''

your rampant consumerism has jaded you, chump. Time to take up fishing.

tim, i would have said you were right about 6 mos. ago (cf. the ancient jukebox entry where i decided that this year was going to be all about listening to music recorded before 1984...that lasted about 2 weeks.) but otherwise, since i've all but stopped posting to ilx and hadn't had a blog for 4 or 5 months, most of my thinking about music has been done in a social context (i.e. actually talking rather than posting something and wondering if someone reads it.) i guess, despite my best intentions, i'm a verbal creature at heart and i need to write this shit out. mostly i was just trying to excise some muck which had been lodged in my head for a month or two. as much as i appreciate the increased hits - 16 to 123 in less than 12 hours har har - keep in mind this thread was ned's idea not mine. so empathize/sympathize with him, not me.

as i was saying to nath last night, i think the age thing is a total red herring - lester bangs was in his 30s when punk hit, simon reynolds was in his 30s (i think) when rave hit, even mark above saying he heard more new music last year than ever - i just think it's something in my own personal makeup, as a listener, which craves this extracurricular musical activity (social tension, etc.)

another problem might be that i haven't bought a new record in months. (the last was eminem in may...before that was the herbert comp. everything else has been downloads here and there.) last year i had a seemingly endless stream of pocket cash to spend on music, which meant my listening was extremely broad and inclusive. the lack of money this year has made me exceedingly critical about any possible purchase (to the point of not buying anything at all lately...the loss of audiogalaxy has reinforced this forced break hardcore). a good thing, some might say, but at least a few of my favorite records last year were things i bought on a whim.

(i'm beginning to think tim is right too: listening to the last daft punk record last night for the first time in a couple months i realized that much of what made last year "exciting" was this convergence of "perfected" ideas from the previous four years. but also the most exciting things in 2001 were total one offs, things no one else seemed to care to expand on, combinations of ideas which a. worked and b. hadn't been beaten into the ground [daft punk = buggles + van halen x todd edwards + 10cc b jaxx = prince + loose joints x masters at work + sham 69, etc etc.] so i would love, love, love! to hear something this year like that. and again, i don't think it's impossible: it's only july...the amount of 2001 music i hadn't heard by sept. last year is staggering. and i still haven't heard it all, etc.)

anyway, now that i've shat this out of my system, i will focus more on talking about stuff i lurve. i'm rather sick of the rampant negativity i'm reading on the internet re. music these days (lame attempts at lame duck sarcasm like that "100 records you should get rid of RIGHT NOW" piece of shit.) so expect nothing but happiness and sunshine from now on.

Also for sale random crankiness and bile, will take cdrs or next offer.

Not true, I'd think, at least in the sense that I don't spend listening to music wondering what I will listen to next or trying to build up expectations for that rather than the currently playing song. But I think there's also something interesting here about connection...is that required/expected of every musical experience? The possibility of connection, instead of connection itself, should be the key.

Do you think the same thing when it comes to human relationships?

No, I don't, but then again I don't consider songs and people to be equatable anyway...does anyone?

I get that sense...a certain sort of 'which side are you on?' deal. But hmm...hard to articulate how exactly this plays out sometimes.

Somehow this strikes me as too sweeping, too conveniently set up to be placed into a box (much like my own stance, I'm sure ;-) ) -- what exactly would the musicians themselves say in response to this? I think they might almost find that insulting, like a pat on the head for 'quality.'

I feel like the important developments are too subtle to be examined properly and will only be noticed years in retrospect.

But making it worse is the idea that if you're not plugged into the newest singles 24 hours a day you're not 'paying attention,' and that that many of the comments themselves are too subtle over sudden orgiastic explosions of how great (or utterly un-great) this or that new hit it is. The seeking for eternal rhetorical pop rush can be a problem here.

This is something I was trying to get at a bit with my likely-odd hypercapitalism comparison, only now it's suddenly an academic comparison to me, literally -- there's a 'publish or perish' syndrome in the ILx/blog hothouse, isn't there? This is one reason why I'm phenomenally glad I DON'T have a blog.

I don't feel pressure to discover a new paradigm any time soon as long as the glowing embers of all the old ones still offer such warmth.

Ah, but therein the difference -- I think the embers are pretty damn cool now. ;-)

BTW Ned, I'm confused by your current anti-pop position, if only because it never occurred to me that you were so heavily invested in chart-pop to begin with.

The net me isn't all of me. ;-) Perhaps not so heavily invested in chart-pop as its potentials and changes -- and frustrated when I'm not seeing or sensing it, when only encountering cliches considered revelations.

Are your expectations for current pop *so high* (or, alternatively, is the pro-pop line *so all- dominating*) that this shortfall in quality you're sensing is actually debilitating?

For me or the 'scene' as broadly described? But the expectations are high for me, and a pro-pop line can indeed be that overwhelming at points. I won't bring myself in line with it just because nearly everyone else is telling me I'm living in a time of wonder and wondering why I'm not appreciating all the sparkle like I 'should.'

What happened to all the post-shoegaze stuff you're supposed to be listening to? ;-)

I'm listening to it. Don't you worry. ;-)

The way to relieve pressure-to-publish is to write for a group blog like NYLPM, duh ;) (Seriously though - I wrote very little for 6 months or so last year and knew I could come back to 'active service' whenever - it's really not a problem)

I'm still against 'passion' as a compulsory strategy.

I also still love music - v. enthusiastic about lots of things. About things that are happening 'now'? - well, they're happening to me now! They might have happened to the rest of the world a couple of years or longer ago. (Ned - are you bored/cross with the pop whirligig because its temporality is an affront to your subjectivity? ;))

I think unpaid, unprofessional people writing about music is a good thing, because I think unpaid, unprofessional people writing is a good thing. Not because they'll replace the professional media (thats a whole different argument) but because I think it's good for people to articulate themselves, and the wider the opportunities and ways people have to articulate themselves the better. This includes trying to think and write intelligently and personally about music (it also includes writing about music like a 30-something middle-manager!) - Jess, just by existing (and potentially coming up in searches) your blog is a riposte to the rocks/sucks/fuck you people.

More to say on this, probably. I wuv music.

Gives us something to hang our hat on, at the least.

The way to relieve pressure-to-publish is to write for a group blog like NYLPM, duh ;)

And you'll note that IS the only blog I've ever dealt with! But very irregularly, and usually people seem to have said more than ever I can -- or, alternately, I get a feeling of, "Why do I think that if I post on [song x] somebody else is going to say that you should have heard [producer y] do [song z] a while back, and why haven't you actually been listening to the radio and watching MTV like normal people? Tch." Which is frustrating, but I should note, not actually what I think is happening -- it's just my OWN personal barrier! There's no reason for me not to say anything in particular about any song, of course. Then again, I also haven't posted much in the age of comments on NYLPM, so I won't really know what feedback if any I'll get until I try!

About things that are happening 'now'? - well, they're happening to me now! They might have happened to the rest of the world a couple of years or longer ago.

Well, see above, to an extent.

(Ned - are you bored/cross with the pop whirligig because its temporality is an affront to your subjectivity? ;))

Could well be, m'friend. ;-) I am quite content with my subjective taste and stance, to be sure. I don't think the temporality is the problem so much as the hothouse focus on What's Happening Now -- and just trying to listen to everything is a problem enough, trying to read everything written about it? Damn well impossible. This also reminds me of academia, something my first grad advisor said to me -- "You'll never be able to read everything, literature or criticism of it, you're supposed to." Good and sound advice, but the overall structure of critical discourse really doesn't ALLOW for that, at least explicitly so. Implicitly, expressions on the blogs and elsewhere take the time to look at things differently, the equivalent of medieval marginalia on the Great Works -- monks complaining about failing light and aching bones, us wanting to stop the world and get off for a bit.

I wuv music.

Oh yus. I have spent the morning listening to Klaus Nomi and Nurse With Wound -- both early eighties efforts, both singularly detached from much current context -- and I don't care who knows it.

Of course this also could be to do with my favourite music being house/techno etc. Is it possible that a few great singles can take the place of a great album? I think of how much I love 5 or 6 different singles at any given time and I think that on top of listening to mixes or old albums that's always enough.

I hate to say this, but I am strangely reminded of that Jaron Lanier piece. I realize this is a grave insult and I hope Jess does not take this as a declaration of undying hatred or anything.

Out of interest, is there a music 'group blog' (or equiv.) on the interweb that is dedicated to writing about "old" records?

NYLPM does seem to be mostly about the 'now' (this is not a criticism).

(spot the breakdowns in my theory thusly: daft punk/b jaxx both pop cult polyglot cut and past blah blah. difference: "where's your head at" and "digital love" took my head off last year. "shock" can be a hammer-on solo from a pop country song in the middle of a buggles track in a supposed house record. it can be an oi chorus dropped into a middle of an insectoid yet muscular house homage to cab volt's "nag nag nag". nothing in these songs is "new" at all, except the fact that they're completely unexpected.)

other than that, obviously, i was really unclear in what i meant by "extra-musical excitement" or people just don't understand it. (i can't imagine it's a rave era thing across the board, but it's telling that the people who lived through it seem to be the ones who implicitly understand.

Rave and punk and etc. were exciting because they caught on and developed socially in the way they did. i.e. it wasn't that this music was being made, it was that this music was being listened to and then made by loads of people. But if you'd been listening to the right things in 1973-4 or 1984-5 you could have heard the 'revolution' coming, I think (and plenty did). What the Internet does is put everyone - or everyone who wants - in the position of listening to the 'right things', all the time.

The Internet doesn't stop big new things happening and catching on in music or anywhere else - whether your attitude to them is rabidly populist or disdainfully snooty, weblogging is surely an example of this. But the person who gets involved online, writing about stuff, downloading music, taking advantage of the enormous free libraries of music and knowledge online, is making a Faustian pact of sorts - they get all this stuff but they can never again share in the public surprise and excitement that happens when something big 'breaks'.

In other words, Jess, if you want to hear kwaito then go into soulseek or whatever and type in 'kwaito' (this is the difference from MTV again) - but in doing so you're forfeiting your chance of being surprised, sharing totally in the public excitement, if kwaito becomes The Big Thing, like punk was.

(In some ways, it's like studying history. You study history because you love it, it excites you (you = "I" here, obv.). It excites you because of all the big things that happened. Then when you study it the big things tarnish and fade away, replaced by lots of tiny causes and influences and long-term trends. And you can't unlearn that. So you give up, or you find your joy in the little stories not the big ones.)

(this has exhausted me. if ned wants to talk about this more, he can. it's his thread. i'm half tempted to delete the damn thing from my blog already.)

(and nate, i don't think yr a moron. i realized how harsh that sounded when i posted it.)