Compared to the average person, I consume a lot of music. I spend about $200 a month on CD’s (that’s not including a subscription to emusic.com) and regularly pick up 2 to 3 new albums per week. It’s very rare that I can walk into a record store and not walk out carrying at least a couple of discs, but it’s getting to the point where I think I have to slow down a bit. Discs get pushed to the side and barely get listened to, long lost favourites get dusty and forgotten and my 60 GB iPod is full of legal music.
I grew up in a rural area. There was no record store within 50 km and the Internet had yet to push beyond the gopher protocol and the world of the BBS. Procuring new sounds took effort, time and happened once a month (if I was lucky). As a result, I spent a lot more time with each album. I memorized the lyrics to all the songs, recognized the nuances that appeared with time and heard the slight imperfections that get missed by summary listens. Weezer’s Blue Album, Poor Old Lu’s A Picture of The Eighth Wonder, Ghoti Hook’s Sumo Surprise, MxPx’s Teenage Politics and Life In General were part of the soundtrack to my youth. To this day, I can still recite the track list and nearly all the lyrics by heart. Conversely, I don’t think that I can do this with anything that I’ve purchased in the last 3 or 4 years. If you look at my top 10 list of favourite albums, most of them come from the mid-90′s. Is it the over-abundance of quality music? The ease of aquisition? My lack of self-control? Have I developed an A.D.D. attitude towards music?
It’s not that I don’t like new music. I’m not one of those people still mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, Brad Nowell or Cliff Burton. Most of my favourite shows and albums from last year were from new bands or bands I hadn’t listened to before. (Mute Math, Anathallo, Islands, etc.) But even with these albums, the songs sound tired and dated with a couple months of occassional listening. Have I become so cynical that I can’t be completely and continually moved by an album again? I’m not sure about that. It’s been said that the music you listen to in your teens and early 20′s stays your favourite throughout the rest of your life. While I wouldn’t be too disappointed with this, I still like those discs, it’s still a little discouraging if it’s true. Come back in 5 years and I could be sitting in a corner, clutching a CD and reminiscing about the time when Weezer was good.
