here's what clint wrote:
I don't think Wilco will ever accomplish this goal, but I would love for more people to listen to music as a sole activity. I think it's a really transformative way that that art can touch you. Aside from live music, which I think is really important to being human...to be a part of a crowd experiencing music...recorded music is like literature when you allow yourself to sit and listen. I mean, you know. That's all you did when you were growing up; that's all you needed to do. You found friends that could sit and be quiet and not fucking ruin it; those were your friends, you know? If somebody couldn't do that, you couldn't hang out with them. I don't care how cool they were; they weren't cool. - Jeff Tweedy
Jeff Tweedy is the shiz. He makes great points. It's becoming harder and harder to do two things: Listen to and engage music as an activity in itself. Listen to records as a whole piece of art. The advent of the ipod has been wonderful. It has allowed music lovers to not only compile and organize ALL of their music into one device, but to also make it compact and portable. It really has revolutionized music.
But it's also desensitized us to the intentional production of full records. It has made us anxious to move on to the next thing and in typical American-instant-result-fast-food-high-speed-internet-jet-plane-instant-grit culture it has sapped our patience to engage an entire piece of art. I find myself switching not only records and songs but artists and genres all in a matter of seconds. This is unfortunate. We must teach ourselves, alongside the discipline of listening to our own solitude and others' pain, to listen also to the music and art around us. Listen to a record today. We'll start there. I just got Ron Sexsmith's new record, Time Being. That shall be my choice. What will you listen to?
posted by Clint Wells at 12:49 PM on Jan 23, 2007
my response:
i'm going to give the new shins cd a try. also going to re-investigave death cab. i just now got into their latest (2 year old) cd.
everytime i play some records from my vinyl collection, i get this small hint of angst toward previous generations who were blessed to NOT have as much hyper-media options as we do.
back in the day, listening to a record all night was a perfectly normal thing to do. chairs, stereos, etc were all designed for extended listening. now we get screens and earplugs. two things that SEPARATE our listening experience from others.
the new apple phone will have "record browsing" which will let you flip thru your song / artist collection by album cover... or virtual album cover. wow. exciting. remind me AGAIN of how life is getting less and less tangible and/or meaningful. eventually we might just sit around in virtual rooms virtually talking about how we used to actually LISTEN to stuff in realtime. maybe history really is dead.
welcome to the 21st century... and isolation.
I don't think Wilco will ever accomplish this goal, but I would love for more people to listen to music as a sole activity. I think it's a really transformative way that that art can touch you. Aside from live music, which I think is really important to being human...to be a part of a crowd experiencing music...recorded music is like literature when you allow yourself to sit and listen. I mean, you know. That's all you did when you were growing up; that's all you needed to do. You found friends that could sit and be quiet and not fucking ruin it; those were your friends, you know? If somebody couldn't do that, you couldn't hang out with them. I don't care how cool they were; they weren't cool. - Jeff Tweedy
Jeff Tweedy is the shiz. He makes great points. It's becoming harder and harder to do two things: Listen to and engage music as an activity in itself. Listen to records as a whole piece of art. The advent of the ipod has been wonderful. It has allowed music lovers to not only compile and organize ALL of their music into one device, but to also make it compact and portable. It really has revolutionized music.
But it's also desensitized us to the intentional production of full records. It has made us anxious to move on to the next thing and in typical American-instant-result-fast-food-high-speed-internet-jet-plane-instant-grit culture it has sapped our patience to engage an entire piece of art. I find myself switching not only records and songs but artists and genres all in a matter of seconds. This is unfortunate. We must teach ourselves, alongside the discipline of listening to our own solitude and others' pain, to listen also to the music and art around us. Listen to a record today. We'll start there. I just got Ron Sexsmith's new record, Time Being. That shall be my choice. What will you listen to?
posted by Clint Wells at 12:49 PM on Jan 23, 2007
my response:
i'm going to give the new shins cd a try. also going to re-investigave death cab. i just now got into their latest (2 year old) cd.
everytime i play some records from my vinyl collection, i get this small hint of angst toward previous generations who were blessed to NOT have as much hyper-media options as we do.
back in the day, listening to a record all night was a perfectly normal thing to do. chairs, stereos, etc were all designed for extended listening. now we get screens and earplugs. two things that SEPARATE our listening experience from others.
the new apple phone will have "record browsing" which will let you flip thru your song / artist collection by album cover... or virtual album cover. wow. exciting. remind me AGAIN of how life is getting less and less tangible and/or meaningful. eventually we might just sit around in virtual rooms virtually talking about how we used to actually LISTEN to stuff in realtime. maybe history really is dead.
welcome to the 21st century... and isolation.