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Regular Non obscure music
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Oct 04, 2013, 09:51
Re: Regular Non obscure music
Oct 04, 2013, 09:02
Sin Agog wrote:
I can understand wanting to give up the fight for good new music. It's an increasingly time-consuming and arduous procedure, especially as you get older and the sources you relied on fall by the wayside. But it's too easy to comfort yourself with the idea that you happened to be there for its high-water mark which can never again be reached. That line of thinking is the proverbial wisp of straw that old, drowning men cling to.


And regurgitating the past is the wisp of straw that the terminally untalented and unartistic cling to when making pop and rock records.

Things will improve when people detach themselves from the consumerist impulse to hear more of the nearly the same and that will free up artists to break new ground and be more unreasonable and less nostalgic.

Similarly the culture of championing the obscure for the reflected glory and status of being a cultural prospector of outsider art is nonsensical as it rates music, at least initially, on the basis of its inability to reach the market.

I am not advocating a Classic FM approach to rock music but if the only thrill left is to find the least mediated art and use that as a critical yardstick then that is about the listener defining themselves by their cultural otherness. It has little or nothing to do with the music itself. Its more akin to the teenager in a My Chemical Romance shirt in a school full of R&B fans.

Let me tell you it's not about having been there at the peak (I really wasn't) but there aren't enough hours in the day to be ticking off items on the endless list of the new and mediocre rock. That's more train spotting than close listening and if you are not listening closely you are just playing measure-my-cultural-virility-by-the-girth-of-my-gigantic-collection.
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