The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 12/7/07 Section: The Arts

Do you download too much music to listen to?

In 1995, music critic Simon Reynolds wrote an article describing "music overload," the phenomenon of having just too much good music to listen to, stacks and stacks of CDs each awaiting - and deserving - a play. And very few of them achieve the transcendent plane of aesthetic glory that musicians, music critics, and music listeners pray for from every concert, every show, every song. "There is," concluded Reynolds, "simply too much 'valid' music being made for the world to handle." The result? "The boredom of sheer abundance."

The almost eerie prescience of this article is undermined by Reynolds' assertion that what he was describing was "an occupational hazard," a phenomenon to which rock critics - alternately, in his self-deprecating terminology, "professional fans" - were inherently given.

Intriguingly, then, the crisis Reynolds described resurfaced in Nick Southall's "Soulseeking," a brilliant piece published about two years ago on the late, great webzine Stylus Magazine. Yet as Southall's title implied, this was the condition not of having your apartment strewn with label promos and obsessively purchased used records, but of having your hard drive filled to the brim with easily acquired albums that you may never listen to. So unlike Reynolds' piece, the condition Southall described was not at all particular to the rock-critic breed - or was it? To put it more bluntly, have we all become rock critics in everything but occupation?

This might seem a drastic conclusion to draw. Yet so many friends have complained of what Southall describes. With indie's rapid ascent into mainstream culture, it appears we have raised a generation of obsessive, even rabid music fans. And even if the meat-and-potatoes artists of '00s indie - Sufjan, the Arcade Fire, the Shins - inform most of this generation's taste, everyone loves to proclaim that they "listen to everything" when asked what kind of music they like. And actually, they do.

Squeezed between recent alt-indie favorites like Modest Mouse and previous generations' legends like the Pixies or the Smiths, an average Macalester student's iTunes library is likely to feature a variety of interesting wrinkles, whether it be Manu Chao, Cam'ron, or Serge Gainsbourg.

So the positive effect of this is obvious. Our generation's heightened and intensified rock-critical apparatus has led to a rampant cross-genre exchange of music, an unending dialogue between friends and strangers. And the thing is, so much of what we collectively listen to is really, really good.

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >

Article Tools