Fell upon an interesting notion recently that immediately connected several “WELL YES THAT MAKES SENSE” synapses in my mind.
That little post, in a nutshell, says how we live in a time where we have vast catalogues of music at our fingertips. The strange pay off for having all of these aural delights at our fingertips is that we are enjoying music less. Like an infinite gorge on roast potatoes and gravy, fine when you’re having as a treat but losing the magic when it becomes mundane and commonplace. You can’t get no satisfaction.
I remember the days in my distant past [bear with me], walking around with a clutch of 80 min mixtapes in my bag. Tapes full of tunes painstakingly sourced through having to jump on the train at Chelmsford, whizz down to Southend and go to a specific vinyl shop where I could pick up 12”s. These little black discs were often still shrink wrapped and had *that* smell which is on the ‘new car smell’ grade of special. I’d desperately try to avoid paying full fare on the train as the stack I amassed often featured £8 per single US Imports, please sir I am under whatever age it is I need to be to pay half fare. It was like Christmas every time I did the journey, walking into the shop with “OMG HOLY” visibly beaming out from my expression. JESUS FFING CHRIST I’VE JUST FOUND JAYDEE’S PLASTIC DREAMS. Serotonin overdose.
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| I used to shop in Southend. I could only wish it was as hip as this... |
Now, well, I’ve just read that Photek has put a dubstep effort out so I’ll probably check it out later, probably have a 20 second scan through. I might write a note on Wordpad later on my “stuff I may slap onto a mix in the near future and if I don’t write it down it will be lost on my 1TB hard drive” list. Highly likely that it won’t make it onto the little 32GB slab that goes around in my pocket.
Sitting back and thinking about it, pretty unsurprising that most of the music I listen to recently comes in the form of mixes I’ve put together. I’m sat in the dark, lit by the glow of a monitor, headphones on for weeks, like the shining social beacon of my neighbourhood. During that time I – am – RINSING the mix constantly as I tramp through my Driving Licence-less existence, on a grand world tour of supermarkets of my area. Through graft, I have appreciation for every second of waveforms, little bubbles of bliss firing through my system as I analyse each blend.
Now I’m actually taking the time to put new noises on my iSlab and decide to spend some quality time with the “to listen” list, a bit like having a musical Supernanny intervention for my aural life. Some enforced discipline to ensure my love affair with music keeps on rocking on and that I don’t abandon Autechre in favour of whatever the radio decides to vomit into my face.
I do appreciate I have gone a bit Tolkien on you here with what in effect is an emphatic “YES I AGREE” but my main drive is an overwhelming sense of disappointment about the way entertainment in general is heading. You hear things about the “7 second” rule, where labels grade and push for releases to be able to make an impact within 7 seconds, like the micro-cutting of generic R&B tracks behind aspirational torture porn programme Cribs. Depthless, horrible releases, flaunting all their secrets onto your ears like a cheap tart with no reward for long time effort. A hugely empty experience.
This isn’t just happening in music. John Carmack might be a name that is lost on you all unless you happen to partake in my other great love outside of music, shooting virtual foes in the face via my consolage of choice. Mr Carmack is a legendary figure in the face shooting world being behind classics such as Doom and Wolfenstein, and more recently you would have seen him migrate his attentions from the polygon pushing ultraboxes to the smartphone arena with his Rage port. I came across this little nugget:
and all I wanted to do was CTRL-H “may” with “won’t”. We have the same scenario, a huge array of cheap to free games offering a rather depthless and disposable gaming experience. There is constant justification about how smartphone titles are just as good as a fully fledged £30 title, where in reality this is so not true it is unreal. This unreality is particularly frightening, when you see Epic Games starting to go for game dev tool dominance by rolling out Unreal Engine to smartphone platforms, a clear shift in stature for smartphones as a gaming platform. I’m lost in an inception spiral of unreal. I don’t know if you have played the Unreal powered Infinity Blade but let me summarise: you use your sausage stylus to battle through the same enemy repeatedly about 10 times, at which point the game reboots and you start again after buying some better weapons. There you go. If that is satisfying, what does Carmack have for a nummy treat? Celery? This does not equate to a £30 game experience! Quite telling that the game I am most looking forward to playing on my iPhone is Final Fantasy 3, a direct port of a proper £30 gaming experience Nintendo DS title. Everything else I have on the phone is there to bulk out the icons.
Sadly, this is what the market is demanding nowadays. Throwaway music and throwaway games. It has to be NOW, FAST, INSTANT. Look at “icon of our time” Lady Gaga, where Madonna made a career out carefully considered image changes, Gags is swapping from Kermit dress to Meat suit at every appearance. Are we reaching burnout? Is our bright star of entertainment displaying signs of going supanova? God knows, and its not like sitting here and twapping out several thousand words on Blogspot is going to do anything about it.
I know one thing, I'm going to strive to give every game and piece of music that enters my life my absolute undivided. Time to recapture the spirit of wrestling shrink wrap off 12”s and unboxing a hard saved for £50 SNES game. So if I may be excused, I need to scan every planet in the Mass Effect 2 galaxy until it is depleted of all minerals. If you want me, I am occupied in space.
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| IT JUST GOES ON FOREVER |
I know one thing, I'm going to strive to give every game and piece of music that enters my life my absolute undivided. Time to recapture the spirit of wrestling shrink wrap off 12”s and unboxing a hard saved for £50 SNES game. So if I may be excused, I need to scan every planet in the Mass Effect 2 galaxy until it is depleted of all minerals. If you want me, I am occupied in space.
