Music, basically, has become the aural equivalent of fast food: consumed quickly, in super-sized portions; we get filled up but not necessarily nourished.
It was the spring of 2002. My 13-year-old had randomly pulled Annie Gallup’s album from a disorganized shelf of used books offered for sale in our local library for fundraising purposes. It was the only CD there. “Do you know this?” he asked…
When I Was a Boy showed me the way. It started so accidentally. One minute I was in Tower Records in New York City in the early fall of 1993, briefly browsing, the next minute I was leaving the store with this Jane Siberry album I hadn’t otherwise realized existed, never mind that I was going to buy.
Music has accompanied my life seamlessly; it has never occurred to me to wonder why I listen so intently, why I seem to need music on wherever I am, or what, even, I am concretely getting out of it. I have just always known that I want it and need it, that it satisfies something beyond the realm of my rational mind.
Okay, so we can all agree by now that computer technology has had a momentous impact on recorded music. And we might also agree that we are still pretty much in the middle of watching that impact unfold. But all this unfolding, which has been going on for almost 15 years at this point, is starting to leave a bad taste in this music fan’s mouth.
MP3s first began to appear on the internet in 1994. They were at that point a kind of geek-oriented novelty. When the first widely-used audio player came online—-Winamp, in 1997—-the popularity of the format grew. When Napster was launched in 1999, well, we all know what happened after that. MP3s flooded the internet, thanks (uh oh) to a user’s newfound ability to turn physical CDs into electronic files.
Back in the middle of the 20th century, plenty of perfectly reasonable people were convinced of not just the possibility but the inevitability of flying cars. Surely we would be zipping around in them by the 1980s, never mind by the oh-so-futuristic year of 2000 Music is not like water…but it sure is starting to remind me of a flying car.
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