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Why choosing five songs was harder than creating 100 fairies

6/12/2016

5 Comments

 
Picture
Music

I was invited to take part in a five day music challenge on Facebook by a friend and all I had to do was pick a song a day for five days. Easy hey? Little did I think about how difficult I was actually going to find it.

The thing is, I love music, but my relationship to it has greatly changed.

The friend who tagged me in the challenge shared a lot of my musical tastes and discoveries during my early twenties. We went to see bands all the time and would often buy the same albums and listen to them at the weekend whilst talking about life, work and dreams. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, My Bloody Valentine, Ride and a whole host of other indie bands were blowing our minds.

It was a fantastic time and music then was an investment and a gamble. You often had to judge an album on its cover and also on the label and the other artists who shared it. There was the Chart Show that had a five minute Indie slot where you might learn about another band.

Buying an album was therefore quite a commitment. You had to listen to the whole album, because you had spent money on it. You paid attention to every song and you would know the song order. If the album was a good one then it would be played over and over becoming the soundtrack to conversations and the explorations of life.

Music and its lyrics expressed my emotions in a way that nothing else did and I found refuge and relief in albums that expressed my feelings about the world and articulated things that I hardly knew anything about.

From vinyl, to CDs to iPods to Pandora, to Spotify and Mixcloud my approach to music has become very different.

There is no commitment to any band when I tap on the discovery button. Some songs don't even get past 30 seconds if they are not able to instantaneously match my mood.

Albums I like and listen to the whole way through get forgotten about when I next look for something. My thirst for newness and my bad memory make it easy to keep clicking and scrolling or just listening to dj sets where the songs are never identified.

If I do actually like an artist and remember their name then they might make it to the 'radio' stage where Spotify will then deliver similar artists and titles in an endless stream that is only interrupted by adverts at increased volume.

I'm not complaining. I think it's pretty amazing. The stuff that dreams are made off. After the years of searching for artists that I like I really appreciate being able to discover new music for free.

It's me that's the problem. I don't spend the time researching and getting to know a band anymore and rely instead on recommendations from an algorithm.

So when I was invited to take part in the challenge my head started to spin as I started to question what music from the past I still liked and what music from the present I could actually remember.

I think I only made it to day 2 of the challenge and I think those two days were Tabitha inspired Disney songs!

I started listening to old albums, some Alanis Morrisette, The Cocteau Twins, Julian Cope, looking for songs that could some how sum up the best of all the music I loved. Even listing those artists now seems really limited and more a result of a transient mood than any real evaluation or judgement of worthiness.

I couldn't pick single songs out of old albums anymore than I could pick single songs out of new ones. The task that looked so simple was actually vast!

I still don't think I could pick five songs... How could I? But it's been quite a fun journey and it's made me think and appreciate the importance of music and the people that I share it with.

I'd love to know your favourite artists, albums or anything musical you'd like to share!
Thank you for reading.
Best wishes and fairy kisses.
Jacs xxx
5 Comments
Steve Long
6/13/2016 01:06:24 pm

Good lord Jacs! What did i do to you lol.
that was really interesting to read and echos some of my own thoughts about how my relationship to music has changed over the years as i grow older. Going from enjoying listening to wanting to learn an instrument, then being an analytical listener because i learned to play a guitar, then drifting away from playing an instrument and going back to enjoying listening again...a full circle.
Some of the Bands i obsessed over hungrily hunting down tunes that were hard to get, those bands became megastars and becamd less interesting to me, i've thought about this hard as to why, am i getting older and taste change?
Yes i'm older and tastes do change, but that isn't it, there are bands that were on the cusp of the big time that never quite got there, they still play and turn out records now and i love them, they still have that youthful zest that never got diluted by the big time.

I dont use spotify of any of that kind of thing, no real reason other than its never come into my sphere, i still buy music cd's and vinyl.
I have my iPod, my favourite thing to do is to put ghat on shuffle in the car, its like the radio without any annyoying DJ and its all music i like, its interssting hearing what will be mixed in with what, as an avid album listener, its really cool hearing music out of its context that i'm used to hearing it in, unless its that secret track with 10 minutes of silence before it starts.

From funk to metal to rap to jazz to the music too weird to pin a tag on, from the 60's right up to now, the days of knowing the name of every track or pouring over the words may be gone, but the passion is still there. I even really like stuff now that i really didnt like when i was younger (britpop!)

Its really fun rediscovering music you'd completely forgotten about.

Reply
Jacs
6/14/2016 04:45:49 am

Ha! Yes it was kind of funny! I was really excited at first and then it just seemed like too big a task. You should definitely give Spotify a go! Just think of all the albums you never checked out! It's all there! ???

Reply
Steve
6/15/2016 10:03:31 am

I don't really get much time at home for music listening anymore, it all happens in the car on the way to and from work

dal hall
6/13/2016 01:16:49 pm

Help

I don't even know where to start !

Reply
Jacs
6/14/2016 04:43:09 am

Ha! Now you know how I felt!

Reply



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