(Author's note: this is a piece I wrote for possible publication that never got picked up. So, it finds its home here.)
2001 was the year I stopped listening to new music.
This is something I recognize now, not a conscious decision made at the time. It surprises me to discover it.
I love music. I love sounds I've never heard before, I love being intrigued by a snatch of melody and I love the thrill of hunting down the source. But in 2001, I disengaged myself from that process. I only rarely turned on the radio, and when I did, I listened to "safe" stations, the ones that play the same song twenty times in one day. I didn't bug anyone to make me mix tapes or to download tunes from Napster clones. I didn't check out CDs from the public library. I bought only three CDs all year, each from established names--Springsteen, Dylan, REM. But that in itself is unremarkable--I almost never buy CDs. No, what was strange about 2001 was not my purchasing, but my listening. I stopped.
Maybe I'm just getting old. Time was when record stores were a chaotic kind of heaven to me. But as I strolled through one recently, I made the unhappy discovery that piles of CDs by bands I don't know no longer excite me as vistas of new possibilities; they just look like piles of CDs which I lack the interest to sift through. I understand this sort of thing happens to old fogies. I'm not yet at the point where I yell, "What's wrong with kids today? They call this garbage 'music'?" but I can feel it coming.
That's the easy answer. The more honest answer is that I was too scared to listen to new music--and by "new" I'm not just talking about recent releases, but anything that would be new to me. Fear kept me from tuning in to the community radio station, the one where the DJs program their own music, our finest local source of what is original, different, thrilling. Fear: because I knew that if I turned to that station, I would hear something that would catch my attention. I'd have to keep listening until the DJ announced the artist's name, or I'd have to call him up and demand that information. Then I would have to track down the CD--likely not an easy task, as the radio station has a reputation for playing obscure tracks and ours is a world of mall record shops. Then I'd have to buy it, because I know way too many starving musicians to justify relying on a Napster-like service for my song fix.
However, a CD purchase represents something like a tenth of my weekly salary. I know me. I know that once I've hooked my interest on a song, I won't rest until I own it. Since I can't afford to be constantly feeding this impulse, I cut myself off from the way the trouble starts. I avoided any situation where I might hear something grand and wonderful.
It's desolate, this new-music-less place I now find myself. I lament because things could be so different. Imagine--what if I could pay a few pennies each time I downloaded a song from the Internet? Then I could own it and be happy, the artist would earn something and be happy, and neither one of us would have to be poor. A solution like this is what I really want. I want to be listening.
Record companies: are you listening?
Actually, they are listening. From what I've heard...that's the direction the next generation of Napsters (the legal ones) are headed.
Though it may end up being a subscription service, where you pay a monthly fee for the right to download music from their site, as opposed to a pay-as-you-go plan. (Hopefully they're willing to do both).
Oh yeah, well-written essay.
I know how you feel, but if I did the same thing with books, which have the same lure for me, you wouldn't see me anymore on Tuesday nights.
This may not be a solution for you, but have you stopped by Vintage Vinyl on Delmar lately? Despite their name, I don't think there's any vinyl in the entire store anymore. But they have lots of used CDs. The artist doesn't profit, but it's not stealing.
Posted by: John at May 23, 2002 10:11 PM