Sharing Music

I don’t think I could express how much music means to me and what has influenced my perceptions and taste, but I’ve been really happy to see a resurgence of meaningful good music and I wanted to at least try and say something about it.

For christmas this year I got my mom’s record collection, and the amount and range of great albums she had started me thinking about the effect of collectively being influenced by music.  I don’t know many people who dislike music, and most are at least affected by it emotionally in some way.  So it has to do something right?

There are large portions of the population who have all grown up listening to some really revolutionary bands.  The best example of this would have to be the Beatles.  How lucky to have such a great band provide an ever changing soundtrack!  We got Brittany Spears shoved down our throats….  What a sad personification of modern American media….

I actually did grow up listening to the Beatles, but missed out on the shared experience part.  When I was really young I listened to Please Please Me constantly.  It’s still my favorite and the only album I’ll actually dance to.  I went through my White album phase during what I’ll just call my “experimental” years….which I vaguely recall had something to do with being in high school :p  I didn’t really listen to Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour until much more recently.  I find it funny now that I skipped the experimental albums and went right to the end result when I first started.  But I digress…

It felt like music went through an almost 10 year stint of shit.  There were a few good bands sprinkled about but you had to try really hard to find them and as soon as they started selling, record companies would scoop them up and make them suck.  Meanwhile pre-packaged pop tunes were celebrated and relentlessly pushed on children.  Children!  Oh, Think of the children!  Their lives filled with thoughtless meaningless “music” and shitty TV….I’m surprised any musicians survived the 90’s with their dignity in tact.

So of course I love that the internet has been helping to usher in a new revolution in music.  Instant worldwide word of mouth.  Musicians can stay out of the crap again and just make music.  Hooray!  Back to real talent and real heart and real feeling and…ahh…good music….I’ve missed you!  

I was worried for a while after Metallica’s ridiculous tantrum over Napster.  I honestly could not understand at the time why a band would want to punish fans of their music (now that I’m soooo much older and wiser I understand the world is just actually run by greed!).  Then there’s the RIAA…which is Disney villain evil and really needs to be put out of its misery.  

*On a side note the movie industry equivalent of the RIAA just recently admitted to “accidently” pushing false statistics about college students since 2005.  Turns out college students aren’t responsible for 44% of illegal movie downloads…it’s only 15%…

These groups have been targeting college campuses and student networks for censorship and prosecution specifically based on shit like this.  You’d swear it was almost like creativity and education were being actively discouraged in this country!  But that would just be silly, wouldn’t it…

There were a decent amount of bands though that kept pushing back against the record companies and conventional views on marketing and image.  The Gorillaz for example use animated characters in videos and concerts to represent the members.  This is a live performance of the song Demon Days from the album of the same name.

Ok Go on the other hand, unbeknownst to their record company released a music video on Youtube costing less than $10 to make, that ended up becoming the most downloaded music video ever less than a year later.

More recently, there is of course Radiohead.  After breaking with their record company they released In Rainbows this past October.

Initially it was available for download at any price you wanted to pay.  So you could choose $100 or nothing at all depending on what you personally thought their music was worth.  This was then followed by a collectors “discbox” release containing an extra CD, double vinyl and artwork.  Then on New Years they released an online video called Scotch Mist.  

I am a huge fan of OK Computer.  It’s on my personal top 10 favorite albums list.  I’ve listened to it hundreds of times since it was first released and I’m still not tired of it.  I haven’t really liked any of their other albums nearly as much until In Rainbows.  The Scotch Mist video is just incredible.  I saw notlightnessofbeing had a post here just after they first released it.  I was so glad to see someone else had felt the same way after watching it!  I’d say it’s taken me about this long to really digest what I think about it overall.

If I could make a request of anyone who happens to read this, it would be to watch this video (preferably in an altered state….).  Just humor me.  Let me know 10 years from now if my plan works :p

The beauty of having large amounts of people all listening to the same music at the same time is that it gets everyone thinking on the same wavelength – another cultural revolution is most definitely in order and long overdue.  Good on Radiohead for doing their part, and rocking while they were at it.

It’s also good to know that right now we are all trying to do our part to bring about that same type of change.  I’d say this place especially has gone so far in such a short time.  I haven’t spent this much time reading for pleasure in years!  My brain was starting to run out of fuel there for a while.  Stuck on a steady diet of over processed junk food culture and propaganda.  It’s so nice to be mentally detoxing.  Get that shit out of my system and start breathing fresh air again.  Mmmmm…air…

There are of course lots of other really great bands out there now too.  My latest favorite has been TV on the Radio.  This performance of Wolf like Me on Letterman blew me away the first time I saw it.

Even David Bowie is a huge fan of theirs and sings backup on the song Province.  (The video has embedding disabled which is a real shame because it’s beautiful).  

So I guess now I’m curious.  What has everyone else been listening to?