I35 thoughts on music

It's that time of year again, the crest of finals is about to commence and here I am blogging. In all fairness, I'm doing well this time around; I'm done with physics, I have to create a cheat sheet for econ and then I have a couple of days to worry about my stats final. It should be okay, I think. Aside from preparing for finals and finishing Everything is Illuminated [it fascinated me so] I have had a couple of thoughts on the the music industry. I can only imagine that these ideas have been put to words already somewhere, but I haven't done so, so I might as well do it right now.

First, "crunk" is the new "glam". I don't really listen to crunk rap, but my co-workers do and they attempt to bring it into our workplace. I get it, it has catchy hooks and beats, but rarely says anything of non-narcissistic matters. Glam rock revolved around treating women like sexual objects, large quantities of alcohol and drugs, quickly spent wealth and fantastic guitar hooks - all the makings of a Vh1 "Behind the Music" special. And, from my limited view, crunk centers around the exact same things, though exchanging guitar hooks for electronically created beats. I'm not denying its artform, though it's fairly easy to criticize the lyrics, I'm just noting the similarities. I figured Chuck Klosterman should have already written about this sort of thing.

Second, I used to be opposed to the electronic medium of music. Then I was surprised with an iPod last Christmas. Honestly, it has revolutionized how I listen to music. I spend the most time listening to music in my car, where I spend an unfortunately large amount of time, and it's where I keep my iPod. It's a nano, so it holds a fraction of my music, but what it does is that it keeps my music fresh. When I only listened to CD's in my car, I would listen to one CD until I got bored with it, then repeated the boredom with another CD. The process made me lose interest in the music I owned in the form of CD's. With the electronic medium it is easy to create what amounts to a personalized radio station. Since I began using my iPod I have only rarely got bored with my music selection, meaning that I buy fewer CD's [helping my wallet], and enjoy what music I have more.

This being said, there is one thing that is still lacking in the electronic medium: the physical art that physical mediums are packaged in. I love looking through liner notes and looking at old LP covers. There's a certain beauty that's found in those things that is difficult, if not impossible, to recreate in the electronic medium. Maybe it puts more focus on the music itself, but I know that my friends that are in bands sometimes really enjoy creating what packages the music. Perhaps the alternative is the artist's [non-myspace] website. Some artists keep their websites unchanged over the period of several albums, while others revamp their sites for every release. And there are some really, really creative websites out there: Point Juncture WA, Talkdemonic or Jesca Hoop [vis non-crunk co-worker Emily]. I'm not entirely sure of how to resolve this, but I know that multiple musicians read this blog o' mine, so I would like to hear at least a couple of responses. I'll just go ahead and thank you in advance.. and wish my fellow final-takers good luck. you have my love.