What a way to start out. Two huge rants. We've each got our essential albums of the 2000's coming up and a few local events we'd like to see you at. In the meantime we're just going to bitch and moan. Enjoy!
------------------
My rant is about something a little simpler. To me, it's not really what you listen to, but how you listen to it. The last decade has brought mind blowing technology in and the simple process of listening and experiencing good music out. It's rare for a "release date" to be an event. Most dorks have the albums downloaded in some shit format that leaked a month before its release on some blog site and it's been listened to out of order in awful quality. Now they've heard it and aren't pleased so they've written a review their friends went along with before it's even out.. You don't do that with movies or books, so why water down music like that? You don't walk in the theater 40 minutes late, sit down, watch the last half, come back later and watch the beginning, so why do people do it with records? And yeah, it's all up to the listener. That doesn't make it any less stupid. It's pretty obvious no one really gives a shit about the quality music anymore.
The point I'm trying to make isn't to only hear lossless qualities of the music on million dollar stereos - it's to sit down and listen to an album as intended by the artist, which hopefully is to take time to listen to it in its entirety. Then again, I don't think "artists" out nowadays like Lady Gaga had music lovers in mind when she wrote her shit poop nonsense- so maybe everyones approach to listening to music is dead on.
Ever notice when you walk in a Best Buy you're bombarded with a plethora of HD tvs and video equipment, yet the most popular level of music technology there is a 2 inch piece of plastic with those little fucking ear buds? We couldn't care any less about quality. Just give us all the latest Lil Wayne, Lady Gaga, and Green Day mp3s my iPod can handle and we'll be shitting rainbows for weeks! Does this mp3 come with a poster? I love posters.
I'm still a fairly young guy yet I can still remember saving up the few dollars I made at my first job and going to stores to buy cds of bands the day they came out. That release date was anticipated for weeks. Whatever friends I had into that album, we'd all sit around and turn it up real loud and pass around the artwork it came with. Read who wrote what, where it was recorded, all the liner notes.. and that's all been washed up to just clicking a link and sliding it onto your iPod. Are you really that busy you can't take 40 minutes out of your shitty day to sit down and listen to a record all the way through? Would it really kill you to wait for the album to come out so you can experience it how it was intended to be?
To each his own I suppose, but I still think it just defeats the entire purpose. If we still had the format of an album, where songs are written to compliment one another and make a bigger picture both musically and visually- I think just maybe we'd have a better scene to sink our ears into. But unfortunately, we seemed to have replaced the love of music with the interest and dedication similar to an elementary school crush. You know, where you're only into the bitch because she's got nice hand writing and her shoes light up when she walks? Yeah. It's like that. And the bands and labels pumping out this shit are well aware that they're just background noise to your parties so both sides don't waste their time writing or distributing anything but disposable fucking garbage.
I know there's still bands, listeners, and record stores with these simple ideas out there. We're slowly coming back on the radar. In the meantime, I plan on supporting, praising, listening, and helping keep real musicians and music alive any way I can.
-Novak