How often do you feel completely uninterested in music?
 

it feels like i have been uninterested in most music for over a full year, i haven't been to a live show in so long i can't even remember who it was and when

also have a giant $700 fender head paperweight gathering dust, same with the guitars

my receiver sucks, no subwoofer output, also gathering dust, so about $2000 in total music related items just not being used

oh shit right, my wall of about 1000 CDs just sitting there

i am not really sure why either, i only really listen to music in my car

just kinda wondering aloud, actually not interested in almost everything to be honest

Music something that is a lifelong pursuit, like any art, and there are times when you need to separate from it to better appreciate everything else, and then bring that back to your love of music.

I like it when I lose interest in music because when I go back to it I'm reminded why I love it in the first place. One thing the internet taught me and constantly reminds of is that I am generally more bored with most audiences for music. Too many crybabies making a big deal out of things that are not that important in the big scheme of things.

i gradully stopped caring.

the last genre i got into was classical, theres probably nothing left that would interest me. i spent recent years trying very hard to care and exhausting myself on the effort to get enthused, but there is just nothing going on that is what i want to hear. i can listen to some stuff, its disposable and ok, but thats it.

i like some choral stuff now, and modernist era classical, and japanese composers.

black metal, drone, the gazes and hauses, i can get into some of it but i forget i even heard it and dont bother looking it up again.

That's a totally legitimate feeling to me. I can't think of any other form of art that's been discussed, dissected, patronised, overrated, underrated etc more than music since, maybe, the 60s.

It only seems normal for some people to exhaust on it and get overwhelmed by the amount of redundant discussion. That group of people to me includes musicians themselves. If this means that eventually more and more artists totally detach themselves from the idea of having an audience and have less distractions, maybe we're going to hear more emphatic music than a lot of what you hear these days. I don't think this a bad thing at all, and besides, if no great music is produced ever again, there are so many records to catch up with if you have a keen interest.

i think that ive heard everything. my brain has schematics of where everythings going to go in advance. it never does anything that grabs my attention

our society is composed of the oldest individuals in history, so its a gerontocracy and everyone young is too poor to do anything. its just lazy soundcloud mixes. we need to be crushed and enslaved by aliens with different brains who can produce some actual novelty.

and black people cant come up with anything new for us to steal. why is hip hop still happening?

Maybe musical appreciation is like any muscle, overuse, creates fatigue.

I have gone through long stretches where I do not listen to music, and I have gone through long stretches where I do not create any art. I am currently in the middle of one of those. It has been at least 7 months since I have drawn or painted anything substantive.

I think people like many in the SYG board, like us discussing here, are the kind of folks that seek the leading edges, the boundaries, of what we like in music. That makes us bypass 80-90% of what exists because it is not an outlier. When you seek to reside in the avant-garde, your sphere of connections becomes ever smaller. There are only so many drone bands you can hear before they all begin to tread the same territory.

I tend to think that the mind detaching from outside stimuli, (music, art TV etc.) is a signal from yourself to yourself that you need to focus more on what is in you as opposed to what is outside you. The outer stuff becomes tame, boring, or even just easily ignorable.

Thinking that culture is an actual, real factor in a changing society is exactly what I think is the problem most musicians and their audience trying to get it right face these days. What you listen to and consider your own taste is, in the vast majority of cases, determined by how best you are able to do it. It still seems like this type of naivety is more popular in rock, pop, hip hop and whatever comes from them. It involuntarily leads to the ground zero of perceiving how it all happens. In such a public way it's often embarrassing.

I thought I'd put a traditional Suchfriends meme on this thread before he gets back home and do it himself. I hope I got the style right.

Must Spread the Deal With It Meme Shades Around Before Sending It To Genteel Death again.

As to the thread, I've felt this way a lot more lately, like over the past year. Its not so much that I listen to music less, its that I listen to less new music. I am not chasing new music, even when my favorite bands put out new records. Also to your equipment getting dusty, well I can also relate to that too, but I can't explain it either, I don't like that I've been a lot less involved in playing music than listening to it, honestly I feel kind of victim to it. But music is from inspiration, hence the term muse, and if there is no muse, no inspiration, it becomes mechanical.

There have been times I haven´t been very interested in music. When my first child borned, music was really not in the middle of my life. And there were years I bought only new albums of my favourite artists (it was that time I noticed almost over year after that SY has released Murray Street) not any second hand albums or any other new albums.

When I have listened four albums non-stop, I don´t want to listen any music long time. If it has been in the morning, I can listen an album in the evening.

I don´t also get excited about totally new music often these days. If it happens, there has to be something I haven´t heard before, at least totally new mix of old elements. Well, sometimes some song just got me (like Dumb Numbers "Last Night I had a dream" did last year).

I used to create own music, but I have lost interest to make it anymore. I made one new song last year, this year I haven´t made any. Maybe I don´t make any songs in my life anymore.

One thing I have thought that popular music has made a circle. I think before Elvis most of the popular music meaning seemed to be just entertainment. And all the music I hear from the mainsteam radios and television these days seem to be only entertainment music.

Yes, there are important things in my life also as music. Like my family.

I just thought that maybe music recording is the reason why people can´t create anything really new these days. Because when the recording music hadn´t invented, people just couldn´t listen any music and they have to create totally new music.

theres an overflow of info and media. everyone is in permanent click distraction. every wants it to slow down but it wont.

baudrillard understood in his last book - he talked about the net and said that "free obligatory communication is unbearable" and how we all want it to be stopped and subject to the law of value. but it goes too fast.

there are no gaps anymore, no moments in which you want the thing but dont have it. theres just a noisey glut.

he has this other line about how we've "lost the vital secret" to our energies which is to never go all the way. its like when you binge drink and everyone pukes and cant remember it and gets sick. alternatively, if you sit in a quiet place, relax, and have just a bit short of the amount of alcohol you want to grasp for, you have the most amazing and wonderful time. true pleasure.

people talked about hauntology but even when i was young, i was getting into stuff from the early 80s and 90s, into a moment that had already past and existed as something else in my imagination. so that effect is still there and young people will explore and still feel that awe because they havent heard it all yet and there are still places on the trail ahead of them to discover.

music is for the young anyway, because we know that the brain changes and music is not as sensational and great for a 25 or 30 year old as it is for a 17 year old.

and i feel that the young are robbed of their rightful spaces by the gerontocracy.

i noticed that out of all the new underground genres that appeared in recent years, witch house, hauntology, hypnagogia, vaper etc. they are all characterised by almost no lyrics or vocals at all. it makes sense given the conditions. i also remember one night at 4am listening to radio 1 and hearing blocks of electronica and just thinking how the machines are doing it all themselves, and our input is such a small part of that.

anyway, for me, my interests shifted but im still pursuing the same thing, whatever it is. i just find it outside of music. something like punk is such an embarrassment because it is just history now, its like an old man with some antique thing.

music is for the young anyway, because we know that the brain changes and music is not as sensational and great for a 25 or 30 year old as it is for a 17 year old.

I agree this. I know I will not have as great emotions from any new music, as I get in the age of seventeen listening first time Velvets two first albums with few bottles of beer. But on the other hand, music is not dead to me (& I am 41), specially music that have earlier caused me big emotions still causes them to me. And I still want to hear music I´ve never heard before, but mostly it is old music, today´s music is just not for me. The world of today seem to live like only youth-time is important. In the past old people were respected. I don´t believe I will ever become totally bored to this life, also there are many other interesting things in my life as music. I don´t care what the world think of me because I´m old, I am still going to live full life!

And about that everything goes too fast, I´ve chosen that I`m not in it. I don´t have to know everything what´s going on in the music or in the world. I just try to live as simple as possible.

I do not agree with the "music is for the young" statement. Most musicians are NOT young, especially in truly musical (in that they require musical skill as well as just desire) forms like Jazz, orchestral, blues, and other such music. The musicians are generally older.

Most Jazz fans have always been older, most classical fans also. It is usually the new waves of acts that attract the young audience looking for something different than what their elders listened to, but since they are young, they really do not understand that the "new" stuff they like is just an extension of the massive amounts of "old" stuff that came before it.

Even pop music behaves this way. Most pop music is done by people over 30, produced by people over 40.

what gets tiresome is chasing the "new"

I'm not really interested if music is for the young or old. I am curious to know how someone feels when you lose interest in something you've been holding as special for a long time and suddenly you realise all that has changed.

I agree with rob, music, especially PLAYING music is so much more an old man's sport than a young man's game. When you're young music is more all-absorbing and all-encompassing, but when you're older its something you've mastered, something largely intuitive, something that has become instinct.

ALL the best bands really hit their peak in their late 30s if they aren't already a cliche of themselves. I think some of the best records of ALL TIME were recorded by band when they were in their 30s and 40s as opposed to 20s..

When you're in your 20s music is more of an open experiment, when you're older its more of a calculated risk.

Definitely like rob said, its not listening to or playing music that is for the young, its chasing the new, because when you're young EVERYTHING is new and EVERYTHING new is practically Divine.

As to Genteel's question, I think that you raise a great point. However, I think like rob mentioned, if music is a lifelong passion we should expect as we in Rastafari say, "Trod over hills and valleys."

There are ups and downs, ebbs and flows, but what is the long arc trajectory?

I think to put this in Campbellian terms, when musicians and music lovers get past the infatuation stage and evolve into a serious marriage, they have found apotheosis and are bringing home the Ultimate Boon. So what they, either fans or musicians are chasing is no longer the new, but perfection. A kind of balanced bliss. There is a sense of vision.

It is the only way to survive years, possibly decades of devoting so much of your life to spending odd and long hours in dive bars, shitty clubs, and smoke filled jam spaces ;)

Me? I admit to having lost sight of the Vision, I gave up on that goal, I decided that devoting all that time to that setting wasn't part of my Vision any more, instead I focus on my school teaching as my stage and audience.

I will say this, admitting to becoming a "failed musician" has made my music so much more satisfying for myself. I always wrote and performed music for what it did and does inside for me, but I also was intrigued, indeed DRIVEN to share it with other people at all costs. Since that extrovert part of my soul is now overly occupied with a different audience on a daily basis, I don't have the spiritual capacity to expend myself any further. So the music is JUST for me now. It has become purified like a potent extract of my own personal use. Writing and playing my own original music has become like my private stash..

To me that's a cliche. I reckon I've listened to more musicians in tune with my idea of good music in my mid-to-late 30s than when I was 16 or something. I understand that some people lose interest in stuff as they grow older but it irks me when opinions like yours and Rob's seem to be met with general consensus. Besides, they seem to stem from a wider acknowledgement that the old ''don't get'' the young when it comes to music, when it's also true that the young ''don't get'' the old and often only seem to emulate them, which is useless as far as I am concerned.

You misunderstand. I didn't say the young know more about music than the old, or that they are more experienced. Quite the opposite, its that the experience and indeed musical wisdom of the older tempers our rush to dive into everything new.

Chasing new music is for the young, but they are chasing precisely because of the insecurities and excitement of what they DON'T know.

In this regard, I think music in your 30s is much like dating. In your teens you are just fucking horny and crazy. You go after every opportunity. When you are in your 30s you know what you want and you know who you are..

Just admit it, you didn't read my post with calm. Your quick reply is suggesting this. Perhaps a sign that the older you get, the more you value impatience as something that comes with it.

Admit what, that I totally agreed with you? Did you read my reply "with calm"??

Meme time.

I agreed with you that the experience of being "older" means we approach music with a more tempered approach. We know what we want. We know what we are looking for, even in something new. Its not about young or old misunderstanding each other, its about the older just knowing themselves better.

Really and honestly, please explain where we disagreed? I'm not trying to be "muleheaded" like !@#$%! always accuses, but I sincerely thought we shared similar sentiments here, where am I off base? I ain't trying to say that "you're wrong" especially when I totally thought I was saying, "You're right."

????

Funny. And true. Just about everything recorded by a black person before 1980 was good or goddamn great. Kinda patchy, to say the least, since then.



My last big project was to study Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. It's something I'll probably never be one with entirely, but I've heard several performances and paid a lot of attention to smart pros and professors discussing them.

Glorious stuff. But jesus fuck I need a break. Like, a lot of silence.



Oh, well, "new" music. I haven't cared about chasing the new for about a decade now. I'm sure I'm missing out on great stuff. But I don't care.


But for music in general, it's been awhile since I've strapped on a pair of headphones, rolled some cigs and a joint or two, and blissed out for a few hours. I miss it. I don't know. Perhaps western harmony can only do so much. Even with classical music, I was starting to get tired of that genre's cliches.

It's weird. I'd never say I DON'T like music. But mostly, I sure don't act like it.

It is a sign that oneself has changed. The Beatles stay the Beatles, but as one listens to more and more, one changes and what was energizing and life-affirming just becomes rote.

I shrug and say "Boy, the younger me was kind of an idiot."

Doesn't everyone?

I do not think it is about the audiences. It is about the music as appreciated by someone with more experienced ears, and mind.

someone who in their 50's finds that he likes reggae music will likely be equally as adamant about it as someone who finds it when they are 16. It is just that as a youth, you are surrounded by people that are also seeking and also experiencing everything as new, whereas as an oldster (I am 41), you may find yourself the sole person in your group of humans that is interested in what you are seeking. It comes from both a specialization/focus of one's taste, and from the weight of life dragging one and others away from the pursuits which used to seem meaningful and crucial but now seem to be distractions from what is truly important (family, work, sicknesses, atheism... ;) )

To be sure, I don't think ANYONE discovers reggae in this 40s or 50s.. With reggae you either find it long before then, or you never do..

After all, most people stumble ass backwards into reggae in some pot smoking haze and don't know half of what they are getting into ;)

hahah, maybe a bad example.

I had a painting teacher in college who used to come around to my studio to check my work and talk,a nd I always had music playing and one day I had a mix of King Tubby, Marley, and Lee Perry dub on my little boombox, and he hung to listen,. telling me that Reggae music was the only music that he still loved from the time he was a young man. (He was British).

It still moved him, and he loved listening to it, but he was just as lost on "new" reggae as most 50 year olds, and he had no fucking clue what dub was! He liked it though....

His accent was amazing, "That is quite a lot of reverb on that...."

you guys are funny.;)