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Originally Posted by terminal pharmacy
I think it's great that that the younger generations aren't concerned about audio quality and downloading their whole collections of music without paying for it. Even if you do pay for it via itunes or what ever digital transmission it is not in full cd/vinyl quality.
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There are plusses and minuses to the self-serve smorgasboard of free and cheap downloads. Obviously, the biggest plus is the access people have to find any kind of music including highly obscure stuff with tools like Soulseek, MySpace, etc. But if the appreciation of or the finicky insistence on audiophile-quality recording fidelity has begun to erode as listeners become more accepting of downloadable or streaming media, that is probably as hurtful to listeners and musicians as it is helpful.
I doubt it's contributed too much to the burgeoning lo-fi zeitgeist, which in many ways reflects the much more widely recognized lo-fi movement of the late 80s/early 90s when even magazines like
Spin and
Rolling Stone were treating it like a new genre (isn't it always so problematic when a word or phrase that is essentially a mode of production [folk, indie, lo-fi] becomes recognized as a style or genre?). And we all know why that era was so full of crap that we've left buried in the past now, don't we? Well, if not, it's because so often, bands would hide behind "lo-fi" as an excuse to make a record that sounded like shit.
Little did these bands know that making a great lo-fi record was all about getting the best possible results outta limited or basic means! When you think all the way back to early legendary producers like Joe Meek and Phil Spector, those are the prime examples of what is possible with limited means right there, and that is the surest sign that so much is possible with a little inspiration and attention to detail regardless of how spartan the studio (or bedroom or basement or tool shed).
I think that much of the best so-called lo-fi music today is recapturing that inspiration. Check out the latest albums by Dan Melchior und Das Menace, Nothing People, Thee Oh Sees, Eat Skull......it's got all kindsa splendor and ghosts fluttering around in it, and it just sets the mood perfectly to enjoy some really splendid songwriting as well. But the more uncultured an ear becomes due to compass-less meandering through the self-serve smorgasboard, perhaps the less likely a lazy, undemanding listener is to fail to capture that brilliance. And don't we all know that these undemanding listeners aren't filtering down to the best that the so-called underground has to offer anyway? Not when there's still flashing commercial banner ads and online idol-worship centers like Pitchfork laying out the roadmap to today's trends sponsored by bags and bags o' $$$, and never veering more than one or 1½ standard deviations from the LCD center. (Queue up The Fall's "Middle Mass" now.)
What's encouraging about today is that there are more and more people at all levels of music fandom from casual to obsessive that are rejecting mainstream media, and that is causing some micro-revolutions. I may not be a fan of Bright Eyes, but I was pretty happy just thinking about the panicked board-room meetings that happened in corporate media after they picked up the issue of
Billboard magazine when Bright Eyes was #1 on a sales chart. I just imagine chrome-domers in navy blue suits steaming from the ears, slamming the wrag down on the table going "WHO THE HELL IS BRIGHT EYES AND WHY DON'T WE KNOW ABOUT THEM???" And then there was the fan petitions numbering into the several hundred thousands (if not millions) demanding that the label give Fiona Apple permission to release an unreleased album that the label didn't feel was worthy.
These were moments that resonated in the recording industry the way that $4.50/gal gasoline played in Detroit. That certainly sets the table for a better marketplace that values musicians and their fans a lot more. Of course, that change will come slow.....especially in a marketplace that is continually diminishing due to the CD format's continual fadeout.
The most demanding listeners in the last few years have learned to live with the changes in negotiating the channels through which music becomes available, and where people go to learn something new about music and read opinion and share theirs with others. This has led to an actual increase in music sales of independently produced and marketed music on formats like vinyl (and even cassette culture is making an appreciable comeback). And perhaps the anonymity of the internet has led to a smearing or crumbling of borders between genre ghettoes.
Stylistically, there's the expansion in definition of psychedelic which has also greatly diversified music as much as it has also helped to provide paths for bonding between artists formerly divided by those genre ghettos. The only ill effect of this is the slow death of "irony as fashion" (can we just kill it off now already?!) and the increase in the amount of ironic facial hair that you see today. But that's a small price to pay for the kinda variety that so many people now share together.......and even words like "garage" which was so limited has changed so much, and words like "punk" are coming back from having been hijacked by marketers of crap that shall go unnamed, such that both garage and punk now include music that sounds as "proto-" as the stuff they used to call "punk" in the early to mid-70s, yet is also music that has been influenced by the past three decades as well.
Certainly, there was a huge amount of music that was made in the mid-90s explosion of indie/punk/underground culture that immediately followed the controversial mainstream media co-option of "alternative". And that might be believed to be something of a halcyon age, too. Goodness knows there's a lotta folks here who think that this is when Sonic Youth peaked along with the Pixies and My Bloody Valentine and Pavement and a lotta other bands that so many SY Gossippers wear kneepads for. I was into these bands, too, and also learned to love garagepunk, and sure...I thought New Bomb Turks, The Makers, Supercharger, Teengenerate, and Guitar Wolf were all awesome back then, and there were dozens more faves I had back then. But now that I think about it, I realize that I was 21 back then and super-enthusiastic, and now I understand that while there was a dizzying amount of records back then, most of it was dreck, and I don't listen to all of that stuff combined as much as I listen to the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, who I only
sorta liked back then. Nowadays, there's too many records to keep up with, and a lot of it compares well to the top 5% of great records 15 years ago.
If you're born in the mid-80s or later, I hope this last part doesn't read like some "you kids don't know shit" sorta thing, but I do feel like I'm able to see this more clearly because of my experience. Someone my dad's age can probably take me to task over everything I just said by saying that rock & roll has never been as great as it was in the years 1965-1968. (And he'd be right, but that's an even longer story!)
I'm just saying...if you're musically aware right now, whether you've been aware for years or just getting into it, RIGHT NOW is a really excellent time. And it's no time to be wishing you were born when I was born just so...what?...you could play hacky sack at Lollapalooza?