![]() ![]() ![]() Here we can focus our attention on what we read about, what we hear online, what friends tell us about, what we find in shops, what we discover in a distant relative’s cabinet. Secondly, we should concentrate further on our collection of new music, and work ahead steadily to increase its size and quality. This is acceptable and healthy, because we know that we love the music that we know of absolutely we can’t pine after something unless we’ve heard and then forgotten it. If we miss out on some terrific stuff, the reasoning goes, then we should concentrate on two things: one, the music we love, which we have discovered ourselves and are permitted to love like our own spouses, the music without which we would have never become the people we are today - we shudder to imagine a world without it. It’s like dating, in a way, because we must learn not to drown in the opportunity costs of unknown prospects even Julian Cope had barely any idea of what his favorite band would sound like, only that “it would have to be the Sensational Alice Ra Pop & his MC Cheer, when Damo ‘Ozzy’ Morrison was still on vocals, and before Manuel ‘Sonic’ Van Halen had sold his FX pedals.” (For those who don’t get it, that band is a composite of different names and doesn’t exist in short, there is no such thing as PERFECT MUSIC.) ![]() It sounds painful, and it is, to realize that this is the truth we live with, but it is a necessary realization to preserve one’s sanity in this kind of frenzied productive climate. What we need is a new philosophy by which to guide our search for “the good stuff,” as nebulous a term as that may be, and wide-netted besides we need to accept one thing first of all: that we are bound to miss some great music. Who says there’s any sifting to be done? Why do we treat this profusion of content as something to be waded into a la the Ganges River, or a sewage pond? We despair at the idea of finding good music in the swamp - not for nothing are SoundCloud rappers an Internet punchline. The massive whoompf of content that worried analysts predict will turn the Internet into a jungle of human output (whaddaya mean “will,” ya fuckin’ egghead?) has swamped me and everyone else seeking to connect, superficially or otherwise, through the traditional arts, and at some point the average reasonable observer will be sorely tempted to light his hair on fire and run screaming from the three hundred hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube alone. Few are the students, many the volumes everyone’s got a contribution they want to make to the written and visual and sonic record of “what people do.” With the advent of the Internet the masses have been enabled to make such contributions - witness the proliferation of new music of highly variable quality on SoundCloud and Bandcamp and YouTube. ![]()
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