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On Music
12 years ago
A world that loves it's irony...
I am going to unfold upon you the secrets to listening to music. Be ready, my readers--this will be a mindblow.
How to Enjoy Music
It's strange, that I am writing this. You would think it would be far easier to enjoy music than it is--but no, I meet folks all the time who cannot fathom enjoyment. They say, "I like this because yes." And that is all, that is the finality of it.
It's sad, really.
Music is how we, as humans, have communicated nuanced and intense emotions for eons. We beat drums to send news before we could write. We danced to summon gods. We built spoken word songs of vast adventure to tell to our children and children's children.
And yet it's hard for some folk to really listen to music.
Listening to music is more than just hearing it. Anyone can hear music, can name its genre and whether it's positive or negative sounding. Anyone can do that. But listening to music? It's so much more than that. So much more, my beautiful ones.
1. Headphones
I don't care what any audiophile says to you. If they claim speakers are a more worthy listening style than headphones, they are wrong and have made horrible life decisions. You do not experience music by allowing outside distractions to interrupt your oneness with the songs. I do not mean to say you should not have speakers so you may share music with those around you, no no.
Just invest in a very good pair of headphones.
I don't care if they are earbuds or DJ cans. I don't care if they are wired or wireless. I don't care if they are ugly or match your music player. There are only two things that matter when it comes to choosing headphones:
1. Do they give you an immersive experience?
2. Do they allow you to hear everything?
The immersion factor is something I take very seriously. While on the computer, I do tend to use my speaker system. When I acquire a new piece of music, be it just one song or an entire album, that I am earnestly excited for, I put it onto my iPod, sit in my bed, and I listen to it with headphones.
Why?
There is a peace and fullness of headphones that you do not get with speakers. Speakers allow the white noise of your life seep through the music and poke you in the eye. The fan running; your roommates running about; the dishwasher; the mouse in your wall. Speakers are party devices, not personal ones.
If you spend money on a good pair of headphones, a decently-made set, you will shudder as each note comes off of your favourite album. They will expose you to little sounds in the song you never knew were there before. There are moments where I have been listening to a song I thought I knew in and out, and suddenly there is a woodblock beat I hadn't heard in all my other listenings.
If that isn't a holy experience, I am a heathen.
2. The Challenge
Complacency is the death of love. Becoming a stoic is going to stunt your emotional and personal growth far more than you might think it will. There will be genres you will be most fond of. I, for instance, love glam without a sliver of irony (as if irony is something worth bringing into music). This does not mean I listen to Bowie, Cooper, and Semi Precious Weapons all the time to no end.
I feel a little death when someone tells me they don't listen to a certain genre. Why? I ask this with real worry in my voice. Why would you ever do that to yourself, to deny an entire section of the broadest emotional expression system we as humans have ever created?
You don't like rap? Give me five minutes and Tyler, the Creator or Dessa. You hate country? Let me show you The Civil Wars or Neko Case.
There is a font of music in every genre, unless you hand me a sub-sub-sub-subgenre as if its something the populace listens to normally.
Denying an entire genre access to your pleasure centres will be the death of your musical enjoyment, so never quit. Never relent. Always give something a chance. You don't have to like it, just try it.
PROTIP: It's sometimes hard finding new music to listen to out of your comfort zone. I suggest www.allmusic.com's "New Releases" list and Grooveshark. Pick a few albums that look interesting, read the reviews, see if it sounds even akin to something you may want to give a chance. Do it whether or not you want to. The worst you'll lose is an hour of your life. The best you'll gain is a new band to listen to.
3. The Album as Art
There is a plague in modern society. It is called "the single". I deny nothing about finding and hooking your teeth into a song you love more than the rest. I do that all the time, I have playlists of songs like that. It's the point of music, finding pieces you resonate with emotionally.
But learn to listen to an album.
Before you jump to the well-known singles, or the song your friend told you to listen to while vehemently screaming about its inherent meaning...just take the album, and listen. Really listen. A good artist will organise their tracks on purpose, with a purpose. Even more schlocky flash-in-the-pan musical acts at least order their album with some amount of sense.
Artists know what they want to say. They want to say things in a specific order. It'd be like taking a book you love and reading the chapters out of order. Sure, you'd get the point of the story but would you get the same effect as if you read the book in order?
Then again, you might get a different effect, a more potent effect. But it will be dulled if you don't understand how it was first ordered. In a tangentical way, it's like people who re-cut movie trailers to seem like disparaging genres. A trailer for How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days that plays like an assassin drama, for instance.
This is the art of the album. And not just concept albums (though this author has a serious hard-on for a good concept album), but any album by a competent musician. Later, you can pick out your favourite songs and play them on repeat forever. Later, when the time is right. Now? Put those headphones in and have an experience.
4. Two Worlds
There are people I have met who do not listen to lyrics. I suppose that is fine--those people tend to go for instrumental tracks anyway. Here is the issue--if you are listening to a song that has lyrics, and it is a band of any substance...why are you not listening to those lyrics?
This is akin to humming the meter of a poem and enjoying it. Sure, you could do it, but you're missing the point.
It is also wrong to listen to the lyrics, to read them as poetry and distance them from the music they are sung to. Yes, certain bands (The Decemberists, for one) read like poems at times, but this is a fallacy that they are as enjoyable in this form. They are not, no one can say otherwise and be right. A lyricist and a musician are partners in crime, and you must accept them as an entity--not as two statues facing away from one another that have some of the same symbols carved into them.
A musician worth their salt will match music and lyrics. Sometimes broadly, sometimes subtly. "But Lu!" I hear you cry from the depths of the Internet. "How am I to know? Not every musician is so intelligent!"
Hush, you silly children. I know. That is okay. But you will never know, you will never understand whether a musician is that intelligent, unless you listen. And really listen, in your headphones, with your cynicism for the moment put away and on a high shelf.
Be open. That is the key to music, beyond any of the bullet points. Be open, be ready to hear and experience and process and understand. Whatever the song means to you is correct, regardless of anyone saying it may or may not be about that. What it says to you is far more important than what it says to anyone else.
It is a mirror; look into it.
5. Sharing Is Caring
How do I know people don't really like music?
The never tell me what they're listening to.
Much like movies you love, or video games you really felt, music is a medium that screams to be shared. It is a series of emotions set on the backdrop of a key signature and notes. It is thoughts with a melody. Not sharing that should honestly be a real and true crime. It is heinous when people do not share.
This is not just a quality of hipsters. Yes, they are a set of people who do not share, for they want to keep the indie-ness, the underground attitude of their music intact. That is fine (but also wrong). It is just as wrong to be a lover of music and not actively try to give those you know the ability to enjoy what you enjoy. If you have an emotional connection with something, if you really feel a song in your guts, if it makes your heart turn over a few times in your chest--share that now. Even if you do not get the response you want, you have breathed more life into the music than you could have by keeping it to yourself, hidden away on your hard drive and iPod for the rest of eternity, only to be heard by your ears in your own magical unbreakable world.
Never. Ever. Hide your music.
6. The Old & the New
Literally, fuck you if you think music stopped being good ever. And don't give me those tired lines about what's on the radio. The radio, no matter what era, has always been the lowest of the low. While at times good music wiggles its way onto the airwaves, for the grand majority of "good" bands (and good is entirely subjective, I know) hit the top 40 maybe once? If they were lucky, twice. You don't hear The Velvet Underground on the radio, but they are more influential than most bands that were actually popular at that time.
That being said? Older music is highly important to at least have a passing knowledge in, if not doing the right thing and exploring it just as much. New music is a series of more complicated building blocks on the foundation of what came before it. Some may copy it too heavily, some may barely be related to it--but much like painters and writers, everyone owes at least a passing debt to those who came before.
The issue with this comes when the fans of one or the other side begin to butt heads. Wrong, you are all wrong and you should feel bad for this. There is no such thing as "the day the music died", and the very idea that music stopped being good at some point is laughable at best. If you aren't willing to do a little research, sure--but guess what? There are quite a few popular older bands who, at the time, were barely on the radio and were, for all intents and purposes, one-hit wonders.
Don't deny the old or the new. Appreciate it all, know your history and watch how new music unfolds and fractals itself into more and more intricate designs. The only bad music is that which is not made well.
7. In Conclusion?
At this very moment, at this second of me writing this sentence, Emilie Autumn's "Thank God I'm Pretty" is playing on my iTunes. I have my entire music collection on shuffle. Right before this was Lisa Miskovsky. After this? It could be anything. It may end up on Enya, it may end up on Devin Townsend. I don't know.
And fuck do I love that.
The eternal breadth of my musical tastes turns me on in a way only my boyfriend and certain images can. This is important, as music is humanity's most all-encompassing search and discussion of our lives, our ability to be, and the world we live in. Some may do it through frivolous means, some may sit and write lyrics more introspective than they have any right to be.
It's all okay.
Not enjoying something isn't a crime. Not knowing why you don't enjoy something is. The same goes for knowing why you enjoy what you do enjoy. Never settle on the answer "because", as that is the equivalent of saying 1 + 1 = 2 because "someone said so".
Never be content. Always be searching. And enjoy, my friends.
Enjoy.
How to Enjoy Music
It's strange, that I am writing this. You would think it would be far easier to enjoy music than it is--but no, I meet folks all the time who cannot fathom enjoyment. They say, "I like this because yes." And that is all, that is the finality of it.
It's sad, really.
Music is how we, as humans, have communicated nuanced and intense emotions for eons. We beat drums to send news before we could write. We danced to summon gods. We built spoken word songs of vast adventure to tell to our children and children's children.
And yet it's hard for some folk to really listen to music.
Listening to music is more than just hearing it. Anyone can hear music, can name its genre and whether it's positive or negative sounding. Anyone can do that. But listening to music? It's so much more than that. So much more, my beautiful ones.
1. Headphones
I don't care what any audiophile says to you. If they claim speakers are a more worthy listening style than headphones, they are wrong and have made horrible life decisions. You do not experience music by allowing outside distractions to interrupt your oneness with the songs. I do not mean to say you should not have speakers so you may share music with those around you, no no.
Just invest in a very good pair of headphones.
I don't care if they are earbuds or DJ cans. I don't care if they are wired or wireless. I don't care if they are ugly or match your music player. There are only two things that matter when it comes to choosing headphones:
1. Do they give you an immersive experience?
2. Do they allow you to hear everything?
The immersion factor is something I take very seriously. While on the computer, I do tend to use my speaker system. When I acquire a new piece of music, be it just one song or an entire album, that I am earnestly excited for, I put it onto my iPod, sit in my bed, and I listen to it with headphones.
Why?
There is a peace and fullness of headphones that you do not get with speakers. Speakers allow the white noise of your life seep through the music and poke you in the eye. The fan running; your roommates running about; the dishwasher; the mouse in your wall. Speakers are party devices, not personal ones.
If you spend money on a good pair of headphones, a decently-made set, you will shudder as each note comes off of your favourite album. They will expose you to little sounds in the song you never knew were there before. There are moments where I have been listening to a song I thought I knew in and out, and suddenly there is a woodblock beat I hadn't heard in all my other listenings.
If that isn't a holy experience, I am a heathen.
2. The Challenge
Complacency is the death of love. Becoming a stoic is going to stunt your emotional and personal growth far more than you might think it will. There will be genres you will be most fond of. I, for instance, love glam without a sliver of irony (as if irony is something worth bringing into music). This does not mean I listen to Bowie, Cooper, and Semi Precious Weapons all the time to no end.
I feel a little death when someone tells me they don't listen to a certain genre. Why? I ask this with real worry in my voice. Why would you ever do that to yourself, to deny an entire section of the broadest emotional expression system we as humans have ever created?
You don't like rap? Give me five minutes and Tyler, the Creator or Dessa. You hate country? Let me show you The Civil Wars or Neko Case.
There is a font of music in every genre, unless you hand me a sub-sub-sub-subgenre as if its something the populace listens to normally.
Denying an entire genre access to your pleasure centres will be the death of your musical enjoyment, so never quit. Never relent. Always give something a chance. You don't have to like it, just try it.
PROTIP: It's sometimes hard finding new music to listen to out of your comfort zone. I suggest www.allmusic.com's "New Releases" list and Grooveshark. Pick a few albums that look interesting, read the reviews, see if it sounds even akin to something you may want to give a chance. Do it whether or not you want to. The worst you'll lose is an hour of your life. The best you'll gain is a new band to listen to.
3. The Album as Art
There is a plague in modern society. It is called "the single". I deny nothing about finding and hooking your teeth into a song you love more than the rest. I do that all the time, I have playlists of songs like that. It's the point of music, finding pieces you resonate with emotionally.
But learn to listen to an album.
Before you jump to the well-known singles, or the song your friend told you to listen to while vehemently screaming about its inherent meaning...just take the album, and listen. Really listen. A good artist will organise their tracks on purpose, with a purpose. Even more schlocky flash-in-the-pan musical acts at least order their album with some amount of sense.
Artists know what they want to say. They want to say things in a specific order. It'd be like taking a book you love and reading the chapters out of order. Sure, you'd get the point of the story but would you get the same effect as if you read the book in order?
Then again, you might get a different effect, a more potent effect. But it will be dulled if you don't understand how it was first ordered. In a tangentical way, it's like people who re-cut movie trailers to seem like disparaging genres. A trailer for How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days that plays like an assassin drama, for instance.
This is the art of the album. And not just concept albums (though this author has a serious hard-on for a good concept album), but any album by a competent musician. Later, you can pick out your favourite songs and play them on repeat forever. Later, when the time is right. Now? Put those headphones in and have an experience.
4. Two Worlds
There are people I have met who do not listen to lyrics. I suppose that is fine--those people tend to go for instrumental tracks anyway. Here is the issue--if you are listening to a song that has lyrics, and it is a band of any substance...why are you not listening to those lyrics?
This is akin to humming the meter of a poem and enjoying it. Sure, you could do it, but you're missing the point.
It is also wrong to listen to the lyrics, to read them as poetry and distance them from the music they are sung to. Yes, certain bands (The Decemberists, for one) read like poems at times, but this is a fallacy that they are as enjoyable in this form. They are not, no one can say otherwise and be right. A lyricist and a musician are partners in crime, and you must accept them as an entity--not as two statues facing away from one another that have some of the same symbols carved into them.
A musician worth their salt will match music and lyrics. Sometimes broadly, sometimes subtly. "But Lu!" I hear you cry from the depths of the Internet. "How am I to know? Not every musician is so intelligent!"
Hush, you silly children. I know. That is okay. But you will never know, you will never understand whether a musician is that intelligent, unless you listen. And really listen, in your headphones, with your cynicism for the moment put away and on a high shelf.
Be open. That is the key to music, beyond any of the bullet points. Be open, be ready to hear and experience and process and understand. Whatever the song means to you is correct, regardless of anyone saying it may or may not be about that. What it says to you is far more important than what it says to anyone else.
It is a mirror; look into it.
5. Sharing Is Caring
How do I know people don't really like music?
The never tell me what they're listening to.
Much like movies you love, or video games you really felt, music is a medium that screams to be shared. It is a series of emotions set on the backdrop of a key signature and notes. It is thoughts with a melody. Not sharing that should honestly be a real and true crime. It is heinous when people do not share.
This is not just a quality of hipsters. Yes, they are a set of people who do not share, for they want to keep the indie-ness, the underground attitude of their music intact. That is fine (but also wrong). It is just as wrong to be a lover of music and not actively try to give those you know the ability to enjoy what you enjoy. If you have an emotional connection with something, if you really feel a song in your guts, if it makes your heart turn over a few times in your chest--share that now. Even if you do not get the response you want, you have breathed more life into the music than you could have by keeping it to yourself, hidden away on your hard drive and iPod for the rest of eternity, only to be heard by your ears in your own magical unbreakable world.
Never. Ever. Hide your music.
6. The Old & the New
Literally, fuck you if you think music stopped being good ever. And don't give me those tired lines about what's on the radio. The radio, no matter what era, has always been the lowest of the low. While at times good music wiggles its way onto the airwaves, for the grand majority of "good" bands (and good is entirely subjective, I know) hit the top 40 maybe once? If they were lucky, twice. You don't hear The Velvet Underground on the radio, but they are more influential than most bands that were actually popular at that time.
That being said? Older music is highly important to at least have a passing knowledge in, if not doing the right thing and exploring it just as much. New music is a series of more complicated building blocks on the foundation of what came before it. Some may copy it too heavily, some may barely be related to it--but much like painters and writers, everyone owes at least a passing debt to those who came before.
The issue with this comes when the fans of one or the other side begin to butt heads. Wrong, you are all wrong and you should feel bad for this. There is no such thing as "the day the music died", and the very idea that music stopped being good at some point is laughable at best. If you aren't willing to do a little research, sure--but guess what? There are quite a few popular older bands who, at the time, were barely on the radio and were, for all intents and purposes, one-hit wonders.
Don't deny the old or the new. Appreciate it all, know your history and watch how new music unfolds and fractals itself into more and more intricate designs. The only bad music is that which is not made well.
7. In Conclusion?
At this very moment, at this second of me writing this sentence, Emilie Autumn's "Thank God I'm Pretty" is playing on my iTunes. I have my entire music collection on shuffle. Right before this was Lisa Miskovsky. After this? It could be anything. It may end up on Enya, it may end up on Devin Townsend. I don't know.
And fuck do I love that.
The eternal breadth of my musical tastes turns me on in a way only my boyfriend and certain images can. This is important, as music is humanity's most all-encompassing search and discussion of our lives, our ability to be, and the world we live in. Some may do it through frivolous means, some may sit and write lyrics more introspective than they have any right to be.
It's all okay.
Not enjoying something isn't a crime. Not knowing why you don't enjoy something is. The same goes for knowing why you enjoy what you do enjoy. Never settle on the answer "because", as that is the equivalent of saying 1 + 1 = 2 because "someone said so".
Never be content. Always be searching. And enjoy, my friends.
Enjoy.
point 3: Tougher for me lately, with the shift of my musical listening to funnel through my computer (and either from there, or through iPod), to listen to a full album. Often i'm listening to a few tracks, then a few tracks sometime later, and such. It's the onyl way to get immersive song-listening for me. and that somewhat takes away album-potential.
Point 6: Music was always greatest when you were 12, it seems; in the way Mad Magazine was always best when you were 10. But yes, there is always good music regardless of the time of production, n the same way there is good art, good movies, etc. Some technical measure in music shift in the modern era, arguably for the better-- the availability of computers and digital tracking open up an amazing world. Still, your point stands.
1. Headphones
See, I create music. Headphones somehow strangely make my music sound better than speakers. No matter how many sound systems I have heard music through, I always found headphones to give much, MUCH more clarity- with an easier time focusing on whats there. With that being said:
You can not /feel/ music the same way you do with speakers. some songs are MEANT to be FELT through speakers. Not all, but there are some.
2. The Challenge
Some people dislike a genre not due to the genre itself, but to how most of the music in the genre sound the same. For instance, I hate most rap, but the genre- no. Its just.. where its gone by the 'popular' artists. Yet, what isn't popular usually is the most enjoyable to me. Same can go true with artists in a genre. There are artists I hate, but man there are some songs that come out of these said artists that surprise me. (Like: Eminem's "When I'm Gone". THAT surprised me.)
3. The Album as Art
Believe it or not, the singles lead me to the albums. When I get hooked onto a song, I give the full artists a chance. And through that artist I see their discography, find where that song first came through- and listen to it in order. If it doesn't speak to me or if I just cant find myself enjoying it after a few songs, even after listening- I will put the album away, and give another a go. Many times though, I hear the story they tell, each song in some of the albums I listen to is in fact like a chapter out of their story. I.. love it.
4. Two Worlds
This bit was rather powerful, but I need to ask you this: I make music, but I do not sing- nor do I have lyrics to most of my songs. I do write poetry in conjunction to some however... does this mean my music means nothing? Most of my music is there to those to enjoy and get into, and possibly even dance! ... but there are those ambient ones that are created with more emotion in mind. With the sadder ones, I do try to display emotion, and sometimes a story with an instrument, however unskilled it may be- I still try...
5. Sharing Is Caring
I share my music, but no one ever shares with me except my girlfriend. oh my god thanks to her, I now know of many more amazing bands I've wished I listened to years ago.
6. The Old & the New
I was going to have an argument here, until I read over it a few times. Amazing point.
7. In Conclusion?
Shuffle is Magic, especially when your music library is one of the biggest folders on your hard drive.
I really wish I would of saw this journal sooner, because this is just downright amazing, and I think all music lovers should really SEE the true meaning behind why they enjoy what they listen to, and broaden their horizon. I really have to thank you for helping me to that as well.
If you do read this...thanks, again.
About the music & lyrics bit...of course that doesn't mean it means nothing! The point was, I know a lot of people who will listen to songs with lyrics but never listen to the lyrics, and that makes me a sad panda. That section was about, if the song as music and lyrics, to know and listen to both. If you're writing instrumental music, of course it doesn't get held to that standard. Brian Eno's "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" is a personal favourite album of mine, and can't be judged by that standard. But if a song does have lyrics, getting intimate with both sides of that song, with the words and the instrumental, I think, is important.
" He looks like a purple ratchet. I wonder if he's a lombax". (I know I'm wrong after I did a tiny bit of research on your page). I liked your post and traveled to your page, viewed a few more images and literature posts- then this journal caught my attention. With the music lover I am, I had to look at it. Your writing is consistent and usually well thought out.
And thanks, I understand now. I just wanted to make sure if I wasn't complete or something ;;