Lovely day, looks like Spring’s very much about to pop its
head around the door, so time for something musically suitable. No idea why,
but I fancied Blur’s Out Of Time; a little solemn perhaps, but deep down do we
not all have a slight melancholia even as the year rebirths?
I dug out Think Tank, intending only to play the one track
before moving on to the random iPoddery that usually scores the day. Somehow
the CD started before I could select.
It’s very easy to forget certain parts of an album. You buy
one, usually on the strength of something from it that you’ve heard elsewhere,
you listen to it all the way through maybe a couple of times, you put it on the
shelf and there it stays until you get that urge to hear it again, probably
just the one immediate track that made you buy the thing in the first place,
but you hear the entire album and…
There are some great tracks on Think Tank that I’d forgotten
about. There are also some great tracks on it that I didn’t like when I first
heard them. If I’d done as usual and fed the iPod through speakers, I’d’ve
played Out Of Time and only Out Of Time, as that’s the only Blur track I have
on the iPod. No Tender, no ParkLife, not even Girls And Boys.
Listening to the whole of Think Tank re-established the
variety of music the group were creating at that late stage in their career,
Damon Albarn’s world music interests were making a firm stamp on the sound but
they’d not gone the Full Gabriel. There are loud crazy tracks, and weird
experimental tracks and at least one track foreshadowing Albarn’s
disappearing-up-himself trick that would make his later solo material such hard
work to listen to.
I would have missed all this if I’d just linked up the Pod,
and it struck me that most of the music I buy these days is via download. I
only buy physical CDs for music I definitely want on my shelves, otherwise it’s
an everyday thing to click an icon on Amazon or iTunes and have the sounds
playing within a minute or so.
We buy single tracks and ignore what else is offered. We buy
whole albums and after a while we delete every track that isn’t that one
immediate favourite. We can’t go back and be surprised, months or years later,
that the music we didn’t like then is music that sounds perfect now. We change.
Our tastes change. But in our rush to embrace ever greater amounts of the
immediate, we’re losing the means to re-evaluate and re-appreciate the old.
It’s also unavoidable that download sales are more immediately recognised by
artists and by management, each click registering in the cash register or in
the songwriter’s pen, giving them a real-time illustration of what the public
wants. And as the public gets what it says it wants, only those most
unconcerned with commerciality will produce anything other than what already goes
down well.
Worse than this, as we hack away everything that isn’t
familiar, we lose the guide that shows us the unseen city. If Graham Parker’s
band The Rumour hadn’t covered Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear From Me on the b-side
of an old vinyl 45rpm single, I’d have had no initial exposure to Duke
Ellington. No Duke, no Dizzy Gillespie, no Miles Davis. An entire planet of new
and wonderful sounds eliciting newer and more wonderful responses from brain
and heart, all branching from that one flip of a scratched disc.
We can’t prevent technological progress and we shouldn’t
wish to. Nobody wants to be sat in front of a tiny, near-unreadable
black-and-white tv screen watching the Coronation. Let’s not lose our sense of
adventure, though, and let’s above all not lose the knowledge that growing up,
growing older, brings different appreciations of old experiences.
None of this, however, will stop me from throttling my
bloody lodger if he plays this sodding Nazareth’s Greatest Hits album one more
time.
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