During second semester of my freshman year of college, my brother gave me a gift. An incredible one: a hard drive loaded with over 60 gigs of music. Combined with my own music collection, that made way too much music. Thanks to the virtues of the NYU interweb, I also (and ashamedly) downloaded craploads from ourtunes, the iTunes sharing network. Again, I had way too much music. I couldn’t handle it. I cried for days. How was I to approach this cumbersome task of listening to everything?
Days passed and I still couldn’t handle the pressure. My body curled like a painful footcramp where you can feel your toes digging into your soles. I tried a bunch of crazy balls-to-the-wall approaches of listening to every song: alphabetical order one after the other, songs by track length, or any other funky way iTunes could organize my despair. I was so focused on getting through the music that I could never get into the music. There would be artists that I would want to keep listening to over and over, but my obsessive drive to finish my task stopped my natural musical urges.** My obsession died around the middle of the A’s during the alphabetical album crawl. A year and half passed, and I still barely recognized half of the artists and albums on my iTunes. Determined, I found another obsessive solution, but this time more enjoyable.
The new perilous and obsessive track was not much different from one of my previous ones. To listen to my music alphabetically, album by album. I would listen to each song over and over until I knew the words, could sing the guitar solos, and air-drum the rhythm perfectly. I haven’t gotten too far. I’m only about half-way through the A’s in a matter of 4½ months. But it’s paid off. I love my music so much more.
The greatest joy to be found in listening is by hearing out an entire album. I don’t care about the digital age and how it promotes the buying of ninety-nine cent single songs and that’s all people really care about, the singles, the singles, the singles, blah, blah, blah. That’s bullshit to me. Artists go on the road, and they write songs. Lots of them. Then they hit the studio and iron out the details. Every song on an album is one they care about, and they put it on the album because they feel it’s worth listening to. A song becomes much more when you hear that happy chord alleviating the pain from the previous painfully sad song, or that pulsing drive from drum and bass opening an album, or a subtle acoustic closer after a tragic harmonic denouement. These are things that matter to the artist.
This doesn’t mean you can’t love individual songs. You must. But understand that they have a role in your favorite artists’ greater expression. Once this is appreciated, you can more fully delve into those individual songs.
From the albums that I deep dig into and other personal favorites, I’ll be giving you my albums to savor, ones to hold close to you late at night, or to run out with during the fire. They’re albums that influenced my views on life and music and are essentially essential. So Fucking Important. These albums will be labeled thusly as savory.
If you disagree, bring it on. If you have an album that you find just as important, write about it. Don’t be shy. Coyness will not be allowed.
**Always listen to these urges. It doesn’t matter if there are demonic voices in your head telling you to listen to The Stooges or JoJo, they’re probably coming from some deep suppressed urges in your subconscious. The very same as the Freudian death drive. It’s what we need to survive.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
How to Savor an Album
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2 comments:
Awesome post, I definitely know that feeling where you don't know how to listen to everything. Though I do not have nearly the dedication you do. I usually go through the album a few times to give everything a fair chance, but then pick out the ones I really like and sometimes just end up with them on repeat. Case in point, I tried really hard to get into the entire American Football album, but I'm obsessed with Never Meant and especially since it's the first song on there, I can rarely make it past anymore.
in regards to the dedication, you might be referring to the alphabetical order. There's no particular reason for doing it this way except that i'll be exposed to albums I would've otherwised skipped over. For each album I listen to and learn and love I take the handy-dandy rating tools of iTunes and rate each song with a number of stars. The average of those stars is taken, and poof, you're your own personal Rolling Stone reviewer. Its fulfilling and fun to see how you view an album overall, whether or not your avg ranking equals how you feel about the album as a whole. this method of rating is part of how i will come up with my album reviews because despite how an album may be entire, as you said tim, there are still awesome songs(song). If you want to get into the whole album but can't get past that awesome first song, i see nothing wrong with that, but ryan concurred and I stated, AF probably wanted you to listen to more than just track 1. just put on the album while you're doing homework, focus on your studies, in the back of your head, you'll hear another song you like and maybe it'll become your new favorite. in my intro to psych class we studied how familiarization leads to a growing to like something. For example, you see yourself in the mirror everyday and you're accustomed to that image. you see a picture of yourself and you ask who the fuck is that. Thats b/c in the mirror, your image is flipped and thats the image you're used to seeing and you like it. Later songs on albums are harder to get into for that same reason, you just haven't listened to them enough to get to like them. Music is like people, you have to take the time to get to know them. You don't have to dig deep immediately. Just get your toes wet, then your knees, and then shiver when you get your balls cold, but then you have no other choice but to go all the way in.
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