It's A Repeat, And It's Getting Old

Over the course of the last five days(at the time of this writing) I downloaded forty-four albums. Why? Because soon I leave on an extended trip to Israel. (I have pre-written some posts in advance, and The Hydrogen Jukebox should still be posting while I'm away.) While I am in Israel I won't have access to a computer, so I won't be able to download or rip music onto my iPod. Now, certainly this wouldn't be a problem for some people. Some people can easily go six weeks without getting new music, especially because it is so easy to share headphones or listen to another's iPod on speakers. But not me. I need new music. It's an addiction. I have never understood how so many people exist with such small libraries, listening to the same music over and over again. My own brother's library is about 200 songs, a far cry from the 9600 I have. He listens to the same album again and again, for weeks at a time, or sometimes the same three or four songs on repeat. I cannot understand this. Music stretches off in so many directions, it is so vast and diverse, one can never hope to know all of it. But why limit one's self to the same small collections of songs in one or two genres? Is it comfort in the familiar? Ignorance of the scope of musical expression? I suppose I'll never know. I've asked my brother and he just said because it's the music he liked; I only see that argument working so far. Since the world of music is so big, surely someone else out there is doing something similar, right? So why not spend that time and effort – not very long or hard, in this modern world – to find those other three bands playing the same style of music that is just as good, but haven't been signed or have broken up or whatever? To date I have found one band that makes music utterly unlike any other band I can find, and trust me. I've looked. (If anyone has any bands that sound similar to Circulus, I'd be very appreciative.)
Detractors from my opinion often tell me that “there's no way you listen to all of that music, I listen to every song in my library.” While it's true that large portions of my library sit unheard, the truth is there are very few complete unheard albums in there. I start nearly every album I download. It just happens that sometimes I don't finish them. I don't want to delete them, who knows when I might want to listen again, or finish the album? Deleting an album from my computer is a very rare occurrence. I always would rather have an album than not, and in these days of massive amounts of cheap digital storage space, I feel that it is to my advantage to keep albums I start but don't finish, or albums that I hear only once. I could be in a discussion about a band, and want to hear an album I haven't heard in months, or I could get bored and want to revisit an old interest. At the very least it serves as a kind of record book – I can see what albums I've listened to, and how long ago, and how many times.
Another pet peeve of mine is the trend of downloading single songs, revolutionized by iTunes and their 99 cents per song model. Though not quite of the same opinion as my father who constantly extols the virtue of the album and the glory days of the album-as-a-whole model of selling music, I still believe that owning a single song by an artist limits a listener's view of that artist. True, some artists have only one or two “good” songs, and I am guilty of the occasional single song or two downloaded – often songs from movies, like “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” off the Big Lebowski soundtrack – but I always feel cheated when scrolling through a friend's iPod, and am fooled by great artists into thinking a person has great taste, only to find that a person has only the most popular hits by any of the artist, with nary a full album in sight. I am left wondering what the point of music is, if you're just going to listen to what everyone else is listening to?




Title of the post is from a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. It came to mind when thinking about putting an album on repeat.