It's Thursday night, and thus time for the weekly bonding ritual with my itunes as I compile a playlist for my radio show tomorrow.
My library is vast (but still modest alongside those of many of my friends) and I believe our relationship is progressing past the awkward anti-social-facebook-friend stage to the point where we begin to learn secrets about each other. But all cyber-craziness aside, I do feel as though slowly learning the music in your library is quite like the process of getting to know a close friend. Recently, this has made me think about the way we treat the music which is so good to us.
There is an exaggerated DNA strain among those of us who lean to the Alternative persuasion of feeling compelled, sometimes obsessively, of always being up with the play. There is noting more terrifying for us than the thought that there might be a band out there that everyone is listening to and we have no idea about. Few people will admit this, but all know it in their hearts to be true.
I will admit being very caught up in all that for the greater part of 2008. My music and I were on very bad terms. I hardly ever went into itunes to visit my friends (such as Blur, Beck, and The Shins), motivated more by the opportunity to be seen hanging out with those hip kids outside Plum, clad in the sonic ambience of whatever new shit was hot shit that week. I was on a diet of musical nostalgia, planning ahead twenty years from now so that I could say 'yeah, I was into that shit' when we look back on these days through greyscale eyes.
But in reality this has all the substance and relevancy of someone who may or may not have seen Captain Planet when they were six. The revelation hit after a minor identity crisis that the music I truly loved had taken a long time, years in fact, to grow on me like a dirty love fungus. How can a person truly know or connect to an album on first listen while still naked of all the memories you and that music have to create together?
So, it is Thursday night and I am pouring through my itunes looking at all the friends I still have to make. I don't know Siouxsie and the Banshees as well as I should like. I haven't txt Kings of Leon for ages (despite what they did to us). And man, I should really catch up and have a coffee with Leonard Cohen tomorrow. How could I have ignored such loyal comrades in cheap pursuit of pretentious satisfaction? My music is so good to me, and the only way we can repay it is to return it's loyalty on a personal level, and share it as much as possible on a more social scale.
In this sense, I think I love being on the radio.
My library is vast (but still modest alongside those of many of my friends) and I believe our relationship is progressing past the awkward anti-social-facebook-friend stage to the point where we begin to learn secrets about each other. But all cyber-craziness aside, I do feel as though slowly learning the music in your library is quite like the process of getting to know a close friend. Recently, this has made me think about the way we treat the music which is so good to us.
There is an exaggerated DNA strain among those of us who lean to the Alternative persuasion of feeling compelled, sometimes obsessively, of always being up with the play. There is noting more terrifying for us than the thought that there might be a band out there that everyone is listening to and we have no idea about. Few people will admit this, but all know it in their hearts to be true.
I will admit being very caught up in all that for the greater part of 2008. My music and I were on very bad terms. I hardly ever went into itunes to visit my friends (such as Blur, Beck, and The Shins), motivated more by the opportunity to be seen hanging out with those hip kids outside Plum, clad in the sonic ambience of whatever new shit was hot shit that week. I was on a diet of musical nostalgia, planning ahead twenty years from now so that I could say 'yeah, I was into that shit' when we look back on these days through greyscale eyes.
But in reality this has all the substance and relevancy of someone who may or may not have seen Captain Planet when they were six. The revelation hit after a minor identity crisis that the music I truly loved had taken a long time, years in fact, to grow on me like a dirty love fungus. How can a person truly know or connect to an album on first listen while still naked of all the memories you and that music have to create together?
So, it is Thursday night and I am pouring through my itunes looking at all the friends I still have to make. I don't know Siouxsie and the Banshees as well as I should like. I haven't txt Kings of Leon for ages (despite what they did to us). And man, I should really catch up and have a coffee with Leonard Cohen tomorrow. How could I have ignored such loyal comrades in cheap pursuit of pretentious satisfaction? My music is so good to me, and the only way we can repay it is to return it's loyalty on a personal level, and share it as much as possible on a more social scale.
In this sense, I think I love being on the radio.
No comments:
Post a Comment