Something happened to me recently which hasn’t happened to me in a long time: I heard a song at Caffetto and it stuck to me. Last I remember it was Iron +Wine (but I didn’t know that until I borrowed a random CD from the office at SSCA.) Before that it was Neutral Milk Hotel’s King of Carrot Flowers pt. 1. This time, Welcome Home by Florida songwriter Radical Face.
I don’t listen to music much. It just naturally happens that way. I don’t think music is meant to be researched and shopped for. It’s meant to be out in the world, playing at some random place you happen into. Friends are supposed to expose you to music, and it should come to you when your not expecting it.
I’ve never bought a CD because of what I read on a blog, or because of a clip I heard on television.
I could say a lot of stuff, I suppose, about Muzak or radio, how music is turned into an industry and how we thus become consumers first and listeners second. There’s books written on the subject, one of which (Noise by Jacques Attali) I’m getting started reading now.
I feel like music is a source of connection we feel to the world, and to reality, and then to ourselves. That connection is often amputated and rerouted to our system of culture and a very constructed, mediated sense of reality. (Music is constructed, too, but organically.) I think it’s safe to say that I feel disconected from the world right now, and now more than ever. To compensate, I dig into myself. I try hard to be happy, but it doesn’t work because there’s just one person keeping it together: me. Hearing a good song unexpectedly provides an escape from that. An escape from the ridgid brain connections I’ve forged in order to create myself the way I wanted.
It also reminds me that such exceptions, more than anything, prove the rule. But hey, that’s the fault of consumers, giving in to fantasies of control and false individuality. That’s another subject.