12.20.2011

Notes from the underfoot

I guess I haven't been writing because things just feel pretty fucking bleak. Although I have people to commiserate with, as close as here in NYC and as far away as the UK and sometimes Australia, it's not quite comforting to know that we are all in the same boat. It's actually quite distressing. If only because I can't imagine that anything could really be accomplished if we were all in the same room together. The hacienda won't be built.

I have been drinking a lot more than usual lately. Don't worry, I am taking the next weekend or two off. Maybe I'll get some more writing done then.

I do plan on writing a bit about music again. Or maybe I will do so now. I don't know what I mean to say when I say write. Because you all expect paragraphs. Arguments. I don't want to do that. I just want to say that what I find disappointing about music now is that I wish there was something large enough, a statement, a concept album, even, or just a sound, that could really describe an encompass what the world feels like now. I can bitch and moan about how there is nothing new, idea-wise, but that's not quite the problem. Novelty has always been relative. But music now and the discourse surrounding it has concerned itself solely with music, and that is why it is all dead. Music is no longer an interpretation of life as it is or should be, but rather of music itself. Nothing can be accomplished in this way.

You may say to me that this is all my fault. I am depressed. Lots of people aren't. So why should I expect others to have a desire that makes no sense to them. Well. Maybe some people are not fucked, but we are fucked. Which is more arrogant? Trying to speak for more than one person, or asking me to listen to a record about your feelings just because you are you? I prefer a general lie to a specific truth. At least it is a vision.

Am I making sense? I don't know. My mind is still hazy.

People should know better than to accept things the way they are. Don't tell me that when you first heard whatever it is that made you who you are that you wanted taxonomy. "Who would care to contribute to a culture that cannot be satisfied no matter how much it devours, and at whose contact the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment is changed to 'history' and 'criticism'?" Only historians and critics, apparently.

1 comment:

Pied Cow said...

I couldn't agree with you more about the state of the music business. It's a desert.

It's also a sign of the time, reflective of the intellectual stone age in which we presently find ourselves.

Still, it makes me optimistic. Eventually the vacuum will need to be filled.