when recorded music inundates.
“Music exploded over the past 20 years,” [critic Michaelangelo] Matos says. “The figure Robert Christgau likes to put out there is, ‘There’s twice as much music made per year than there are hours to listen to it.’ This is pure conjecture on my part, but I would say that now it’s actually more music made per month than you can listen to in a year.” One thing’s clear: if your music-consumption habits are dictated primarily by the amount of space left on your hard drive, your ears will never catch up with your collection. – From Miles Raymer, “Sharp Darts: The Slow-Listening Movement,” Chicago Reader, March 5, 2009
NPR’s All Songs Considered SXSW Festival Preview episode contains a nice example of the overwhelming amount of popular music — or as Robert Christgau calls it semipopular music— that is available now.
Host Bob Boilen, producer Robin Hilton, Monitor Mix blogger/ex-Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein, and NPR music online editor Stephen Thompson admit that, try as they might, they simply cannot listen to and evaluate all the bands that will be appearing at the festival.
In one hilarious segment, they rifle through the first three seconds of a series of metal songs, which start simply to blur into the next. Your ears get tired just listening to them having attempted to listen to all that music.
Honorably, the NPR team admits that there is a kind of tragedy to their inability to give all the music a good listen. Surely, they note, there is a fan out there who cares deeply about each individual song. That’s not even to mention the performers themselves. But as a whole, the entire SXSW Festival is more than ears can bear.
The problem now in the dawning digital age is not exclusivity, but inclusivity, not a mainstream that marginalizes outliers, but rather a system so large that one might find it more easy to tune out the entire thing completely than engage in any particular detail.
Listening to the NPR All Songs Considered crew listen, one feels that the summation cannot be summoned, the total can not be totalized. A kind of bleak, weary, cynical passivity starts to take hold. Things are moving so fast, you feel like you aren’t getting anywhere at all. You are just a whir.
And this leads to a larger, more ominous sense of dread: what system is taking shape here?
The system itself cannot be named, there is no overview possible, butterflies flap their wings and tidal waves follow, but we can’t tell the butterflies from the tidal wayves anymore. We are, instead, awash in sound, trying to find a way to surf the surfeit.
Awesome, dude! But not in a good way. The new context (something George W.S. Trow foresaw as “the context of no context“) calls for a new kind of calculus of listening, a new sense of the self as listener, and from that new formation of identity, a new kind of community of listening.
Not Robert Christgau’s nostalgic yearning for the days of monocultural yore, nor even Michaelangelo Matos’s promising notion of starting a “slow listening movement,” but instead something new and more difficult: a community in which the interconnection called forth by music is so deeply felt, the awareness of shared sound so resoundingly echoed, that a new understanding of particularity and universality might emerge.
Listeners of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your earbuds!