Metarock: Value of Digital

(You can view this an extension of Brandon's post here, since it touches on many of the same things. You should note, as well, that I only have 250 tracks of Orthodox singing, which is more than enough for almost anybody.)

I've spent the last two weeks acclimating to my new place, new city, new time zone. This trip moved me a thousand miles. I left with a backpack and two bags: everything else was given away, sold, or stored.

This includes my music. The vinyl, the CDs, even that one cassette I own (Robert Johnson's Complete Recordings)...most are in a storage unit in the middle of the midwest. The rest, hopefully, are being given a good (temporary) home with a friend. I have 12 albums with me, 5 I brought, 7 I bought once I arrived here.

This is just physical media. I did rip most of the music to an external hard drive before I left, so I'm not in danger of running out of exciting music or having a listening itch that I can't scratch. (If I really find myself begging to hear, say, Billy Joel's Millennium Concert or the second Finger Eleven album, then I have bigger issues.)

Is this not a glorious time we are living in? I have over 40,000 tracks two clicks away and they physically take up as much space as my left hand. Thirty years ago I'd have crates of AC/DC, Sabbath, Springsteen, Cheap Trick, and the Damned to lug around, plus a turntable ('cause why would I buy a new one when I'd have a perfectly great one already?).

Eight years ago, when I moved 1500 miles for college, I had 224 CDs. I bought a case that allowed me to take the entire lot but not the jewel cases or booklets. I felt it was a bit of a loss not having the package, but the music is what's important, right? The subsequent 11 moves in 4 years between dorm rooms convinced me that the lack of extra bulk was virtuous.

But still, when I got my own place and it seemed I was relatively settled, I once again brought out all those empty cases and added them to those I'd picked up in the intervening time. And when I finally got the whole thing set up, I was happy and impressed. Here's the picture, initially from a previous post:


Yeah, I'm a little sad that all I have now are 1s and 0s and code to show me what I got. I like having the booklet, I like having the case, I like seeing the CD sitting on the shelf. I like being persuaded to listen to an album because exposed end is garish yellow. I like the artwork. I like to read the essays included with compilations of old blues. This is all lost with a switch to a solely or mostly digital interface.

But...I have 1800 albums I can listen to right now that I couldn't otherwise.

I wonder: it'll be at least three months, but more like six or nine, before I get the physical copies back. In that time, will I feel the same way? Could I bring myself to sell all those discs at the local used store? Will I stay completely digital?

Well, no. Because, for me, it's not just about the music. I'm a collector. I like the aesthetic, the way rows of music look on the shelf. I like re-arranging my albums by things like spine color or how they fit into my personal narrative. And that's something you can't do with a digital copy. Not easily, anyway.

But I imagine 95% of what I'll play will be the digital versions.

Robert Johnson - Ramblin' On My Mind (take 1) [sounds almost as good on the cassette]
Cheap Trick - Stiff Competition [a very specific time in my personal narrative]
Gogol Bordello - Oh No [from that garish yellow album]

(Having difficulty uploading the files...will try again in the morning. Sorry.)

Posted by Lin.

Metarock: Talking About Talking About Music (1): The First Salvo

The Dean of American Rock Criticism

"Unless you are very rich and very freaky, your relationship to rock is nothing like mine. By profession, I am surfeited with records and live music. Virtually every rock LP produced in this country is mailed to me automatically, and I'm asked to go to more concerts than I can bear. I own about 90 percent of the worthwhile rock albums released since the start of the Beatles era, and occasionally I play every one of them, although I haven't heard half the LP's in my collection in six months. All this has a double-edged effect. On the one hand, I am impatient with music that is derivative and see through cheap gimmicks easily. On the other, I can afford to revel in marginal differentiation, delighting in odd and minor talents that might not be worth the money of someone who has to pay for his music."

-Robert Christgau, "Consumer Guide #1," Village Voice, July 10, 1969

One of the priorities Lin and I had when we started this blog was to have a conversation about how much the way we consume music has changed since we both started becoming "music" people in the late 1990s. I'll let Lin speak for himself, but my strongest memories of that initial, exploratory phase almost always involved a local record store (often visited in lieu of attending my afternoon classes) and an old Sony boombox, the pride of my teenage years. I can remember playing my Replacements records at top volume before my father got home from work, sitting on the bed and reading the liner notes and memorizing biographical details about Bob, Paul, Chris, and little Tommy that no one would ever ask me about. I remember listening to Wilco's Summerteeth, turning the volume up and down while my father mowed the lawn, moving back and forth from my window to the driveway. I remember convincing my mother to let me sign up for the BMG service that sent you 10 free CDs if you payed full retail price on two more (and back in those days, full retail price was $18 or more--another reason no one I knew ever shopped at Sam Goody in the mall).

But mostly, I remember when I had no more CDs than would fit in a single copier paper box. They had personalities, it seemed--I knew where the scratches were, and which jewel cases had cracked fronts or broken tines in the little circle that secured the disc. I poured over every detail of every liner insert--no matter how little information there was to find. I had a clear sense of the value of my music back in those days. I knew what the investment meant to me, both in money and in time digging through the stacks. I remember the sheer joy of finding something I had read about at the library, or had been mentioned on one of my music listservs. Months of looking, of slipping away from my parents on vacations to stick my head into thrift stores and little music stores, checking the new arrivals racks at the used store back in La Crosse every week. When I found Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart that afternoon in the spring on 1999, it made my week. And I didn't even know what it was going to sound like.

Now, after Lin's visit last week, I have 36,316 songs in my iTunes library. It's about 1800 separate "albums," but would take 1633 blank CD-Rs to contain its epic grandness. And Lin's collection is at least 25% bigger (a fact I chalk up solely to his collection of Orthodox church singing, and that year I was in Nigeria without internet access). Christgau's collection circa 1969 was probably bigger, but mine is almost certainly broader (this was, I'm reasonably sure, before he discovered Papa Wemba and Franco and became America's greatest proponent of African pop music), containing all manner of music from the rock "canon," but also nearly complete discographies for many of the major artists of the rock and roll era and a staggering collection of blues, classic country, and soul box sets. When music became so easy for me to get, my response (as, I suspect was Christgau's) was to become nonsensically cosmopolitan in my tastes. While it's easy enough for me to summarize my basic preferences and my favorite musical themes (I'm going to forgo the word "genre" here, for reasons that will soon become apparent), my collection is probably more diverse that 95% of the people in this country who consider themselves music fans. That said, there are still entire styles of music that are basically unrepresented (ambient and all the various forms of electronica, classical), which means occasionally I'm accused of parochial tastes by people in casual conversations about music. The notion that a man who owns the Complete Hank Williams Collection, a half dozen Fela Kuti records, everything Elton John recorded between 1970 and 1976, the complete Mississippi Sheiks' recorded works, two Conway Twitty albums, four Ice Cube platters and a disc of early M.I.A. & Diplo mixes is a little crazy, but there it is anyway.

Really, I find it all a little alienating. It sounds ungrateful, but there are days I miss being able to identify every CD I own by comparing the pattern of scratches on the underside. It's harder to forge the strong emotional connections I had with the records I listened to three times a day for six months in 1996 when I feel compelled to check out some of my new haul everyday. I rarely get through complete albums anymore--and frankly, as much as I really like pre-war black string band music, I don't think I'll every play the entire four and a half hour Mississippi Sheiks playlist in a single sitting. The irony is that this is all happening just as my life is changing more generally, in a way that makes my vastly expanded musical knowledge less and less relevant to my identity in the minds of most of my acquaintances.

When I was in college, I probably never owned more than 350 albums, but music was a constant part of my everyday self. I deejayed dance parties and on the college radio station, and always insisted on curating the music at dorm room gatherings, even when they consisted on nothing more that six people crammed onto a futon staring down at a case of warm Coors Light. The songs I played when I was with my friends, or when I was at parties, were more than just the songs I liked--they were an attempt to signal what I was all about (and perhaps, get laid in the process). When music is such an investment, as it was for me on my college budget, you don't invest flippantly in the new thing, no matter how big it's getting. You build a collection from the bottom up, with a limited selection that you're sure you'll continue to like (or, as sure as you can be at 20) and that will tell the appropriate story about who you are. But now, just when I have the ability to wow the masses with a truly diverse, exotic, and free-wheeling collection that fits in my pocket, I don't have any more parties to go to. None of the other grad students in my program have expressed any real interest in pop music in the broader sense--most conversations I've had about music bog down in the first two minutes. Someone will tell me their favorite band, and I'll start talking about my new reggae compilation, and then they'll politely excuse themselves. What people want to know about me--as a scholar, as a teacher, as a married guy in his late 20s--has very little to do with my music taste. The only difference between me and the rest of the iPodded masses is the size of my headphones (and no, that's not a metaphor for anything).

So ultimately, this is my introduction to a new line of inquiry we'll be undertaking here at She's Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight--given the inordinate amount of music we all have, and given that this makes us not in the least cool, and furthermore, given that we must have acquired it because we want to listen to it, who do we turn all those files into something accessible, something useful? How do we make the music work for us?

The first tentative steps in this direction will probably focus on how we classify and sort our music, starting with a discussion of "genre." Anyone who's had the ill-fortune to import a record into iTunes knows that the Gracenote database they use to tag the information onto the songs uses an unwieldy, dense tangle of genre nomenclature--a taxonomy rooted in neither how we listen to music nor how artists make it. How can we classify our music? Is it worth trying, and if so, what's the payoff (hint: for me, it's having a way to divide up my music into workable chunks I can listen to on shuffle, the way that I used to listen to the radio. This is how I'm forced to take on all that new music in manageable, well-programmed chunks)? We'll almost certainly be looking at the academic literature on music genre taxonomies going on in various information systems journals (because that's what we do). Stay tuned.

Franco et le T.P.O.K. Jazz - Liberté
The Mississippi Sheiks - Bootlegger's Blues
The Mississippi Sheiks - Sittin' On Top of the World
Camper Van Beethoven - Waka
Camper Van Beethoven - Eye of Fatima (pt. 1)

Oh, and for the dozen or fewer of you who care, Reading Rock: Lost Highway will be back with a vengeance between now and Tuesday, with a new post and those promised .zip files. Holler.

Posted by Brandon

Rounding Out the Collection: Intro

So I’m going to try to do a variety of different things with my part of this operation, and one of the most important to me is a series of posts I’m going to call “Rounding out the Collection.”

Like most people I know who are serious about music, the internet has radically changed the way I consume, search for, and discover new music. When we got the internet for the first time in 1996, the first thing I did was look up “Led Zeppelin” on Altavista’s search engine. I spent the day reading crappy Geocities fanpages (complete with classic 1996 webdesign and interface—and still there after all these years!), and learned all about the convoluted mythology of Zeppelin IV, the first CD I owned after my first great musical “epiphany,” the summer I turned 14 and put away childish things (top 40 radio).

Led Zeppelin - Battle of Evermore

By 1997, I had moved on musically and technologically. I spent a lot of nights my last year in high school on a listserv for my favorite band, the Old 97’s, trading concert reviews, rumors about the band’s next album, and getting into the Dallas music scene (which was a little weird, since I was from Wisconsin).

Old 97’s Beer Cans (Too Far to Care Outtake - Never Officially Released)

I missed the first wave of Napster by a year or two—my first very own computer (a Gateway bought in 1997) didn’t have an Ethernet port, and when I got to college in the fall of 1999, home computing remained a dial-up affair for me (much to my first roommate’s chagrin, I ran a jury-rigged phone cord along the dorm wall from my desk to the communal phone jack, and dialed into my parents’ AOL for two years, before simply giving up and using campus computers for my internet needs). So in college, there was album swapping (I met my wife-to-be in part because she was one of the only people I knew who had a good CD copying set-up on her computer—with two CD-Rom drives!—and I wanted to trade albums with my then-girlfriend), ordering from the still-minimalist storefront at http://cheap-cds.com/, and whatever scant word-of-mouth was available in Cedar Rapids, IA. I had one buddy in particular, who had grown up in Washington, IA but had excellent taste in CBGB-style New York punk. I was finally able to put a sound to names like the Dead Boys, Johnny Thunders, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids.

Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers - Born To Lose

When I got to Grad School in Madison, the prospects improved. When I had been in high school, a trip to Madison was massive for me—State Street from the University to the Capitol was a haze of record stores like the (now relocated) Sugar Shack and the B-Side, which immediately became my go-to spot, the place where I bought the long-lost Rocket from the Tombs record when the re-issue came out.

Rocket From the Tombs - Final Solution

But the way I got at music didn’t really change until I got my laptop and DSL in 2004. This is a story most people already know—the experimentation with different P2P services, a short tour with BitTorrent, and finally, looking for something a little more secure (damned RIAA!) and maybe a little more personal, I found music blogs. I started with Hype Machine and mp3 blogs, and quickly graduated to Totally Fuzzy and the full-album variety—accumulating music at an alarming rate (pointless hoarding, my wife calls it). With so much at my fingertips, one problem is solved—I rarely have to spend months (or years) trying to find an album (or worse even, a song) I’ve heard a reference to in a book or a conversation, skimming the used bins in every record store in every city I visit, carrying around a list in my wallet, (almost) paying ridiculous fees on eBay for weird out-of-print records I’m not even sure I’ll like.

What I tell myself (and thus the name of the series) is that I’m “rounding out my collection,” filling in the “gaps” in my already 100 GB+/1200 album collection—stuff every serious fan of country/reggae/classic rock/1970s Cleveland post-punk/early Piedmont Blues should have. But obviously, it tends to degenerate into wild, bleary-eyed, late-night downloading binges—stabbing wildly across genre lines into the weird little nooks and crannies of recorded music’s century of history. These posts are an effort both to:

• Slow down my ridiculous accumulation of music I don’t even have time to try out to a workable pace—to be intentional in what I download, to return to the real goal of “rounding out my collection” with records I’ll like and relate to the music I most enjoy.

• Document the process (personal and digital) by which I find these songs and albums, thinking about how they fit in with my record collection and my life.

This may all seem a little ponderous, but it’ll be good for me, and maybe interesting for somebody out there. I'm not going to post new stuff--strictly catalogue material--but I hope I turn up a few things interesting to more than me. Thanks for playing along.

Posted by Brandon