Too Much Music

The other day I bought . . . And All the Pieces Matter, a compilation of music from all five seasons of the H.B.O. drama series the Wire. I’m a fanatic about the Wire. I’ll take any opportunity to recommend it to anybody I meet – even if it’s not situationally appropriate, as is the case here. It’s probably the best drama series that’s ever been on television, anywhere.

Among many other fascinating aspects of the show, one that stands out is its use of music. With rare and very strictly delineated exceptions, the Wire eschews the use of a “soundtrack”, per se. Rather, almost all of the music in the show – and there’s a lot of it – is “source” music: a character sits drinking in a bar, and the music that’s blaring out from the bar’s sound-system is the music that soundtracks the scene; another character pulls up outside in a car, and he or she is listening to the radio – a snippet of music, heard over a tinny car stereo, and that’s it. It’s all very carefully and very cleverly done.

And it serves to remind us of just how important and ubiquitous music is in our lives. I don’t just mean in the lives of music nerds such as myself or the other contributors to this blog, I mean in the lives of everyone: I think in my entire life I’ve met only one person who claimed to have no real interest in music. Even she probably turned the radio on when she was bored.

The radio’s the thing, of course. Before the advent of sound recording, music was something you had to go out of your way to listen to: you had to go to the concert hall, or to a dance. It wasn’t something that was just there, at least not in the way it is for us now. Things changed a little when the mass-produced upright piano became the television of its day, and families would gather around it of an evening and sings songs to each other – but even that required a level of effort and dedication that’s above and beyond the simple flicking of a switch we have these days. Music-on-demand is a relatively new phenomenon.

A couple of years ago I read a short piece in the Observer newspaper (online, that is) by Bill Drummond, formerly of the K.L.F. In the article, Drummond was talking about his idea for “No Music Day”. On one day of the year, the 21^st of November – the day before St. Cecilia’s Day, said saint being apparently the patron saint of music – Drummond would listen to no music at all. (The article, if you want to read it, is here: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1892833,00.html). When I read the article, I didn’t really understand what he was on about. Why cut yourself off from music for one day? What was the point? Why such a radical act from someone who obviously has a deep and abiding love for music? It seemed utterly nonsensical to me.

I understood when I bought an iPod. I’d never had much interest in one before, in part because I’m a steadfast believer in listening to the world around you (especially if you want to avoid being run over by a bus), and in part because as far as taking music with me went, I had a portable C.D. player and a couple of small pouches in which I could, at a stretch, house around fifty or sixty C.D.s. This set-up had served me well for almost ten years, and I saw no compelling reason to change it.

The reason came when I went overseas to visit family in the U.K. at the end of 2006. Australia is a long way from anywhere, so leaving the country necessitates a lot of travelling time. Although aeroplanes have more and more entertainment options these days, sometimes you just want to listen to that obscure jazz album from the fifties, or that new release you bought just last week, or whatever else you might use to identify your own personal music collection. Knowing this, I packed my carry-on bag with everything I thought I needed, and right at the top was my portable C.D. player and fifty or sixty C.D.s in two pouches.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a long-haul international flight. Space is not a commodity that is in great abundance. A few cubic centimetres of baggage under the seat in front of you can be the difference between being able to stretch your legs beyond ninety degrees at the knee, and intolerable leg cramping for ten hours or more. It quickly became apparent to me that the C.D.-player-plus-fifty-or-sixty-C.D.s was no longer a viable arrangement. So half-way to the U.K., in the duty-free zone, I bought myself a thirty gigabyte iPod.

M.P.3 players are wonderful devices. You can store the equivalent of much more than fifty or sixty C.D.s in a little box that will sit comfortably in your pocket. I instantly became pretty smitten with my iPod, and I could see straight away why they were such popular devices (even if I can’t fathom why there isn’t any “stop” button). And, of course, apart from the practical reason for getting one, I wanted one because everyone else had one.

It’s amazing how quickly M.P.3 players in general, and iPods in particular, have become near-ubiquitous. I remember only a few years ago hearing stories of people being mugged for their iPods, of the tell-tale white earphones marking you out as a target if you were walking down the street. Nowadays nobody bats an eyelid at those thin white threads worming their way from hip pocket to ear: nowadays if somebody doesn’t have an ear or two plugged in, it’s almost more surprising.

So now I know what Drummond was on about – what he’s still on about: No Music Day (http://www.nomusicday.com/home.html) seems to be picking up more and more interest. We live in a world now where, more and more, people can soundtrack their own lives. It’s got to the stage where a lack of music is indeed a radical idea: I read a review last year of Panda Bear’s fabulous album Person Pitch, a quintessential “earphone” album, which concluded with the reviewer having the epiphany that, rather than follow up listening to the album on his iPod with listening to more music, it would be better to take the earphones out and listen to the larger world instead, to let the music settle in the mind. At this point the tone of the review becomes strange: as if the writer is sharing some kind of religious secret with his readers. How has an absence of music become such an unusual idea?

I confused the hell out of a salesman at Dick Smith Electronics a while ago when, in idle conversation while buying some piece of something-or-other, I confided that my iPod almost never leaves my bedroom. I don’t actually go on that many long-haul flights, so practically the only time I use my iPod is to listen to music quietly late at night, when putting a C.D. through the loud-speakers might run the risk of waking my housemates. And yet for all my self-righteousness, for all my iPod abstinence, I’m not immune from the music glut: I’m twenty-eight years old and earning more money now than I ever have in my life before, and I don’t have a car and I don’t drink much and I eat at home most nights, so I manage to have a pretty good disposable income. Mostly I dispose it on C.D.s. In the last month I’ve bought ten C.D.s. That’s not even above average.

Yet of those ten C.D.s, I’ve only listened to one of them more than twice. Most of them I haven’t even listened to more than once. I’ve already got hundreds of other C.D.s vying for my time – but I don’t listen to those much, either. I’m obsessed with getting new music – newly released or new to me – the people at my local record store know me by name and some time ago spontaneously started giving me a discount on purchases, I’m constantly looking for the rush that comes from listening to music the first time around. Music is a constant in my life.

But I’m uneasy about it. I worry that I’m not fully appreciating the music that I buy. I worry that I’m buying music just for the buying’s sake, just because I can. I feel sometimes that all the music on all the C.D.s on my shelves is as much a burden as it is a blessing. This is not the music’s fault: with a very few exceptions, the music is wonderful. But what value am I getting out of something that I only listen to once before forgetting about it for months on end? Is that what the artist had in mind for his or her endeavour?

Of course, even with my rapacious spending habits, there’s no way I’m ever going to even scratch the surface of all the music that’s out there. I’m frequently envious of musicians – no art form in the world connects so directly and so effortlessly with people as music – but it must be incredibly daunting, too, being a musician these days, when every note you record can be instantly compared to millions and millions of notes, thousands and thousands of musicians, who’ve gone before you. I suppose that’s one way of testing your commitment to your chosen art form: whether the competition inspires you or hinders you.

It’s high summer in Australia at the moment. This is the time of year when every week brings another music festival, when all the big bands are out touring. About a year ago I went to a festival called the Laneway Festival. For one day they cordon off one of the myriad back-alleys in Melbourne’s city centre, clear out the rubbish, put a stage at one end and sell tickets. The festival’s built up a good reputation in the few years it’s been going, and manages to attract a more impressive line-up each time. When I went it was solely on the promise if seeing Camera Obscura, one of my favourite bands currently doing the rounds. They were on early in the day, so the festival peaked pretty early as far as I was concerned. Nonetheless I stuck around, in large part because I’d forked out around one-hundred and thirty dollars for the ticket and that was a bit too much just for the sake of one band. Plus Peter, Bjorn, and John were playing at the tail-end of the day, and I was curious about them because 2006-2007 was the year when everyone was talking about them, so I thought I owed it to my inner indie-kid to stick around and check them out. But by the end of the day, after about ten hours of the festival, I was ready to pack it in. It wasn’t so much the crowdedness of the festival site, it wasn’t so much the lingering odour of recently-removed rubbish bins, it wasn’t so much the blazing sunshine and relative lack of shade, it wasn’t so much the fact that for ten hours almost everybody at the festival had been drinking – what really did me in was the music. Each band in the line-up played for between forty minutes and an hour, and there was about twenty minutes between each band on the main stage. But those twenty minutes weren’t empty: no, in those twenty minutes, while each band was packing up and the next band was setting up, the organisers of the festival relayed music from the D.J. booth over the stage’s speakers. When the band was ready to play, the music was faded out and the stage mics were turned up. For ten hours there was constant music. For ten hours there was no respite, no shelter.

In 2003 I was fortunate enough to visit the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The art – both the collection and the building itself – was absolutely incredible. But it was also overwhelming. After about four or five hours I found that my brain could no longer take it in. I could no longer remember what I’d just seen. I was artistically exhausted.

It was a similar sensation I felt at the Laneway Festival last year. But in St. Petersburg, I could leave the museum and come back whenever I wanted. When I’d had enough I could go back to the hostel and lie down and shut my eyes. But you can’t shut your ears. At the Laneway, apart from the fact that there were no pass-outs so you either left or stayed, there was no escape from the constant music, the constant noise, because you can’t turn your hearing off. At the Laneway, I felt by the end of the day not so much that I was listening to music, than that I was being assaulted by it. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think a music festival should leave the punter begging for less. At the Laneway Festival, when I went last year, there was too much music.

But that’s the case everywhere you go these days. Everybody has their own taste in music, and nobody enjoys being subjected for too long to somebody else’s taste. The temptation to cocoon yourself in a musical world of your own moulding is very great. But when music becomes a soundtrack to life, when it becomes just a way to fill in the gaps, it’s diminished. I love music. I adore it. I can’t imagine my life without it. In times of sadness it keeps me company, and in times of joy it celebrates with me. But sometimes I need time by myself. I’m not as good at taking that time as I should be. I don’t think anyone is. Even when we’re trying to take time out, chances are we’ve still got a song in our head, or we’re humming to ourself, or tapping out a rhythm on our desk. We program our mobile phones to ring with our favourite tunes. But how much do we actually value music? As I sit at my computer writing this I can see rows and rows of my C.D.s that are yesterday’s favourites: the complete Decca recordings of Count Basie, Lonely People of the World, Unite! by Devin Davis, Forbidden Songs of the Dying West by Jackie Leven . . .etcetera, etcetera. I know I should dig them out and listen to them again. Sometimes I remember to, and it’s been so long since I last listened to them that it’s almost like hearing them for the first time all over again. But all the same, I’m not half as excited about them as I am about grabbing the new Mountain Goats album when it first comes out later this month, or putting on the C.D. I bought just two days ago. And so all these C.D.s take up space on my shelves on a promise, a thought that one day I’m going to take them down and listen to them again. And each new C.D. I buy so eagerly means just a little bit less to me. I love music, but sometimes I wish there was a bit less of it.