The concept of "used to like"

Only a few years ago I was a Wire reading, jazz-digging, Habitual Shaking, experimental music fan of the highest order. If it involved abstruse noise or someone playing a cello the wrong way round, I was there. I found the avantgarde so inspiring, just this huge font of interesting and fun concepts.
I've long-since canceled my Wire subscription. After two years, I started to find their coverage repetitive. I didn't need to read Derek Bailey or Jim O'Rourke's names in print again. Somehow the ideas that had felt so fresh and interesting seemed aimless. Experimenting, great, but to what ends?
I've found this change in my tastes surprising. At the time, I felt like I'd taken a long time to cultivate an appreciation for free jazz and musique concrete. I felt like I 'got' difficult avant-pop like the Knife's last album. I read (half) a Derek Bailey biography and rated Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescaleet's 'Photographs' in my top 3 albums of 2013.
But jesus wept, the Wolf Eyes gig I went to see the other night and I was just 'what is this for? what am I supposed to be getting out of this?'.
Put it down to a disappointing show, but I think it's more just me. I need form, tangibility, groove, emotion. This felt deeply pretentious. I look at my beloved Ornette and Coltrane albums and remember how they made me feel. I put them on and can barely get through a side. The Richard Dawson album has left me cold. The Knife album is unbearable bollocks - what did I even like about it?
Funny how tastes change. Blame ageing perhaps, a lower tolerance for certain frequencies maybe, but I still like dance music and I like hiphop and dancehall more than ever before.. Perhaps it's a change of circumstance, having moved to a new city and no longer spending long commutes on trains and negotiating underground tunnels. Environmental changes affecting my mood and predilections. A desire for an end point rather than the journey to that end point. Who knows, maybe in a couple of years I'll be back on the avant wagon or maybe I'll only want to listen to Simon and Garfunkel..

Yeah I mean... it's you, of course it is. What else would it be? Not sure what else there is to say.

I like Rockist Scientist's last post from ten years ago. I can relate to quite a bit of what he says there, especially about not having a final end point in mind

I think there is form, tangibility, groove, emotion in that music tho xp

I definitely got a lot out of it, yeah. it would be wrong to say that it's devoid of those elements. and the best stuff transcends labels and still manages to be great. it's not like I have no time for the avantgarde; it's not an overnight sea change but a gradual disillusionment or cynicism or lack of patience that I've noticed in the last couple of years

"Used to like" often amounts to "wore it out" for me--I'm sure that point's been made already.

I'm going to start a "The concept of 'used to be among the crowd you're in with'" thread.

Yes "used to like" can also mean music an exbf/exgf or ex group of friends listened to. Growing up in my generation there. Were a couple of "nu metal", "happy punk" and ska songs that I liked but after highschool I never listened to any of that music ever again and if I ever overhear it I never think "whoa that song was cool", they were all mostly shit.

Partying in the late 90's was dreadful music wise.

People change

Something that once resonated with me emotionally no longer does. Most of the times I still appreciate the song but the feeling I once had is gone, like lots of other strong emotions.

I think lots of people have strong attachment to their coming of age years and forever enjoy listening to the music that soundtracked that period of time for them. Personally I've never really had that sentimental gene and that's a good thing because I'd hate to be listening to the Mission UK in 2017.

do people talk about the kinds of porn they "used to like" too

Yeah I mean... it's you, of course it is. What else would it be? Not sure what else there is to say.

― blog haus aka the scene raver (wins), Sunday, August 13, 2017 1:04 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

At the time, I felt like I'd taken a long time to cultivate an appreciation for free jazz and musique concrete.

Can't help but feel this is significant though.

being strict, as you are changing all the time & have a memory, you can't listen to the same song twice

Most of my friends got stuck in their coming of age years like you say yesca. I hate it, if we make a reunion they always want to play the same terrible 15 or so songs anything that has come after 1999/2000 isn't as good as music from the previous decades according to them. They mostly listen to rock tho so point taken since rock pretty much died a painful death in the 90s.

good post doggie

often its just winter jumpers in summer!

The most violently true example: pixies. sound great at 21, terrible by 31. by 41, you can't imagine anyone...

I used to like blueberries and now :(

What :( I loved pixies at 16 and I still love them now at 31. O lu back then I thought Surfer Rosa was their best album and now I think it's Doolitle.

in my old age i have become much more of a catch and release listener. this is really true of avant/noise records/CDs. i'll enjoy listening to something but don't feel the need to hold on to it or even revisit it. like reading a book. and i think i prefer the ephemeral live experience most of all. i hear it and then its gone. sometimes i feel like people don't even need to put out more records/tapes. experimental/noise feels more true to me undocumented.

as far as this thread goes though, music fits your moods/status/age/situation/etc. and if you evolve like a good human your needs change. no biggie. no, really, i can't listen to biggie anymore. i used to like him...

it's always possible to come back around too

The most violently true example: pixies. sound great at 21, terrible by 31. by 41, you can't imagine anyone...

My sister loves them and she won't see 41 again any time soon.

I think I used to like thinking about what I like but I don't really like to think about it anymore

in my old age i have become much more of a catch and release listener.

I love this concept. I find myself doing this all the time: I read about some album that sounds intriguing, listen to and enjoy it, maybe a few times even, then promptly forget about it. For whatever reason, it was so much easier to forge a long-term bond with a piece of music in my younger years. Now they're all pretty ephemeral.

I'm also convinced by the argument that we try to distance ourselves from bands/genres that we feel no longer define us (i.e. nu-metal is too embarrassing to own up to now). In my own case, it was my college years trading Phish bootlegs, which I now find hard to sit through. However, this thread is making me think that maybe it's not so much about the interminable noodling jams as it is about the associations that come with being a phish fan.

(btw, the pixies are a great counter-example. i got into them around doolittle, and still love just about everything they ever did. and maybe that's just because they're cool enough to keep on my resume)

IMO, free jazz/avant-garde/musique concrete is the actual end point of music fandom - the kind of stuff that people get into when they're weary and frustrated and bored of music. This is, of course, why if I ever find myself straying down that path, I'll know that life is over and it's time for golf.

I'll do you a favour and assume that's a joke.

yes, ilm has obviously proven that the real path is - indie rock -> musique concrète -> teen pop

haha, i wonder if that's what's happened to me! whereas I assumed at the time, like Turrican, that the Wire-style stuff was some sort of appreciative end-point; or that at least I'd broken through to a space that there would be no going back from: i.e. that if at that point in my life I could enjoy music on this conceptual level, that it would stay with me forever. Very similar to the time I went to a Planet-Mu night and realised I'd much rather be at a 'proper' dance night, despite years of loving Warp/IDM stuff

that if at that point in my life I could enjoy music on this conceptual level, that it would stay with me forever

Possibly it might have stayed with you if you'd enjoyed the music on something other than a conceptual level?

in my old age i have become much more of a catch and release listener.

This is exactly a concept I was trying to explain to a friend of mine the other day, thanks for saying it so clearly. For me lately I feel like I almost actively try not to think about how I might compare an album or song to favourites of mine.

I'm having a hard time articulating it, but I like just hearing something and letting it go, and a year later catch myself remembering a lyric or something then needing to search it out all over again. Some kind of joy in that for me these days, maybe I just miss when I was younger and everything felt new and this is my half-assed way to bring back the feeling. But I feel like I can just enjoy the music, it had become a slog to listen to music and deal with the obsessive need to remember and organize all of it.

paint over the middle of your records and forget what they are you can only play one at a time. the words are a form of self-inflicted tyranny, an attack on the dream state

Possibly it might have stayed with you if you'd enjoyed the music on something other than a conceptual level?

― Wewlay Bewlay (Tom D.), Monday, August 14, 2017 2:41 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not so much a disillusionment with specific records or artists, but almost an entire approach or aesthetic, save for a few exceptions. Of course I connected with experimental artists on a deeper level than that. But even Scott Walker, who I rate as one of my favourite artists of all time, I found myself listening to Bish Bosch the other day and thinking 'god some of these lyrics are plain ridiculous and what's with that dreadful opera-voice?'. I should say that his lyrics and voice are two of my favourite things about him and his music. It's very peculiar to feel this way. I know on the Tom Waits thread a lot of people were saying 'I used to love him so much in my 20s but now I find his schtick a bit cloying and at worst, minstrely'. Again, it's not a big revelation that personal attitudes and feelings change, it's just peculiar happening at this time and from an area I felt so immersed in

"Bisch Bosch", lol yes, I listened to that recently too, I think it's just not very good tbh - then I listened to a Pierre Henry 60 minute crash bang sproing thwak opus and loved it.

'god some of these lyrics are plain ridiculous and what's with that dreadful opera-voice?'

That's what I thought the first time I heard the guy. He sounds like Adam Sandler's "Opera Man" character.

Bish Bosch has long been a top ten album for me, so I definitely loved it at one point. I think just bought into it a lot at the time and accepted that you have to take it with a pinch of salt in order to appreciate it. Listening to 'weird' music when other people are within earshot has always been a bit of an awkward thing for me. I'd been telling my (open minded music fan of a) housemate about Scott Walker for a long time but never played it. Then I put some on in my room while he was pottering about downstairs and started thinking 'I can't play him this, what will he think??'. Context is everything I guess. If I were to have heard Bish Bosch for the first time without any introduction to Scott and his previous music, I'd probably wonder WTF was going on. So yeah, in that case it was about putting myself in someone else's shoes and then feeling embarrassed for myself!

Whenever I listen to music I attach a cinematic framework of imagery to it in my imagination that drives or enhances the mood I associate with it. Certain styles of music conjure specific settings for me. It can be based on where I was in my life when I heard the style or whether the style itself is culturally attributed to certain scenery, but I tend to fall out of love with things more when I've stopped romanticizing the settings associated with that first category. The music that never gets old for me does seem to resonate with very deep nostalgic associations, and while I can't predict how I'll feel in another 10 years it's hard to imagine I'll ever go into completely different territory at this point.

I find that a lot of the things I "used to like" I still enjoy, but it just feels like a simpler or more naive pleasure. To really expose myself as a youngster, I grew up on early 2010s indie pop like Two Door Cinema Club, Foster The People and Grouplove. I only really turned my back on those bands when, in senior year or so, I started reading rockcrit and became self-conscious about my taste (insert thinkpiece about class anxiety here). Returning to them now, with the benefit of having developed my own more individuated sense of what I like, it's easier for me to both understand why I react positively to bands like that in a lizard-brain rush sort of way, as well as why they don't seem as "considered" or "interesting" from the perspective of, for lack of a better term, an amateur aesthete. One of the best things that happened to me in college was how I became more shameless, admitting my instinctive pleasures even as I got better at critiquing them from whatever value judgment system.

The other side is the distaste I acquired for the perceived naivete of musical theater-type melodies, which is basically just developing a very contemporary relationship to "corniness." But you could go on forever about the weird ways that can be both natural and historically informed.

i used to like the doors
then i used to not like the doors
now i love the doors

I used to be really into certain scenes or artists and I would declare myself a fan and lover of those things/people forever. Like, I will always ride as hard for this as I do right now.

Of course, that's never the case. We all change inevitably.

I've been through a similar journey with experimental stuff and am fairly sure it's partly context, partly my dilettante nature and partly a change in life circumstances. For a while there I was listening daily - at work - to (for shorthand let's call it) Wire music and experiencing it and writing about in ecstatic terms (I even did it in the Wire, once). I was pretty much immersed. Then I started teaching and gradually the opportunity and the desire to listen to that sort of stuff (skronk, black metal, grown men farting into collanders) faded. I've recently gone as far as deleting a whole bunch of stuff from hard drives, stuff I was sent and bought, as I simply don't know when I'll ever revisit it. I feel like I fraud, a bit, and that's OK.

I've also needed that 'catch and release' tag - it encapsulates a lot of my listening at the moment. I operate in small clouds of intense affect that dissipate fairly rapidly and I can listen to something for a week and then never again.

Fwiw, I still love the stuff I did when I was 14. Christ, I sound senile.

I think I made myself sound even more dilettantish than I meant too. During that period it wasn't just listening at work, I was putting on experimental gigs in a tiny local boozer and regularly travelling into London etc. I guess the point was that it was an immersive thing, and once I came up for air, and had a change in circumstances, it seemed to pass fairly quickly. I've made it sound like a kidney stone.

for some reason all this anti-Wire talk is making me giddy

take some time to listen to some Roland Kayn, and disparage golf, and blanket FP Turricant forever imo.

Ha!

tbf on turricant he has a slightly more expansive vision of what music can be than fergal sharkey has.

The fact that I could use 'Wire music' as shorthand and not punch myself in the face is evidence of how far I've fallen.

Golf >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Paul McCartney

getting bludgeoned with a 7 iron>>>>> very strong 'pinions on muzik>>>>> Paul McCartney

Lads it just music it's not important

I ended up reading some articles from The Wire from the mid 90s after a book referenced one, it's interesting what's stayed relatively the same and what's rolled with the times as far as editorial direction and review style goes

a great first response from wgw itt

i read that old invisible jukebox book last year and goldie was a thing.

i would definitely subscribe to a magazine that was nothing but invisible jukebox. they could call it Invsbl Jkbx.

iirc nothing's important

One of the best things that happened to me in college was how I became more shameless, admitting my instinctive pleasures even as I got better at critiquing them from whatever value judgment system.

I got v into experimental/droney/noisy/out there/wire stuff 17-19ish, and since then my tastes have got a lot broader and I think this is part of it. I have such relative confidence listening to things now it's easy to forget how unsure I was about how to sort through my often ambivalent reactions to things, and how cautious I was about disregarding other people's opinions

scott, me too, I think that's the first and sometimes only thing I read from the magazine

I used to like NOFX White Trash Two Heebs and a Bean, but I'm never compelled to listen to them nowadays. At least, I feel like I got it out of my system. But I'd probably still enjoy it on some level. That, or Ribbed. I mean, I thought it was the best thing ever when Roadkill (1993) came out.

audio is good

good posts chinaski

Hey, Turrican, do you have LZ-A4's and do you still recommend them? (A Turrican was mentioned in a review I found)

https://youtu.be/BnTFA3Bp0hg

Maybe avant-garde was a pivot point for half the music I listen to nowadays - weirdo music. For instance I've been relistening to Kevin Ayers and Brian Eno stuff lately and it has never sound so good. Although, I don't think I had a very long avant-garde phase and stuff like Eno had to predate that.

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