do you ever feel like you are getting too old to be a music obsessive?

I don't think you can ever be too old to be "into" music but I feel that being truly obsessed with it is something that should be left to the kidz (because of their higher disposable income, mainly).

Of course being the total hypocrite that I am, the only thing that will likely cease my record collecting will be destitution or children (more likely both at the same time)

How the gulf between the average person who I would have considered part of my peer group 7 or 8 years ago has turned into one of those 12 cd people, who has a kid, a job, and a mortgage, and here I am not feeling like joining consensus reality one bit. How do the older ILM'ers deal with being older, and being part of a completely separate discursive group?

It's not a problem, though. It doesn't make me feel out of place. There are plenty of other things to talk about. And everyone I know is obsessive about something. Why not music?

I do have less tolerance for crowds, though, so I'm not as keen on live music as I used to be.

I know at least 40 people of around 35-45 who are equally nuts about music.

This job, kids, mortgage thing is a cliche which is incomprehensible me. *Settling down* - WTF!! Why, I mean WHY should it make any difference to what I'm interested in? Sure, work and kids take up time, and there are times when I can't go to that gig or nip off for a band practice, but so what?

Much like Dr C, I am buying more records than I ever have (whilst I still can afford it!) and my tastes are increasingly catholic as I search out new things to listen to. I certainly hope I don't lose this passion and since I've made it this far I don't think I will.

I seem to remember my parents saying that I would become less interested in this as I got older as they had but it doesn't look like it.

I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't understand, the type of people who make comments when they see the number of records I have but, thinking about it, almost all the people I know act like this about something whether its books, videos, dr who...etc.

My Dad regularly took me record shopping when I was a wee lad. When I have kids, that tradition will most definitely continue. It hasn't taken any effort on my part to maintain the level of enthusiasm I had in my teens.

At my 40th birtday party there were around 50 people there, and I reckon 30 were totally obsessed with music, and aged mainly 35-40. The poor DJ had to deal with requests for anything from obscure bluebeat sides, to a Claudia Brucken 12" b-side and stuff by The Mekons. (He did a good job, btw.) I've met the best people I know through music, and I'm proud to know all my music friends. A quick pint can turn into a heated discussion about Hot Chocolate's finest album track, or who was better - The Bourbonese Qualk or Attrition.

I suppose, to answer a question posed on another thread, that's why I Love Music. You meet such great people - and that includes you lot, or at least those I've met so far!

I do notice that my friends have become less interested in seeking out new music as marriage and children. My gender may have some bearing on it - i meet lots of male music fans my own age and older who express surprise that a female of my age would be into the stuff i am.

I don't think a passion for music is something that ever leaves you - my boyfriend is 35 and the depth of his musical passion makes me look like the sort of person who only buys what's in the album chart top ten.

dinner with paul simenon? *feels envious*

It pays off in other ways - I must have many more times the number of good friends now than my non-music obsessed schoolmates; I've met so many brilliant people throught it. Many of which are breeding and having 40th birthdays and still going to gigs, while others are mailing for advice on what college to go to when they leave school.

So many of the people my age who have backed off from music culture in the name of family or career claim to be jealous of those of us who are still in the game. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is what I am, and anyone who has a problem with that isn't worth the brainpower necessary to hate him or her.

I've only felt old at certain all ages shows I've attended, where most of the folks (& bands) are decked out in their thrift-store uniforms, their chain wallets, their punk rock patches, and I'm chilling with my slacks & button-down shirt over in the corner. (Hey, how you doin'?) This scenario says more about my questionable concert-going attire than offering any insight into some supposed music/age schism.

what about in critique of indie kid critiques?

But there is what some retailers have called 'the fifty quid bloke' - the middle-aged man who has money, who maybe goes out for lunch, turns up in the music store with his tie slightly askew, browses around and before he knows it, has spent £50 on CDs. That's the type of person who is helping sales of CDs."

[That will be the so called over 40s "grey panthers" on ILM.]

My biggest regret as a music listener is that I spent so much time trying to be cool. I listened to indie rock to the exclusion of almost all else, mainly because I thought it would be easier to chat up girls in granny glasses if I knew a lot about Sebadoh, rether than, like, Tha Alkaholics. I kept hip hop and soul music in the closet, my secret shame. I didn't dare listen to dance music for fear that I would be pegged as gay. I wish I could go back in time and recommend myself some records, and when old me says "What? You're kidding!" I wish new me would smack him upside the head and say "No, I'm not fucking kidding, you assheaded classist elitist know-nothing."

I still don't really understand anything tbh

I would admit that i've failed to appreciate that distinction. If I'm framing things in the context of a collection, and out of 1,000 things i've heard in passing this is what i want to revisit feels like drawing a similar kind of boundary. But i'm superimposing my own attidutes here at this point.

It was a jazz funk Christmas over here at chez brimstead

I turn 25 a week from today

The idea of nearly 25 being too old for anything is quite amusing...

Tbf I remember complaining to my roommate at exactly that same age that our apartment looked too much like a dorm room with all the posters. And every surface covered in skate stickers etc

"do you think we need to, like, start wearing collared shirts?"

Don’t want to answer the original question, but I probably do feel too old to read this thread.

Re: the original question, what's the correlation between youth and music anyhow?

I'm just about old enough now to feel really alienated by (not just indifferent to) certain strains of youth music. Never thought it could happen to me :)

It's also been many, many years since I felt like the music in my headphones made me the coolest kid on the block.

My social life probably doesn't revolve around music as much as it used to. It's also less likely to encourage me to do stupid shit.

None of these things are bad. It's almost taken for granted that music is the domain of the young idgi

Think there’s a Jethro Tull song about this iirc.

You can only be too young to rock n roll these days tbf

I still use music to regulate my feelings, typical adolescent behavior.

Yes. I dont want to get sucked in and obsessive about music like I had to be. I want it in my life but I'm ok not spending hours each day looking up songs and albums. All that effort. I cant be bothered anymore. Plus I have loads of old albums I neverr really listened to so now seems like a good time. I'm prob missing out on a ton but hey, I think I'm ok with that now.

― candyman, Tuesday, December 29, 2020 7:08 PM

I identify with this a lot, but overall "no" to the question. It's become so easy to sample and hop around catalogs, scenes, labels, genres, etc. that I don't feel like I'm "obsessing" over certain things like I used to - it's a wider net. I still wind up buying physical copies of releases I really get into. Enjoying listening through old stuff as well, and clearing out what has no business kicking around anymore. I still like loads of what I did years ago but I think staying engaged makes me less sentimental than I otherwise would be.

There isn't any way not to miss out on a ton.

i am nigh on 40 :p

I feel like the music itself is as rewarding as ever, but there is less inclination to know the minutiae around said music (release dates, producers, studios, labels etc).

Likewise, a waning desire to rank or chart music, not as a response to online list or discussion XYZ, but a natural disinclination beyond “this is great”, or “this is one of the best things I’ve heard this year”

I find the above has been helpful - not as a forced process but as a natural one - in terms to taking music at face value

(Or taking music at face value better; some releases will invite a level of curiosity beyond the 40 or 50 minutes of the actual music, but it’s not necessary for every great release to be ‘studied’ in the same way)

None of these things are bad. It's almost taken for granted that music is the domain of the young idgi

I think when you're young all the peripheral aspects to music can become focal points ie being part of a scene, meeting like-minded people, using it as a personality identifier, ingroup/outgroup identifier, generational identifier. Whereas when you're old it's like all about the music maaaan. That's why a lot of ppl are into music way less as an adult than they were as a youth: they were never really into Music to begin with, but rather the psycho-social aspects I just mentioned. Obv they did and still do enjoy music for its own sake but it lost those other meanings/functions as they got older. For "music obsessives", even if they too lost those other meanings/functions, the remaining husk of the Love of Music remains and is as big an entity as young normies' peripheral meanings/functions + Love of Music

I listened to too much hip hop in my teens and if I'm honest, I do think I'm too old for most rap now. I can still enjoy it but as I've aged, I see what stretch Armstrong meant when he said rap cant represent the full spectrum of emotions (I read this when I was 16 and was like STFU stretch! WTF do you know?!). I'm glad to be out of that particular phase, as well as feeling like I have to keep up to date. Though I do enjoy just hearing pop on radio 1, or diff stuff on 6music or nts or whatever, but often I dont care about finding out more or buying it, I'm happy just hearing it. That's pretty weird tbh, and I dislike becoming someone who listens in that way now, but I dont feel like being drawn down any huge rabbit holes. I'm happy getting better acquainted with what I have.

No

I feel like the music itself is as rewarding as ever, but there is less inclination to know the minutiae around said music (release dates, producers, studios, labels etc).

Yeah def, idk how much of this has to do with streaming/piracy, decoupling of the music from any physical packaging and artwork... in the old days, i knew a lot of the peripheral stuff before I heard even a note, and often that was what drew me in and got the CD in my hands. i might have had a strong impression of it before the actual music even hit my ears. Now i never read about music i haven't heard yet, or if i do i'm probably streaming it as i read.

It's funny because when I think about music I've "studied" in detail, from that time - maybe the first record that comes to mind is Plux Quba, which has remarkably little metadata attached to it. There's nothing really to read up on there, it doesn't even have track titles for the most part. It's gotta be something else.

I think it's more that when I was 14... What sorcery is this? I had to know. How did they do that? Because I wanna do it too. What's the secret, I wanna see the sleight of hand. That's why I'm buying the magazines or whatever.

And eventually, you know, I'm 23, I have an idea- maybe I can't exactly replicate the trick myself, but I can tell what's going on behind the scenes more or less. And it's just not as beguiling anymore. It's not so impressive. And pretty soon I'm 30 and I'm quite sure that I don't want to be a magician anymore. I don't want to know how they did it. I just want to be enchanted again like when I was a kid.

And Granny, I was nodding along quite happily there, you *almost* had me convinced. Except- I think a sociologist would have a field day with this site, don't you?
"Classic or Dud" is anything other than an ingroup/outgroup identifier?

For me, the issue with aging and music has to do with how much more new music I can listen to now that my life is almost certainly more than "halfway" done. I roll my eyes when people talk about a "bucket list", and my reaction to potential imminent death is not going to be listening to my gaps in some band's discography, but the time left seems finite (even if it is still probably measured in decades), and this affects my plans about what to listen to.

I realized that one reason I am hesitant to listen seriously to younger acts is that if they outlive me, I will never know their "whole story". On the one hand, this is absurd, unless I want to retreat to listening to the long-dead (who can still put out records if their name is Jimi Hendrix), but if part of the interest in music for me is seeing that long arc of a career and a life, why wouldn't I focus on the many musicians where this is still possible?

I'm aware I've twisted the intent of this thread backwards, but I wouldn't know how to search for this peculiar topic...

Sometimes I wonder if that lends to conservative listening,as I'm less inclined to listen to stuff that critics etc haven't already deemed soneone to be great. I'm too lazy now.

^ So much this
(for me, "critics, etc" definitely includes the ILM annual top 77)

I remember a poster on here saying that he had no time for bands that were starting out: "get back to me when you've made your eighth album".

Time is precious. Although, listening to eight albums is a lot more listening than just one debut. Also, they would prob have gone down hill by album 8. I'd wait until 3 or 4.

Xpost Sammy Hagar posted here?

Scott Seward, possibly posing slightly. I just searched for the post, couldn't find it, but there is 20 years worth of contempt and antipathy in the ILX archives keyed to the phrase "get back to me".

My music obsession is still burning strong, but it's more interactive. I practice viola two, three hours a day, and spend a lot of my leisure time comparing different performances of pieces I'm learning. I read about strings, I e-mail luthiers with questions, I plan on buying a new instrument once my finances allow it, etc. I don't buy vinyl compulsively as I used to... I bought only five albums on vinyl this year, down from ten the year before.

I remember a poster on here saying that he had no time for bands that were starting out: "get back to me when you've made your eighth album".

I said this, but I believe I said third or fourth album. It was a response to ILM's (and many critics') tendency to leap after the newest shiny object and declare every 19-year-old idiot who drops a single with a half decent beat some kind of genius destined to reshape music in his/her own image. A year later, they're inevitably gone and the same crowd is dribbling over a different 19-year-old idiot's debut single.

My music obsession is still burning strong, but it's more interactive. I practice viola two, three hours a day, and spend a lot of my leisure time comparing different performances of pieces I'm learning. I read about strings, I e-mail luthiers with questions, I plan on buying a new instrument once my finances allow it, etc. I don't buy vinyl compulsively as I used to... I bought only five albums on vinyl this year, down from ten the year before.

― flamboyant goon tie included, Friday, January 1, 2021 11:11 AM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

haha same, in a way! i went through my youtube history from this year and found i devoted a not insubstantial amount of time to drum cover videos

Professional musicians and critics have an excuse for music obsession, although I suppose if the income is insufficient, there's an extra pressure to drop it?

i also email luthiers with questions

I don't think professional musicians are "obsessed with music" in the same way as consumers. The cutest metaphor I can think of is "music consumers like to fly to nice vacation spots", and "music producers like to scan blueprints of planes and look at maps".

I said this, but I believe I said third or fourth album. It was a response to ILM's (and many critics') tendency to leap after the newest shiny object and declare every 19-year-old idiot who drops a single with a half decent beat some kind of genius destined to reshape music in his/her own image. A year later, they're inevitably gone and the same crowd is dribbling over a different 19-year-old idiot's debut single.

I've spent some time unpacking my own taste for "new bands", and I think the thrill of listening to a new musician is that their career arc is incomplete, and as such, exists only in the fantasy of the mind of the consumer. One an artist makes their second, fourth, eighth album, their career arc is visible. The metaphor I use to describe an artist putting out their first album is "an unstruck match". Tierra Whack, i.e., I listened to that album a hundred times in 2018. What is her second album gonna be like? It's impossible for her to make a second album. If she's gonna make another collection of 1m vignettes, people will get bored of the gimmick. If she makes an album of normal-length songs, people will like it less than the debut. So, I fantasize about her 2nd LP as being rap's answer to A Wizard, A True Star, some kind of continuous adventure that never coalesces into proper-songs but also keeps everything that fascinated me about Whack World. I do not anticipate that her 2nd LP will live up to my fantasy version of it. I doubt I will pay much attention to it, tbh.

I don't think listeners are "leaping after the newest shiny object", I think that fantasizing about a as-yet-unrealized career arc is an important part of music consumption

ILM's (and many critics') tendency to leap after the newest shiny object and declare every 19-year-old idiot who drops a single with a half decent beat some kind of genius destined to reshape music in his/her own image.

The most recent 19-year-old I can think of who got an ILM thread for her debut album was Billie Eilish—and she ended up winning a ton of Grammys and is a major artist (whether you may personally care for her or not).

Anyway, if everyone waited until an artist’s 3rd album to start paying attn, fewer artists would probably make it to their 3rd album.

(xpost, I guess)

I feel like I'm getting more obsessive. Covid gave me an excuse to do a lot of music deep dives this year, which has been very rewarding. OTOH, it has me missing clubs like crazy. I will say that new discoveries rarely hit me as hard as they did when I was young, but I'm ok with that.

I had a conversation with a friend who is deeply into clubbing last night, and during this conversation I realized just how much I missed the environment of "big sound". It's not that I miss live performances or going dancing per se so much as I miss being in an environment where sound is large and loud and it's moving my body, I guess

Tierra Whack, i.e., I listened to that album a hundred times in 2018. What is her second album gonna be like? It's impossible for her to make a second album. If she's gonna make another collection of 1m vignettes, people will get bored of the gimmick. If she makes an album of normal-length songs, people will like it less than the debut.

I was actually thinking about this the other day w/r/t the Jesus & Mary Chain, whose debut album was such a perfect single artistic gesture that the only possible follow-up would have been to announce the breakup of the band, preferably the day it was released. The fact that they continued to make records (some of which were good! some of which I liked!) was still somehow disappointing, because in an ideal world Psychocandy would have existed as their one and only statement. But generally speaking, I am a big believer that very few bands emerge fully formed and most bands get better as they go on. The most recent Deftones record may well be their best album, and/but it couldn't exist without all the albums before it. Baroness continue to get better with every album. Motörhead's 21st century output was better than most of their 1990s work. And on and on.

Ya, good comparison (wrt J&MC)

I personally really enjoy it when an artist who I've always found somewhat underwhelming suddenly starts making fantastic music in their 40s and 50s (David Grubbs immediately springs to mind, I love his last two albums unreservedly)

If she makes an album of normal-length songs, people will like it less than the debut.

If they’re good songs, why would ppl like it less? (A bigger number of ppl may even like it more.)

The format of Whack World is intractable from any concept of "good songs"-- they're great songs, and they are presented in an unprecedented format. I appreciate the unsolved mystery: 'did Tierra plan on this being the album? or was this a decision made late in the production process, to cut short the songs until they're effectively Amazon.com teasers?' Tierra Whack sticks out to me because her initial thesis is so singular, and I am curious as to how she intends to follow it up, either by continuing, or pivoting, or developing. Regardless: I doubt that what she does next will measure up to my fantasy sophomore album! maybe she will, maybe she'll supersede expectations.

all the new stuff from Tierra Whack has been great

I've spent some time unpacking my own taste for "new bands", and I think the thrill of listening to a new musician is that their career arc is incomplete, and as such, exists only in the fantasy of the mind of the consumer.

Well said, OTM

The cutest metaphor I can think of is "music consumers like to fly to nice vacation spots", and "music producers like to scan blueprints of planes and look at maps".

It really bothers me that I can't remember what it's like to listen to music without reflexively scanning the blueprints, even tho I'm no "musucian" and I haven't touched it in years!! And yet, I'm convinced that if I catalog my responses there's going to be a lot more overlap between these things than I tend to think.

Yes, I've been getting more into orchids.

Xp The obvious thing that undermines that distinction for me is "reference points", the ability of music to effectively be representational, through a culturally embedded language of signs.

Whack is THE BEST artist-on-the-cusp I can think of. Her second album will be great in ways that I can’t anticipate. I’m 50 years old (and feeling older) but I know music will always be a churning landscape of possibility which rewards the seeker.

Yeah I guess I sounded like a negatron when talking about her. Whack World was my fave of the year and yeah I love her recent singles, also. I just have been actively thinking about what LP2 is gonna be like and how I'm gonna respond to it!

I find I'm too old to be disorganized and that I can't go on just downloading stuff after reading about it online and then finding myself locked with a long list of obscurities from all genres and provenances. So I'm trying to rationalize it and explore things one at a time on my own terms, and also reconcile it with the fact that I now care much more about playlists and popular stuff. What I'm half saying here is also that I find a lot of music obsessing online to be ridiculous - not just the level of obsession but the stuff that is acclaimed, as if being passionate about music attracts some serious weirdos.

Rant aside, for this year I have a project of revisiting my music and being even more focused / selective than usual. It's also a question of diminishing returns.

A gazillion times in the last year I've read a description of an album that sounded dope, so i went to buy it, and then realized i already had it

.