Do you ever feel like you've discovered every band that really "clicks" with you and that everything else from here on out will just be a bunch of good but insubstantial albums?

There's lots of music made after 1990 that I love and adore and cherish. None of it, though, defines music for me in the same way that Confusion is Sex or Groovy Hate Fuck does. Maybe not everyone fixates on the same relative period in their lives, and maybe a lot of people don't fixate at all, but I think that most people who love a part of "popular" music are thus.

haha, i felt this way when i was 16, specifically w/r/t stereolab!

so you're in support of devolution theory? me, i adhere to the evolutionary stance: everything just gets BETTER and BETTER. every new experience brings me to a bigger orgasm. i suspect that one day, after hearing mc cheesnites maybe, i will explode.

first thing you gotta do is ditch ideas that you just happened to be around for some magical era: everybody feels that way, poets have been writing about it for centuries, it's called "youth"

this is scandalous libel. i have never taken a cheesnite in my life.

genuine fucking cheers to that Marcello, across the Atlantic I'm raising my coffee cup to yr health

Heh. I know wot you mean, it can get a bit too 2LiveCrewish but overall I just love it.

This is very good sense. The 'all new bands are shite' fallacy may also be engendered by the fact that people only bother to remember the good old bands. Compared to those most bands seem shite, but I tend to assume that the proportion of drivel to quality is fairly constant.

serious as heartburn...I'm talking about grown-up things like setting budgets for things like music, which most of us will blow out pretty much every time we set foot in a record store...I can generally fool myself (not such a sharp one, me) by reasoning that this latest binge will increase my odds of finding that mythical "perfect album", which will tide me over until my golden years, and can be passed on to my grandchildren's children...

For me it was basically a combination of marriage, baby and soulseek. Sure, I still listen to music, but so much less than before. I just simply don't have the time anymore. And if I do, I usually read instead.

By the way, this is probably complete bullshit...

Actually, this is completely wrong. You have to remember that 20 years ago there wasn't a pro-tools rig with a commerical cdr dup machine in every neighborhood. The reason music appears to be worse is because it is worse. Most of the music released today never would have made it through the gates 20 years ago because the entry fee was so much higher.

Music is also worse because you don't have good recording technology at the moment. Digital audio is still in it's infancy and it doesn't sound as good as a well pressed record from the 70's. It isn't just vinyl, the pre-amps are not as good, the boards are not as good, the mastering engineers are not as good, and the skills of the recording engineers is not as good. Recording technology peaked from about 1970-1985. You had a mature analog technology, with techs who knew how to make it sound good. It took 60 years for it to get it to that point and then we threw it away because digital was the new thing.

Digital reverb killed music in the 80's. Digital has been creeping into everything ever since and it has wrecked an entire generation of music. Take a cd from the 90's and compare it to an old soul record from the early 70's and the cd will lose every time. Digital mastering still sucks. It sure is loud, but it doesn't sound good yet.

Before you flip out on me. Please realize that I am not an analogue snob per se, I just think analogue had 60 years to become a mature technology. Digital is getting better and it will be as good as analogue in the future. Unfortunately, that is not helping anybody with a recording project right now.

Disagree! Digital audio was in its infancy in the 80s and early 90s. It has definitely matured and there have plenty of great sounding digital recording in the last 15 years. They don't sound like 70s recordings, but why should they? If you are looking for something that sounds like music of the past, you will be constantly be disappointed. Even new "retro" music sounds like music of now.

I've recently resolved to come to terms with John Zorn's output and am feeling slightly overwhelmed. I think he put out something like 20 albums in the last year or so.

No. Many new breathtaking moments always await.

Because I do.
-- Lee is Free (sonicyouth4...), June 19th, 2006 1:46 AM.

That's sad. Says to me you've given up trying to find good, new music.