If you had to choose between listening to all new music/music to be made in the future and NO music made in the past or music from the past but NO new/future music what would you choose?

(and i know the whole "well technically ALL recorded music was made in the past" thing you know what i mean, i mean actual release dates etc)

Future, easy. For me, at least.

do I get to listen to music from the future now, or do I have to wait for it?

it's a gamble though! i only thought of this poll because i want to say the future but then the "what would you play to impress someone from 10 years ago" made me realize that things hadn't really changed that much in 10 years...like things seem to be slowing down....

and thing about all the jazz, classical, world music non-rock type shit that i haven't even really properly checked out yet...that could take a lifetime to get through...like is it worth never getting to hear duke ellington (who i've yet to own anything by) just to take a gamble on some rappers and rock bands and shit?

do I get to listen to music from the future now, or do I have to wait for it?

-- bernard snowy, Thursday, August 7, 2008 4:41 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

dude it's hard question to phrase correctly, and i guess didn't do the best job. basically like think of it today. starting right this second you would have to delete all your mp3s, throw away all your old CDs, LPs, tapes whatever and start fresh, only listening to stuff that comes out starting today.

(actually that starting fresh does sound good though)

so yeah you have to wait for the future, we all do.

in the future people will make crazy awesome progressive genreless intricate micro-managed non-cliche-yet-endlessly-listenable thrill-ride music

and it will rule

I would go for the past option because that's pretty much the only way I would ever get around to hearing all the old records I want to hear.

altho my "listenable" tolerance levels are probably different to most

OH SHIT "AVENGING ANGELS " by SPACE just came on random shuffle :o

I kinda can't parse this - does time stop at some point? or like, does this mean I would only get to hear things once and then have to listen to the next new thing?

just erase my memory after listening to something and play me something else I don't care when its from I'll probably find something interesting about it

can i still listen to shit that samples old records?

^^^lolz

are there covers of old songs in the future?

i'm voting 'past' because of how important it feels to have music/memory associations from your youth (of which the value may increase as you age), and because i spend half the time thinking "doooooom there's nothing new goin' on" anyway. as long as i could have until 31/12/09 at least...

if there's no music from the past, who do new bands rip off?

x-post

Music journalists will be up shit creek

YOU don't listen to music from the past, but everybody else does, is the rule.

well fuck that why should I be punished

i dont get this question - do the guys making new music still get to listen to old music and reference it and sample it and stuff? or is it like all old music gets wiped out?

past for sure, for what M@att said, to hear all the old great shit I haven't heard yet, esp. jazz. But I'm a guy who spends half his life reading and thinking about shit from 2,500 years ago.

what about reissues and re-released remastered shit

Haha way to be dicks about this relatively simple question guys.

i dont get this question - do the guys making new music still get to listen to old music and reference it and sample it and stuff? or is it like all old music gets wiped out?

-- and what, Thursday, August 7, 2008 4:54 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Yeah ppl that reference and sample old music but that are putting out new songs and records are still fair game. This is just your own listening and owning/downloading of music...you'd have to throw away/delete everything and start fresh with only stuff that's being released new....

It's not some weird time/space continuum thing, everything exists you just can't listen to it....starting, say, today.

what about reissues and re-released remastered shit

-- and what, Thursday, August 7, 2008 4:56 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

reissues and remasters are not eligible, you have to give them up.

I can't imagine anyone over the age of oh let's say 30 (but maybe even 20) would answer future. Too much invested in music that was already made.

you can listen to new cover songs.

there's way more music in the future than in the past, but the first few years might be especially tedious.

waiting for some douchebag to rerecord all that Haggard and Jones...

"there's way more music in the future than in the past"

Yeah, but you are only going to be alive to hear some of it!

I won't live long enough to hear all the good music of the past, either. Regardless of my choice, I'm spending what little time I have left sorting through a mountain of music I'll never hear, hoping to find a few good tunes.

can't answer

i like variety, and there's more variety accessible via past music than at any one point in the present/future.

You still retain the memories of all the songs you heard before you made this deal right? If so, I'd definitely have to go with Future Music. I want to hear EVERYTHING, and it would suck being left out of conversations about music with friends. With old music, at least I've heard it before even if I can't hear it again.

yeah you have memories. it's not some magic thing, you just couldn't listen to or buy/download any music released in the past.

Yeah. I'd definitely have to go with the future then. Music is very much cultural currency for me. It's something I talk about, etc.

your friends talk exclusively about current music?
xpost

Music journalists will be up shit creek

-- Tom D., Thursday, August 7, 2008 12:53 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

THE FUTURE IS NOW

No, but I can still discuss older music since I've heard lots of it. I wouldn't be able to discuss current music anymore, tho, if I didn't choose the future option. XP

where are you guys getting this "more variety in the past" "gambling on rappers and rock bandsin the future" crap???

line splits along classical/pop for me. if classical's included, it's the past easy. elliott carter won't live much longer I'm afraid (represent, Minnesota) and I don't see many more on the horizon in his mold. if pop/rock/rap/etc etc., future for sure, though I would miss a lot of stuff. can I keep the album covers?

Future all the way, easy, no question. I have my memories, but am much more intrigued by the prospect of what's to come than by where I've been. I realize that this rules out a universe of old/current stuff that I haven't yet heard, but I can accept the sacrifice.

FWIW, I'd go the same way in almost any context in which this question was asked, always taking the future over the past. Would you rather live keep your past but be able to experience anything new (living forever in memory), or would you give up your past in order to experience an ongoing future? Future wins.

Would you rather live keep your past...

This is tough. But I'm pretty tempted to go for the past - for one thing it is almost certainly true that there is more music in the past than will be created in my future. And I don't buy Louis' "thingggggs can only get bettttahhhhh" argument. And if I ever get bored of this rock/pop shit then I could still spend the rest of my life getting into classical music.

Would you rather keep your past but be UNable to...

Jeezis.

in theory I want to say the future, but in practice I listen to way more old stuff than new stuff (and "old stuff" does not necessarily = stuff I've heard before, obviously)

I think I would rather give up music altogether than make this kind of choice.

cover songs & sampling

here are you guys getting this "more variety in the past"

if i listen to music from the past only, at any point i can listed to classical from the 19th century, jazz from early 20th C, reggae from mid-late 20th C, and random electronic shit from late 20th-early 21st C. If I can only listen to current music, well...

for one thing it is almost certainly true that there is more music in the past than will be created in my future

actually i ain't really so sure about this at all.

Yet another very good thread; we're doing well lately, guys and gals.

I'm taking this entirely solipsistically, like it's a sentence on me and only me and the rest of the world does as it always has, and I choose... music from the past, I think. I think there are too many things that I love and couldn't stand not being able to experience again.

choosing the past = willingly, even enthusiastically, turning your back on the world. do you hate the world that much?

the (music) world != the present. there is more to learn from the past than there is from the present, maybe you should try?

we learn far more from the present about, you know, how to exist in everyday society - pretty sure you could live a happy and fulfilled life without knowledge of history, but not without knowledge of the present

the (music) world != the present.

also you say this like it's not, like, really obvious, but it's not a particularly helpful statement in the context of the thread

To me this is like asking whether you'd prefer only medicine from the past versus only medicine from the future! Medicine has gotten so much more advanced over time and will only continue to get even more amazing as technology improves! Why would I want to be stuck with bloodletting and herbs when I can have cancer-destroying lazer beams?

You really think that medicine is the same as art? You are crazy.

if you had to choose between reading history books but not being aware of anything happening in the future, or keeping abreast of everything happening but not reading about history, which would you choose

choosing the past = willingly, even enthusiastically, turning your back on the world. do you hate the world that much?

Actually, choosing only the future is also willingly, even enthusiastically, turning your back on the world. How are you supposed to understand current events without understanding the underlying histories of them? If you chose only the future you would have a very blinkered idea of the world, and probably a much more dangerous one.

Having said that, I still wouldn't be very happy about being unable to listen to new music. Thankfully I doubt M@tt will be taking down the answers and forcing this to become reality.

"choosing the past = willingly, even enthusiastically, turning your back on the world. do you hate the world that much?"

This is nonsense and you should know better. The world ≠ the present, obviously. You must mean something else.

a lot depends on the past being defined by the music you know now vs you are still free to discover new things made in the past. if its limited to "whats known" I'd drop that for the future in a blink. i actually find periodically ditching cds/deleting mp3s very freeing.

the world as we exist in it = the present

i am aware that history is valuable and why, thanks, but i think you lose more by blocking yourself off from the world that you have to actually live in

Every good track from the past will probably get sampled in the next 2 years anyway.

i look forward to the lex not blocking out any genre of music in his future listening habits

err, shoulda been 20
xpost

I hope you guys are stoned, because there's no other excuse for this conversation going on.

i look forward to my robot girlfriend

how could you pick the past? rap has been around for a while, so it's about time for black people to invent the next genre. i will be GOD DAMNED if i never find out what it sounds like.

im assuming hurting was kidding

the world as we exist in it = the present

i am aware that history is valuable and why, thanks, but i think you lose more by blocking yourself off from the world that you have to actually live in

The thing is, your whole comparison is flawed, as you cannot simultaneously exist (and by definition you are existing in a 'now') and not exist in 'the present'. So the closest reconcilation we can get is that you are suggesting two figures - one who reads only history and does not get engaged in current events, and one who knows no history and does get involved in current events. The latter sounds more dangerous to me.

the knowledge that music is done and closed FOREVER would be a bit too grim for me to handle, despite the fact that I'd still only get to hear only a small fraction of the good shit in my lifetime. So regrettable plumping for the future it would be.

Otherwise you're suggesting someone who has killed themselves, basically.
xpost

lol metaphysical clusterfuck

I'm not stoned but I went to a planetarium today so close enough. C'mon, the world that as we exist in it isn't simply the present---for one thing, there are lots of things in "the world" that are outside of time (think of math) and for another thing, thoughts that were thought 2,500 years are still in "the world".

You mean something else. Maybe something like, those aren't in "the world" in an important way, in a way that you can change them and have power over them. But fuck that: there are planets that aren't part of my lived present but they're part of the world should I choose to think about them.

another thing about this srsly ridic argument is that it's not like when you hear a piece of music for the first time you can necessarily tell when it was recorded. obv if you choose 'past' you will know it is not 'new to the world' but it can be as new to you as anything yet to be recorded and have as much relevance to your life now in the process. sheesh.

i know certain people who almost exclusively listen to one genre, and within that genre only music from a ten or maybe thirteen year span in the past. and are picky as to what is good in that. yet the way they listen to music is, they are constantly on the search for "new" (that is, unheard) music. they find dope or at least interesting stuff all the time. and they've been doing this in some cases for ... five years? maybe more ... without being troubled by diminishing returns.

i hope people in a music forum can relate, and not view them as idiots who eat potatoes every day. probably we've all immersed ourselves in a genre to the extent that the slightest variations give us nearly as much as a whole new music.

so even in this tiny vector, it's exactly like following new music, but with probably even more joy of discovery with the increased research needed in following labels, discovering new ones, following sidemen & bit players, producers, associated acts, geographical scenes etc. plus just random cool things.

what they miss is a connection to the zeitgeist and to the wider culture around them, which is strong in popular music and presumably exists too in niche or obscure current music. that's not nothing, but how much is it? does music made in a world with iPhones in it speak to us in a more valuable way than music made in a world with Prussia in it? or is art or great entertainment "news that stays news", like ezra pound said of literature, speaking to us meaningfully about death or love or violence or Prussia.

But, no live gigs. no making music or listening to something your friends made. dud.

I just read this whole thread for the first time and I desperately want someone to make a duo of songs ala Heat Miser/Cold Miser extolling each point of view.

btw I think a lot of people make this decision subconsciously. You know how you'll visit old people's houses and they obv. quit changing the decor once their oldest kid moved out or some other unconscious checkpoint? Plenty, plenty of people just stop listening to new music at some point. I mean you can go through lots of middle-aged people's music collections & they won't have a single new thing from since they were in their 20s, or 30s, or something. I had this idea when I was a kid that people weren't "allowed" to be into music that came out once they got out of college, and that you had to sell your record collection once you got married.

I seriously cannot wait for when Lex is an old man

― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, August 7, 2008 3:13 PM (1 year ago)

won't u be dead then?

xp

― lex pretend, Thursday, August 7, 2008 3:14 PM (1 year ago)

:D :D :D

new music easily btw, basically do this already

The thing is, your whole comparison is flawed, as you cannot simultaneously exist (and by definition you are existing in a 'now') and not exist in 'the present'. So the closest reconcilation we can get is that you are suggesting two figures - one who reads only history and does not get engaged in current events, and one who knows no history and does get involved in current events. The latter sounds more dangerous to me.

― emil.y, Sunday, January 10, 2010 2:40 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

so basically, someone who is unable to act is sure to be harmless right? and someone who might act wrong is dangerous? if we're talking about politics this is potentially actually DANGEROUS, repeating past mistakes, but what's the big fucking risk i'm taking by only listening to new music? it's sad that i would never have heard pet sounds or afrika bambaata, but i'd love new music just as much--and how could i know if i did love it less?

i suspect the reason the results ended up as they did is because of the age distribution of those who voted. ilxors have a wonderful ability to continue to keep up with and love a great amount of new music, but it's unlikely they would be as emotionally to it as music they grew up with and lived with their whole lives.

*emotionally attached

Yeah, if you're 80, hard to believe you'd say new music. If so, that is very Zen. Would have been John Cage's answer until the day he died I'm sure.

he would listen to 3.33

I've enjoyed reading this thread. Don't know how I missed it before. I listen to much more newer country music, but other than country it's older music that I listen to most of them time. I love a lot of new music, but every week I discover a new album from the 60's or 70's that seems to hold my attention more than a new artist does.

I don't listen to a ton of contemporary music, but I'd still choose future-music. I feel like music 40 years from now will be pretty cool and I want in.

will you be alive?

and kickin' it

those arguing for the future don't judge music on anything other than its 'vintage'? at what stage does being drip fed great new tunes >= the stock of great music that already exists and can be delved into as a matter of fact (and as blueski pointed out, from this stock there's mountains of stuff that even the most knowledgeable won't have heard)

exactly that.

Listening to music from 'past' is not the same as 'nostalgia'

There's a lot of stuff that really bothers me on this thread, more than it should bother me, certainly. But I'm feeling calmer about the whole thing so I want to add some comments.

Among the arts, music is one of the ones which for me has the longest shelf life. I'd be very surprised if I wouldn't be capable of connecting with music from a few thousand years ago, if some were available to be heard. I think literature ages far worse than music does. All of that content is there to get in the way, all of the beliefs and just generally the cultural background which is no longer shared. Works of literature do grow more remote over time, because of that.

This also somehow relates to my confusion over some people's apparent need for a (generally social, content-related) angle to get a handle on music.

Are they living in a parallel world? Do most people not have the experience of being immediately moved by music, without having to have some sort of a story to go along with it? Much of what appeals to me about music is the way it often is "pure" emotional distillation of experience, where experience is almost simply an excuse for the stronger distillation that results.

Maybe it is a decadent approach to music that puts so much emphasis on one's individual emotional engagement, but I'm comfortable with it.

(I realize another possible explanation is that I am maybe unconsciously whipping up more of a context for things than I realize.)

Do people need a context before they can connect emotionally to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPXwnTlbCn8

or this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8jO_qSoab8

for example?

The social dimension of music just isn't one that I personally value all that much, I don't think.

As far as learning how to live in the contemporary world via contemporary music, nah, I don't see that having been much of a reality in my life anyway. Maybe I just fail as a student of the contemporary world.

The past is not the dead thing some of you would make it out to be. Music of the past isn't just a history lesson, it's potentially a very immediate, emtionally charged experience. I'd have to say I'd have been more impoverished if I had missed out on the places (new-to-me) older music has taken me over the past twenty or twenty-five years than I would if I had missed out on where music made just in that twenty-five year time period has taken me.

Also, I've had time to observe how little of the new is anything other than new in the most crudely chronological terms.

The most conciliatory thing I can say is that I'm glad I don't have to make this decision (and I admit my actual listening habits may lean more to checking out new new music than my arguments here would predict, but old habits die hard).

(I guess I'm more often in the "that content/context is getting in the way for me" camp.)

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/images/Chauvet_horses4.jpg

http://peaceclog.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/picasso2.jpg

thanks for those posts, my approach is quite similar. music needs to hit me hard first before i get interested in the context. for example i hardly ever listen to lyrics in the beginning but when a piece has gripped me i want to know more and try to listen carefully to the words, have a closer look at the cover, try to find out more about he background etc. may i ask you a personal question, rudipherous? how old are you? that eastern tune does indeed charm me immediately but somehow i assume that it has to do with the exotic nature of the music. i have listened to greek, turkish and middle eastern music for a long time but it still feels very out of the ordinary, almost mystic. that reminds me of the calls of the muezzins in istanbul after the night has broken. it is overwhelmingly mesmerizing.

I'm old: 44. I've gotten to feel at home enough with Greek and middle eastern music that it doesn't feel primarily exotic to me. It feels more less other and more like myself. (Not 100% or all the time, but in general.)

this is such an easy choice for me -- def future music

still the past. the present already sounds like a pale, compressed, unfocussed image of the past, the future will carry even less surprises. but in the past there is still so much new stuff to discover.

i hate to say it but eeyore's kind of got a point

I very often think about this thread, and my answer is still the same

Who knew the lex and I would emphatically align on the biggest of questions lol

People are interpreting "the past" to include music recorded a long time ago but which they haven't heard, but I would actually choose "from this moment on you can never listen to music you haven't already heard" over "all the music you've ever heard in your life is now barred to you forever"

That might be a nice compromise, yeah

I think it's p apparent that anyone that picked "THE FUTURE" in 2008 would have fucked up