-
“Figures
like Robert Opie and Alex Shear build private museums of bygone packaging and
consumer goods from eras that seem halcyon from the present’s vantage point.
Shear describes his collection of fifties ephemera as an ark preserving ‘the
soul of America’.” Pg.93
-
“…the
fixation of on music as an aid to remembering, or as a form of memory
preservative, is revealing. Collection and recollection are entwined.” Pg.117
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“it’s like
the halls of residence all over again…’ he writes (Dylan Jones writing on the
iPod). Except that the social aspect is completely absent. Instead of the
chance encounters and risky collisions, the friction and epiphany, the iPod
offers by way of compensation the solitary thrill of total mastery.” Pg. 117
-
“This depreciation
of the value of music observed by Dr North and his team can ultimately be
traced back to the shift from analogue to digital. First music was reified,
turned into a thing (vinyl records, analogue tapes) you could buy, store, keep
under your own personal control. Then music was ‘liquefied’, turned into data
that could be streamed, carried anywhere, transferred between different
devices. With the MP3, music became a devalued currency in two senses: there
was just too much of it (as with hyper-inflation, banks printing too much
money), but also because of the way it flowed into people’s lives like a
current or fluid. This made music start to resemble a utility (like water or
electricity) as opposed to an artistic experience whose temporality you
subjected yourself to. Music has become a continuous supply that is fatally
susceptible to discontinuity.
In a
sense, digital music has simply taken the inherent tendency of recorded music
to its logical limit. All recorded music, analogue as well as digital, has the
effect of desanctifying and desocialising the experience of music, because what
was once an event becomes repeatable and what was once collective becomes
privatised.” Pg. 122
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“The live
music resurgence must be due to a semi-conscious craving for the unrepeatable
event, something you have to be there to experience. While recorded music
became free and thus valueless, live music rose in value because it wasn’t
something you could copy or share. It was exclusive. The audience might even
get a sense of itself (potentially at least) as a community. Part of the appeal
of live music is that it enforces a fully immersed state of concentrated
listening through the loudness and enveloping nature of the sound, but also
because if you’ve paid through the nose for an experience you’re probably going
to make an effort to pause, rewind or save it for later. Live music not only
insists on, it imposes undivided attention and uninterrupted listening. To
today’s option-overloaded music fan, that kind of subjugation feels like
liberation.” Pg. 124
