music and aging
Nov. 28th, 2009 01:21 pmYesterday, on the bus, I halfway listened to a couple of college kids flirting by discussing what music they listened to. And I had this sudden realization: the Art of Noise, one of those acts that changed my idea about what music could be, is now further in the past than the Beatles were when I was introduced to them in my teens.
This made me feel old. Not horrible about being old, just... amazed at where the time's gone.
And nowadays, if you haven't heard either of those acts, it's trivial to hit up the torrents to find a collection of all their albums. You can have the complete career of almost any moderately popular recording artist in a matter of days. We're just swimming in this stuff, and I really look forwards to the eclectic music that'll be produced by some kid who's absorbing all kinds of crazy corners of music right now.
You can do the same with other media, too. I'm watching a progress bar crawl as I copy a huge pile of Matt Howarth's comics to my own machine; I'll get to re-read some of this stuff for the first time in years - my collection of Savage Henry is one of the things I still miss out of my hurricane-destroyed library. I snagged a torrent of every single Asterix album a while back when I was playing with reskinning a card game. Just about anything from the past sixty years or so is out there on the net, somewhere. Maybe not in pristine condition, maybe not in the resolution you'd get if you found a physical copy - but it's good enough to have a real taste of it, and for the ideas and influence to persist.
There's still the moral issue of properly reimbursing creators for the time they spent, of course. I'm on both sides of the fence here. But, geeze, we swim in this ocean of culture and it gets thicker and thicker all the time. What can we build out of it? Where can we go next?
This made me feel old. Not horrible about being old, just... amazed at where the time's gone.
And nowadays, if you haven't heard either of those acts, it's trivial to hit up the torrents to find a collection of all their albums. You can have the complete career of almost any moderately popular recording artist in a matter of days. We're just swimming in this stuff, and I really look forwards to the eclectic music that'll be produced by some kid who's absorbing all kinds of crazy corners of music right now.
You can do the same with other media, too. I'm watching a progress bar crawl as I copy a huge pile of Matt Howarth's comics to my own machine; I'll get to re-read some of this stuff for the first time in years - my collection of Savage Henry is one of the things I still miss out of my hurricane-destroyed library. I snagged a torrent of every single Asterix album a while back when I was playing with reskinning a card game. Just about anything from the past sixty years or so is out there on the net, somewhere. Maybe not in pristine condition, maybe not in the resolution you'd get if you found a physical copy - but it's good enough to have a real taste of it, and for the ideas and influence to persist.
There's still the moral issue of properly reimbursing creators for the time they spent, of course. I'm on both sides of the fence here. But, geeze, we swim in this ocean of culture and it gets thicker and thicker all the time. What can we build out of it? Where can we go next?
