Szung Szongs: What Is Love?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X1URP5eg6I&feature=youtu.be
Right now I’m listening to the new Cloud Nothings album, "Attack on Memory," and I’m enjoying it. This is a shallow statement to make because I’ve only listened to the first song at this point, and I’m probably just projecting the fact that the album has garnered great reviews. Metacritic says the album has “universal acclaim.” Because this is a blog, here’s aYouTube linkto the first song of which I speak.
But the real shallowness, one might posit, is that I’ve never listened to Cloud Nothings before, but I am already mentally preparing myself to be a big fan of their album and by extension claim to be a fan of them as a band. Wait! I haven’t listened to any of their preceding albums! What’s wrong with me? Is this what crotchety old news analysts might say are my warped tendencies as a member of the Facebook generation, unable to develop deep relationships with anyone, instead developing insignificant relationships with tons of people? Am I afraid of the commitment that comes with falling in love with a band’s catalog from top to bottom?
So what’s wrong with me? I’m going to go structural here. Spotify is what’s wrong with me.
When I bought my first album ever, "Big Willie Style," in third or fourth grade, you probably couldn’t have caught me dead referring to this masterpiece an “album.” All I knew was “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” (my indie cred is quickly deflating as I write this), “Men in Black,” “Miami” and “Just the Two of Us.” Classics. And I didn’t even know that Mr. Smith still had "Will 2K" up his sleeve.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYzBseUVEhc&feature=player_embedded
Outside of random Smash Mouth singles and whatever came on the radio, not much happened between then and, say, seventh grade, when I started listening to the album "Toxicity" by System of a Down beginning to end. Albums began to carry meaning, and I would devour every album a band had to offer as soon as I learned of its kickass existence. Rage Against the Machine couldn’t hide a release from me if they tried during my freshman and sophomore years of high school. I learned in junior year that I was supposed to cry my way through the rest of my adolescence, so I ransacked torrent websites for all the Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes albums and EPs they were worth. Staring down college, I realized I needed to get quirky, fun and unique fast if I wanted to make any alternative friends, so I was all over Sufjan Stevens’ entire catalog. He now has 3,475 plays on my Last.fm account.
Now I have perhaps less time for music and a much greater appetite for diversifying my tastes, or at least the array of bands I listen to. I fall in love with "David Comes to Life" without ever having heard of "The Chemistry of Common Life." PJ Harvey’s first seven studio albums? Who needs ’em!? Wait, do I really like No Age if all I know is "Everything in Between?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fv7uOphWw8&feature=player_embedded
Am I a total poser? Maybe. And there are definitely still plenty of other artists I've become obsessed with, whose work I devour. But with the rise of streaming music services that can finally accommodate my ever-steadfast fidelity to the album as an art form (listening to single songs on YouTube never quite cut it for me), I no longer have to buy or download music to check it out. This means that I’m no longer stuck with an album, feeling obligated to justify the purchase or data-wasting download by listening repeatedly until the album, and then the artist’s entire catalog, becomes my favorite thing in the world. I can live at the whim of each new scintillating album review, and I often get so lost in the frenzy of new releases that I neglect to understand how an artist’s music progressed to that recent LP. Dont get me wrong, I love the opportunities Spotify and other services offer me to explore more music than ever before. It's just, you know, different.
I just finished that Cloud Nothings album. Pretty good stuff.
Have you heard of that band Bleached?
http://youtu.be/--PGy31IeI4