because of technology

alieNDN

i think what we are living right now is the best period of music EVER. let's ignore the copyright infringement thing for a second. right now, we all have access to the genius of music throughout history..with soulseek etc. something inside me wonders, what would miles davis, jimi hendrix, frank zappa, < insert whoever u appreciate that was dead 10 or more years ago > sound like if they had a resource like soulseek. what im trying to say is that there is now an aural encyclopedia of every form of genre in history's past and most of the world i would say has access to it....this leads to my conclusion, that the geniuses of today have an incredible resource of hearing good music. of course, what made a lot of geniuses of the past is the fact that they had to endure ridiculous limitations. in this day and age, where we basically have NO LIMITATIONS, can we produce something that sounds off the chain? it is tougher than if you have limitations if u think about it. ok, no conclusion, but id like to hear what u say, or what images.google.jpgs you want to convey. peace

parsec

no joke but I'm at work right now and I just sold a J Lo cd right before I read your post, carry on.

alieNDN

i read my post as if i was someone else.

response: its friday, you've drank a bit, cool.

but u have a point there alieNDN, a lot genius in the past was founded through extracting something through certain limitations and making the best of it. nowadays where we have no limitations, ie. people that can't paint can be "artists" with photoshop, or "producers with fruit loops, where does that leave us...hmmm. i just wonder if people these days can be in enclyopedias in a valid manner.

alieNDN

no joke but I'm at work right now and I just sold a J Lo cd right before I read your post, carry on.

i'm a fan of mariah carrey ballads, and im not being sarcastic. i dont know what that means, but its a fact. "thank god i found you", "vision of love", "4th of july", "can't let go", "without you" are my joints. seriously.

handcorkscrew

alien, BIG cosign on summing that up.

I love the argument against modern music consumption: "oh, I can't get an original pressing of blahblah for 5 dollars". Yeah, but you can walk into a store or mail order things that you couldn't even find original pressings of back in the 70s. It's a global marketplace. You can check out turkish prog rock, UK jazz, african folk music, whatever. You think you could even find something like Demon Fuzz when it came out?

I also don't personally feel that unlimited resources equals a greater amount of good music being created. A lot of the music we're all into is a lot about the limitations it was created under.

Personally I feel the musical geniuses of today can make music that caters to their more crazed, 21st-century lifestyle. But it doesn't sound like the older music... it's more and more about technology and less and less to do with traditional musical structure.

dCastillo

having access to everything can be just as bad as it is good for the geniuses of today.
overload = shorter attention spans. less focus. diluted output.

it's nice to hear something from a well rounded mind though, but I don't think that the information age is going to breed as many of them as you'd wish. As much as it breeds, it can equally destroy.

also. i'd rather hear sounds from a genius that has had absolutely no formal exposure to what's out there--somebody so isolated from everything that's going on, than hear the product of one who's studied other works way too damn much. that's quite sad aint it?

johmbolaya

Even with wide access to almost everything, it's still not everything. But I like to listen to as much as I can. Like record collecting, you can use eBay or GEMM as a quick way to pick up what you want, when you want, but there is still something about making the effort to find it. Most of us are probably a dying breed, or as Rise Robots Rise once said, "the last of the tribe". I mean, I was someone who looked in the back of "Rolling Stone" magazine and did record searches, that made me familiar with rarity and whatnot. Or ordering catalogs, looking through Goldmine, and scanning every small line, one by one.

Would the music of Miles, Zappa, Coltrane, or Ellington have been different? All of them had humble beginnings, and when they had an opportunity, they seeked it, and I don't mean Soulseek. Coltrane became very aware of Indian classical music, enough to name his son Ravi. Ellington observed the world and put that into his music. I just read a book by Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland, and Marsalis talks about consuming not music, but interaction with people, and putting those emotions he sees, and the emotions he feels, into his music.

I think with the access of the internet, and maybe I think of this more as I get older, we are able to see how connected we all are, through our differences. Yeah, call that a cliche, but while I have downloaded my share of "illegal" MP3's, I also like going to random websites and being able to download free MP3's just because, to take a chance. I think as long as there is inspiration and the need to create, it doesn't matter what the technology (or lack of it) is.