Slow Listening

Related to the previous post, I read Rob Horning's column over at PopMatters earlier this week, Projects for Paying Attention to Attention, in which he notes another blogger who sets aside blocks of time to confine his listening to artists who begin with a specific letter of the alphabet. Horning writes:

I’m sympathetic to the desperate feeling of being overwhelmed by all the music that’s accessible to us, but I’m not sure that setting up arbitrary limits is the best solution. Ideally, there would be something at least semi-organic about how we pursue pleasure and pay attention. Is that the impasse we have reached, where we have to force ourselves to pay attention to the things we intended to do for fun? ...

That said, my arbitrary listening approach has to do with waging a campaign to play every song I have on my iPod at least once. It’s a Sisyphean task and a bit joyless too. It certainly isn’t what I want music in my life for—to be the arbitrary yardstick for how much entertainment-industry product I’ve compelled myself to consume.

I'd respond that it's only joyless if you consume albums and mp3s without regard to your actual taste. I too feel the need to hear everything I acquire into my iTunes library, but surely there's nothing but pleasure in that, no? Aside from the occasional bum album? (After all, you don't have to right-click-and-save every mp3 you listen to on the internet.) 

Music should never feel like a task (though I admit that I forget this myself from time to time) unless you're a paid critic. Perhaps Horning views it as joyless because he's counting all the promos and solicitations he gets as a PopMatters staffer and freelancer. (I'm just guessing.) That seems to be the lament of Michelangelo Matos, who started a project for 2009 called the Slow Listening Movement. From his inaugural post, back in December:

I need to clean out my ears. So from January to November 2009, I'm embarking on a kind of purification rite. In that time, I'm only allowing myself to download one MP3 at a time; the next MP3 can only be downloaded once I listen to the first one. With CDs, if I buy one, I have to listen to it all before I buy another, and before I am allowed to rip any of it to iTunes. There will surely be exceptions--CDs that suck, that I can't deal with playing all the way through--but hearing a bad album end to end is, if nothing else, a learning experience, so I plan to stick by this rule as much as I can.

Matos's project is a little different from what Horning does, since Matos's goal is not only to focus on what he's listening to but also to curb his rate of consumption (it's doing one but not the other which likely makes the task joyless). In either case, it speaks to the more and more common dillema that it takes a lot of effort to keep up with one's music consumption these days.

We all probably have our own ways of keeping up. Matos goes into the minutae of making sense of all his new acquisitions through iTunes playlists, etc. That's something I do too. I have a "2009" smart playlist, which is simply anything that was released in 2009; then I have a smart playlist for "my listening hours," which gathers anything whatsoever that has been added to my library within a three month period. Come April 1, that playlist will will be wiped clean and I'll begin it anew. I find that helps me hear everything I or my brilliant wife add to the collection. Shuffling that playlist is kind of fun, too. Everything is new to me, but hearing it all out of order makes certain tracks by certain artists jump out at me in a fresh way. (To get even more anal: from that smart playlist, I have two subset playlists: "my listening albums" and "my listening downloads," separating out the stray singles and full-length records.) Tracking my listening habits in three-month increments is my way of, as Matos describes in a more recent post, "carving a narrative" out of my listening habits.

I forget sometimes that most—many, at least—of the bloggers and consumers of music I follow (and often interact with) online are professional critics, or have at least entered into the game by establishing relationships with publicists and treating their blogs as pseudo-professional sources for new music and/or news content, or writing regularly for sites like Pitchfork, Idolator, etc. Sometimes I get caught up in trying to keep up with the conversation. I need to hear the Vivian Girls! I need to know when Merriweather Post Pavilion leaks so I can stay on top of the dialogue! Even though the truth is I don't really care about the Vivian Girls, nor do I have time to seek out leaks or bittorent sites. I do have a full-time job, after all, and my title is not "music critic." Honestly, as much as I think on and obsess over and listen to and write about and opine upon music, I think it's a bit of a blessing that I'm nothing more than an amatuer.* I do have the luxury of only listening to what I want to listen to, of not feeling the need to spend an hour or more with an album just so I can keep up with "the conversation." I doubt I'm alone, though, when I speak of the occasional feeling that I'm not keeping up—not doing my utmost as a consumer of music. 

Professional or not, there's truth to what both Matos and Horning are getting at. Surfing music blogs can sometimes be the equivalent of shopping hungry. It all goes in the cart and a lot of it rots before you get to it. My most fulfilling trips to the grocery store usually begin with a trawl through a cookbook or two, putting a little thought into my diet, my palate, my cravings. Matos says in one of his posts, "even in my usual multitasking sort of way one thing I'm finding is that the more premeditation that goes into an album or MP3, the keener my standards are for it." I think that's a sentiment worth highlighting. To show a little premeditation, to slow down, to focus on the music at hand. To listen.

*That's not to say my inbox doesn't fill up with emails from random bands and publicists. I'm solicited daily but I ignore nearly every request. Incidentally, I've always found it hilarious that I didn't start getting solicited by anyone until I did a massive four-part anti-hype-blog rant a little over a year ago. That's what put me on publicists' radar!

Comments

[Richard]

It's funny, I also felt I needed to keep up with "the conversation", though with a full-time non-music-critic job, there was no way I could realistically expect to.

Now, even though I almost never acquire any new music, I am still overwhelmed by the sheer mass of my collection, even with the vast majority of it still in storage. Since I enjoy a wide variety of musical styles (becoming aware that I actually liked some job chart pop was what ultimately doomed me), and since many of my favorite albums took me many listens before I liked them at all, I am reluctant to pull the plug on stuff, so I still have a wide body of potentially iffy songs on my iPod, etc...

[scott pgwp]

I would probably purge my library of stuff more often, to keep things manageable, but a certain brilliant member of my household has an irrational need to hold onto everything once it's in there. Of course, I'm the guy who used most of his eMusic subscription this month buying shit I sold ten years ago... so maybe it's more rational than I give her credit.

[wifey]

people who wear glass slippers shouldn't walk on rocks, you know...

I love that you take issue with wanting to keep something that takes up no physical space, yet you insist on keeping every crappy paperback edition of every book you've read since college. ahem. you are real lucky that i just so happen to be a book whore too.

[scott pgwp]

Hey - Paul Auster's Book of Illusions doesn't come up on shuffle to ruin my day!