Nomad
Posts: 311
Joined: July 2007
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I'm very much a member of the CD generation. I'm highly skeptical of the claims of vinyl superiority. I'm willing and indeed interested in carrying out a test sometime to see if I can hear the difference, but I've made my decision to stick with the digital world for practical matters. I need a sound system that can fit in my pocket and plug into earphones, and also a medium that can fit into the sound system (factory spec, nothing fancy about it) in my car. Perhaps if I had an audiophile buddy I might find myself spending all my time basking in the high end sound and I might ultimately make the transition myself.. but for now I get my music the new fangled digital way.
This thread has gotten me to look back through my collection of CDs that I've converted to mp3 (or AAC, or OGG) format for my mp3 player. I'm currently listening to the soundtrack to the movie Heavy Metal. Specifically, at the moment I've got Grand Funk Railroad on, playing Queen Bee.
But lately I haven't really been listening to much. I'm kind of on a musical low point. I'm both SEVERELY annoyed at the behavior of the RIAA and the labels supporting it, and also frustrated by a lack of quality music coming out from them. I've enacted a most likely futile personal boycott of everything produced by any company that contributes to the RIAA. It's not really that big a deal since I'm hard pressed to find anything new that I'm into anyway. I've got hundreds of CDs from an earlier, voracious musical consumption period, but I'm hungry for something new.
BT (the artist) could probably break my will and get me to abandon my boycott by just coming out with a new album that includes a song he's performed live that I've heard through youtube. It's terribly distorted, but it leaves me positively drooling for a chance to hear a proper version of it. The song is Mad World, originally by Tears for Fears but more recently redone in a minimalist style for the movie Donnie Darko and then popularized in a commercial for a video game.
Instead he comes out with a minimalist CD/DVD thing.. why does he taunt me so?
If I may explain, I write fiction (mostly science fiction) as a hobby. I do it in a stupid, withdrawn sort of way in that I've never shown anyone 99% of what I've written. Like I said, it's a hobby, I do it for my own amusement. But I need music for it, everything I write is fueled by the music I'm listening to at the time. I have one story that I desperately want to make a movie out of, if nothing else just so I can use another BT song as the song that starts playing just at the end of the movie. I hear the song and I can visualize exactly how the ending visuals would occur, to me the song has the visual cues embedded within it.
With my current musical low point my writing has also ground to a stop. It's a REALLY annoying feeling.. like creative constipation. Hmm.. and music is my laxative.. yeah.. that's.. unpleasant.. I think of it more like a performance enhancing drug. Exciting new songs open up new ideas to me.
Anyway, if we're going to be mentioning favored artists all I can really say is that I have a weak spot for almost anything from the 80s. Especially the pop and techno-pop of the era. Level 42, Toto, Bruce Hornsby, Howard Jones, Glass Tiger, Wang Chung, Journey, New Order, Boston..
And then I'm also a big electronic music devotee, so I should also add The Prodigy, Orbital, Apollo 440, Daft Punk (almost exclusively Discovery, I don't really care for their other albums), and I guess I'll wrap that category up with William Orbit.
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