Hamburger music for the Millennial, Gen Z and Gen Alpha …..
How different things are now from when I first started listening to music.
We live in a time when we are bombarded by distractions and life is busier than ever. Long work days, constant streams of social media and news, assault of your senses by sound, adverts, video clips, messages, likes, dislikes, online interaction, and so on. We feel like we should be constantly doing something or we are wasting time … that’s the impact of technology on our lives in the past 10 to 15 years. It’s incredible to think that the smartphone as we know it now has only really been part of our daily lives for the last 10 years or so. But it’s changed our lives completely, like an insidious virus that has eaten into our time, our souls and our minds. We’ve forgotten how to unplug already. We are constantly on the treadmill.
Is it any wonder that the art of listening is being lost?
When was the last time that you sat down to listen to an album by an artist or composer?
I mean listen. Not listening while doing the housework, or while chatting online, or scrolling though social media, answering messages, working from home or being otherwise engaged.
I remember a time, not that long ago, when getting a new album was special. Taking the time out to actually sit down, in front of the HiFi, or with a pair of headphones and just listen. Fully concentrated on the music and nothing else, often with eyes closed. It was so much more rewarding.
I used to do it a lot; most of my life, in fact … then it went away … and I have been trying to get it back, but it’s not as easy as you think, once you have lost the ability to do it. It becomes an effort to sit still and pay attention without reaching for the phone or some other additional input. I have been making a concerted effort to make sure I do take out time to properly listen when I buy an album these days. Sometimes you have to put effort into listening properly to really understand the music and the get the most from it. The artist has often poured their creativity, life and soul into the writing and recording, you should give it the attention it deserves, shouldn’t you?
But … there are problems with listening these days ..
Most of the truly great albums that have resonated with me and have become part of the fabric of my life have been albums from those years when I really used to LISTEN. In the last 10 to 15 years I can’t remember too many albums that have stayed with me as much as before that. Is it also that the music just isn’t as good these days?
I do think there is plenty of great music out there but it’s often buried and hard to find among the din of mediocrity, YouTube background music, novelty cover versions and the proliferation of YouTube videos of online 8 year old copyists that can play Eruption by Van Halen, or some other streaming sensation … impressive once maybe, but … Yawn.
An album is also not something that the younger generation really listen to. It’s a song, a single, a lyric video, a soundbite. What does an album even mean to the younger generation?
Another problem is that music production has devolved, in my opinion. Many of the great studios are gone and replaced by bedrooms, project studios and sampled instruments. Not that great recordings can’t be made in project studios these days, but the art of engineering and mixing is also being lost. 90% of what I hear these days is truly awful in terms of production and engineering. Generic sausage factory, sausage compressed, production line music that has had every bit of life or originality wrung from it. In some genres every album is starting to sound the same … the same guitar sounds from the same pre-sets, the same plugins and effects, the same mastering, the same compression and lifelessness of the mix; produced for the lowest common denominator of cheap Bluetooth speakers, crappy headphones, smartphone and laptop speakers. On better audio equipment you can instantly hear how terrible it sounds. But who has a proper HiFi set up these days under the age of 40? I am guessing not many. Some of the productions I have played on my HiFi in recent years have ranged from depressingly bad to almost laughable. It’s as though the artists or producers themselves haven’t even listened to the final mix and master, or, even worse, they actually think it sounds ok!
This is another reason it’s getting hard to properly listen. If the sound on good equipment is not appealing and worthwhile then why invest time, and money, into listening properly? Why bother with expensive HiFi equipment? Some productions sound so bad that it is pretty much impossible to sit through them. There has been many a great album ruined for me by terrible production in the past 20 odd years.
If I listen back to albums from before the mid 90’s they invariably sound so much better than what we have now. Some of the Jazz recordings from the 50’s are astounding. The 70’s and 80’s where the focus was on the quality of the sound as much as the music. Recordings with real dynamics and life. Where are the great sounding albums these days? Where is the next Spirit of Eden, or Dark Side Of The moon coming from?
So where do we go from here? I don’t know … really I don’t. I hope that things eventually come full circle back to a focus on sound quality and great production as well as great original music. But I do fear that this will never happen in this increasingly digital world.
Answers on a postcard …
/Adrian