What makes "old" music more appealing to you than contemporary music?
I would adjust this to say that more âoldâ music is appealing to me than contemporary music; itâs not a binary and you donât have to choose one or the other. That being said, there are many reasons my tastes often run towards last century. At the risk of inviting the usual strange disdain, here are the main ones:Â
Production: Back when we only had eight-track recording you couldnât stitch a song together from a thousand individually perfect digital moments; you had to play it through and get creative about how you were going to use those eight tracks. The results are much more human, much more organic; if Led Zeppelin had used a click track on âRock and Rollâ it wouldnât speed up the way it does, and thatâs partly what makes the song so awesome. Music which is technically correct all the way through often bores me. Iâm not looking for precision. Iâd much rather have dynamics and excitement and four dudes so revved up by their music that they canât help playing faster and faster, consistency be damned.
Albums:Â Because hardly anyone listens to whole albums anymore, many artists are (understandably) less concerned with making an actual album than turning out ten de facto singles and packaging them together as an album. I like having the sonic narrative of a whole record, with ups and down and highs and lows and different emotional shades and tones. Just because it goes up to eleven doesnât mean you want to be at level eleven all the time. More on this here, and I do hope you read that post because there are a lot of further thoughts on music in the digital age.
The way we listen: In the shift from analog to digital weâve lost a lot, and I donât just mean liner notes and cover art bigger than a postage stamp (though I do prefer to have a tactile relationship with my media). An mp3 is basically a super-diluted and radically compressed version of what you have on a record, or even a CD, because less content requires less space; the smaller you make it, more sonic detail you have to lose. Iâm not going to get into the technical minutiae, but in order to reduce a song to mp3 size, some engineers figured out an algorithm for what they could cut from it that the average listener isnât going to notice (if youâre interested in this, Simon Reynolds does a good job explaining it in his book Retromania). For the way most of us listen to music these daysâon the go, with whatever crappy earbuds came with our phone, or in the background through our laptop speakers while weâre doing something elseâthatâs perfectly sufficient. Because a lot of people under a certain age have never really heard music any other way, they donât even realize that there are whole layers of their songs that theyâre not hearing. However, if you have any familiarity with analog audio, mp3s and other digital formats sound flat and lifeless by comparison. Can you still get good sound with high-quality files and a good stereo setup? Of course. But is it ever going to match vinyl? Nope. More than this, though, I prefer analog audioâand music made expressly for analog audio because nothing else existed at the timeâbecause itâs a much more intimate and immersive listening experience. Take a song you think you know from five years of listening to it on your iPhone and play it on vinyl on a good stereo and I guarantee you will hear colors and tones and textures you never heard before. Thereâs no such thing as a soundstage with mp3s; in digital music, everything is necessarily smashed together. LPs have room to breathe. And because analog audio is so much more dynamic, itâs much more compelling to listen to. Music made before smartphones and the internet and 5,000 channels of satellite TV is not music for multitasking. Itâs music that demands and absorbs all your attention. It refuses to just be background noise. Thatâs the kind of listening experience I love and want: one that is active, not passive. When was the last time you sat down and listened to an entire album all the way through without doing anything else at the same time? Good music in a good medium demands that.Â
These are the generic, qualitative reasons. And obviously, yes, there are exceptions; there are contemporary artists and albums that still manage to tick all these boxes, and yes, I do buy and listen to new stuff as well as old. And yes, there is old music that totally sucks. But (in my opinion) how and why we make music has changed in ways not always for the better. If youâre at all interested in this digital/analog dichotomy, I highly recommend taking a look at Damon Kurkowskiâs book The New Analog; itâs a short, fascinating read thatâs easy to understand even if you know nothing about audio, high-end or otherwise.Â
Finally, I have to add that the biggest reason I mostly listen to music made forty years ago or more is that itâs just what I like, and I canât give you a neat little reason why. Sure, some of it has to do with my broader cultural and academic interests in the 1960s-â70s, but my love of music and my love of history are mutually constitutive, and art and logic donât always overlap. I love what I love, and that doesnât mean I think everybody elseâs music is trash or they have bad taste if it doesnât align with mine. Music is like literature: variety is exactly what makes it so fantastic. Listen and let listen.Â
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