Where Did All The Music Go?

Alright, let me clarify here. Music hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, there’s more music around today than ever before. Anyone can get an audience these days, whether you’re another bubblegum clone or some guy sitting at a computer idolizing Aphex Twin. A regular tsunami of tunes drenches me every time I pop open my laptop. I have over ten thousand songs without owning more than two hundred CDs. Every single step of the musical process has become so ridiculously easy…that is, every part of the commercial aspect. The production, selling, purchasing, and thievery of music are as simple as can be, thanks to those newfangled computers. You don’t need a label; just put your album on Myspace. You don’t need a record shop; just get a decent torrent site. And what’s the only thing that hasn’t gotten easier with this new wave of technology? The art of songwriting.

Had you talked to me last year, I would have said that in August, I would have listened to more excellent albums that I could have gotten my hands on. Sometimes it kills to be an optimist. But just looking at the lineup this year…Arcade Fire, the National, Wilco, Dinosaur Jr, the Shins, Modest Mouse, Interpol, Smashing Pumpkins, Bloc Party, Spoon, the New Pornographers, Queens of the Stoneage, White Stripes, Porcupine Tree, Stars, Arctic Monkeys, the list seems endless. And some of those albums were excellent (Arcade Fire, the National, Dinosaur Jr, Spoon) but the rest? They ranged from good to bland.

Criticisms aside, with so much music floating around these days and the ease with which such music can float from the creator to the listener, why is it that I can’t honestly say that there’s been one record this year that’s blown my mind? Where’s this year’s Return to Cookie Mountain, Boys and Girls in America, or Come On! Feel the Illinoise? For that matter, where’s this generation’s Nevermind, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, Zeppelin IV, Dark Side of the Moon, or Revolver, where is that brilliant album that nearly everyone can toss into their stereo and feel as if they’re experiencing not just music but something with a greater feel and scope than ears and speakers? The album that hits at the hearts and minds of not just the hardcore who lurk around music blogs waiting for the latest leaks, but the mainstream as well? It might be ridiculous to expect something remarkable to come out in the first eight months of the year, but did you see the lineup hat was in the previous paragraph? One would have been foolish not to expect a masterpiece.

Perhaps, because indie has become so big, with Modest Mouse and the Shins debuting at number one on the charts (despite the dying CD format, it’s still something) and with so many artists latching onto major labels nowadays maybe it’s just the hype machine that has led me to such disappointment this summer. When you’re going to stereogum every day, when you go to hype machine and can’t help but grabbing that leaked track off of so and so’s newest album, when the album itself has become a disjointed assortment of tracks rarely held together by a singular emotion or theme (just because the songs sound similar doesn’t mean they’re necessarily ‘together’), isn’t a bit of the magic lost?

Not to be an old sentimentalist, since I’m not particularly old or sentimental, but there’s still something to be said for going to an old music shop and sifting through dozens of CDs trying to find that long-forgotten EP that you just have to own, or that out-of-print classic that everyone has recommended to you. Sure, going on iTunes and buying an album certainly makes you a customer and a purchaser of music, but do you down the music? There’s nothing physical there, you can’t hold mp4s and admire the album art. Buying the actual album as opposed to downloading it brings a certain amount of risk to it. In fact, for many, it contains too much risk. Much of the appeal for me lies not in having the album spoiled, instead, it’s like a virgin tomb, the legacy of a forgotten Pharaoh, and you’re either rewarded with a ridiculous amount of gold, or some sort of curse. A friend of mine and I once made a habit of going to Borders (the only place nearby that sold music that wasn’t Wal-Mart) every Tuesday or so to actually purchase an album. One week, he bought Stadium Arcadium and I bought St. Elsewhere. Of course, we all know who got the better album (Chili Pepper fans can leave at this point) but we still laugh about it until this day. Listening to Stadium Arcadium during the car ride, not knowing a single track off of the album save for Dani California, it gave the mediocre, bloated, and often stupid misstep a sort of bizarre charm, a charm that wouldn’t have existed if I had just nabbed it off of some illegitimate website. When you buy an album, you invest in the album, and if it’s good, you appreciate it more…if it’s bad, you appreciate those good discs in your collection with all that much more intensity. Everyone remembers the first album they bought…no one remembers the first album they downloaded.

I guess it’s those albums you discover with little to no hype, which completely blindside you, which have the greatest effect nowadays, since there really isn’t a such thing as an ‘event’ album that gets huge media coverage anymore, and since many of the artists that were once at the cutting edge of creativity have lost some of their luster with few artists genius enough to step up and take their place (Jack White? Rock god? Please) it’s those albums that you go into with no pretenses that are the ones that please the most. When I first listened to the National, Hold Steady, and Sufjan Stevens, I knew next to nothing about any of them, just that there was some buzz attached to them and there was a vague memory of someone I knew speaking well about them.

But nothing like that has happened so far this year. The closest thing to that has been Blitzen Trapper’s latest. If anything, this year has been one filled with disappointments both in regards to a lack of quality and a deceptive illusion of quality. Zeitgeist? Mediocre, a commercial album with no soul. An album that was mostly panned. But Feist and Of Montreal? Two acts whose albums were nearly unanimously praised to high heaven? Neither were anything groundbreaking. Feist’s voice isn’t even all that good, whose best song is only great when mixed with Daft Punk, and Of Montreal is a band that tosses out two or three songs on each album that are brilliant, but the rest are just a mishmash of eccentric pretension that blogs and message board goons gobble up.

Maybe my standards are set too high. I am, after all, the guy who came out of The Bourne Ultimatum thinking, “Meh…it could have been better.” And I was honestly ridiculously excited about this year’s musical possibilities. I’m not quite sure whether or not it has to do with artistic difficulties, heightened expectations, a general weariness, the declining bee population, alterations to the arctic ice caps, I dunno what it is. All I know is that I can’t help but look at a 2007 playlist and think, in a monotone, “Oh…that’s nice.” Well, maybe not that bad. But when one expects perfection, anything less is a bummer.

-Morgan