How to get hooked to a song in an era of music abundance

We can rephrase the above question as 'how to derive the maximum out of your music listening experience in the digital era.'
I came up with this question when I realized how often I have been listening to songs from the 80s and 90s lately, despite the fact that there are plenty of musicians bringing out their original compositions and unique covers these days. So, why this urge to go back in time and listen to those old pieces?

Initially, I thought it could be because the old ones were better than today’s songs. That was silly and too easy a conclusion to form. But, the actual reason was that I was seeking for familiarity as it cajoles and comforts me and I am sure many of us seek that from the songs we listen to. Going by this logic, we can derive a few facts about music industry and music listening experience in general: 

“1. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now.
Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.”

— Seth Godin

2. When we listen to a particular song, our brains are wired to seek for familiarity first. 

3. Repetitive listening is the key to understanding a song and derive the maximum out of it.

I want to emphasize point no: 3 in this blog post. In this era of music abundance, when we are busy discovering new songs every minute of our online life, how do we actually get to listen to a particular piece of music repetitively.

To get hooked on a song we need to introduce a constraint deliberately to our listening experience. One proven limitation is to create a mixtape. That is the primary reason we still go back to songs in the 80s and the 90s. There was a constraint in discovering new songs in the analog era regarding cost, availability, and access. But, not anymore.

Here is a mixtape I tried to create for some of my own songs for your repetitive listening experience.

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Presence, not productivity

Two weeks ago, my husband and I went to experience a live musical gig organized by the local chapter of Sofar Sounds in Milwaukee. It was our first time with Sofar Sounds, and we were mighty impressed by the whole concept. This initiative was started by two people, who couldn't hear the music in a loud pub. In the big picture, Sofar encourages people to be present giving less emphasis to productivity. Here is why. 

The concerts are held in secret and are only open to the tribe members. The artist lineup was a secret as well, and we will get to know it only after arriving at the venue. The setting was kind of intimate and personal and was at one of the weirdest, unusual places. It was a no fluff deal, and the focus was entirely on music. There was no talking in between, and we can feel the artist looking into our eyes and singing exclusively for us. We must stay for the entire concert, and no latecomers were encouraged as a mark of respect for the performing artists. 

I loved their business model as it was based on scarcity and value. The element of surprise/serendipity in a Google era, which is becoming more of an echo chamber, does encourage us to have an open-minded attitude to new music and artists. 

The (secret) artist lineup was - Anthony Jay Sanders, Via Rosa, and Calliope Musicals. 

Here are the pics we took at the gig.

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Musicians and emotional selfies

One of my favorite artists in the internet world, Amanda Palmer wrote an article on guardian the other day about how artists and musicians can process grief in today’s age of perfectly filtered selfies. 

“How, in the age of all this perfect-image-posturing, do we process and grieve?
But fundamentally this is what we – as artists – have always done. We take our pain and we transform it into some kind of narrative, some show or story, something … else. We frame our trauma as best we can, and we offer it up. At best, it’s a gift; at worst, it’s a product. And the amount of enduring respect we bestow on our artists seems to be directly proportionate to how well, how authentically, how selflessly, they can take and deliver an emotional selfie like this.”

One way musicians can express authentically is through writing songs about human conditions from their own personal experiences and ignoring critics. That is how the songwriting process becomes more meaningful.

“I’ve left my most painful experiences untouched in songwriting. The death of my college boyfriend. My brother dying for no good reason when I was 21. The difficulties with bearing children, the deep-dark bloody-womb moments. These things haven’t got songs yet. Maybe I haven’t felt authorized to write them.

To be a useful artist, I’m going to simply have to to dig deeper if I want to add anything meaningful to the conversation. And it’s terrifying. All I have to do is close my eyes and see a few YouTube comments ( …flaming narcissist … who fucking cares … how totally tasteless … pure wankery …),but then again, look at Nick. He ignores all that and simply puts it out there, too preoccupied with being authentically in the moment of expression to give a single fuck.

We cannot “make sense” of anything, really, although we can plod forth with our stupid little notebooks and paints and guitars, with our pathetically small little mirror-shards of offered reflections to one another, showing the poetic debris we’ve managed to harvest from our suffering.”

After all, great works of art serve as reminders about our life. 

“Art reminds us. That our plans are meaningless. That help is not on the way. That our children can die in our lifetimes.

The choice to make art is, indeed, an act of blistering revenge against the nonsensical, cold unfairness of this world. Tragedy strikes. We can close down, or we can keep working on finding a frame in which to house all of this confusion. A black frame, or a white one … any frame at all. We have a choice.”

Also, check out a related blog post - Why make art out of pain? 

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Confusing infrastructure development for skill development

A friend of mine who is an amazing guitar player and who loves to play his guitars once thought that if he had a small home studio, he would be able to play more, record more, and release more albums. He got fixated on this idea that he started focussing more on his day job to make money to build his own home studio. He spent a good lot of money, time, and energy in the last couple of years to make his home studio well equipped with all the latest gadgets and technology that would help to make his dream into a reality. But it came with a cost - a big one, that too. He hardly touched his guitars while he was busy setting up his studio. The very pleasure that motivated him to do all this didn’t give him enough time and energy to enjoy that pleasure.

Many of us get ‘fixated’ on our interests so much that it becomes a major hurdle in turning our dreams and ideas into reality.

While infrastructure (tools, technology, money) aids the process of skill development, it is not same as skill development. All of these doesn’t make sense if it robs us of the most important resource we have - time. The question we should be asking is how much infrastructure is enough infrastructure that provides us enough time and energy to work on developing skills that we are interested in.

Pleasure-point analysis of your interests can help resolve this issue of fixation. 

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Art music & entertaining music

Being a blogger and a netizen, I have observed on several web forums/communities that music has been categorized often as an ‘entertainment’ in the drop-down lists. While there are many that consider music as an entertainment, there are also, others who consider music as an art. 

Entertaining music need not be artistic enough and art music need not be entertaining enough. Do listen to the differences in compositions and playing styles in classical music and popular film/pop music and you will understand what I am talking about.

It can be inferred from our cultural mythology and literature that this difference in the entertainment and art components of music could be a result of our inability to deal with boredom.  

“Habit and boredom have gained the upper hand to such a degree in society and this stems from how deeply boredom is woven into the fabric of our cultural mythology. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

Here's a possible reason that explains many great musicians are unpopular due to their inability or a lack of interest to amuse and entertain the masses with their music. 

“How remarkable it is that those who do not bore themselves generally bore others; those, however, who bore themselves entertain others. Generally, those who do not bore themselves are busy in the world in one way or another, but for that very reason they are, of all people, the most boring of all, the most unbearable… The other class of human beings, the superior ones, are those who bore themselves… They generally amuse others — at times in a certain external way the masses, in a deeper sense their co-initiates. The more thoroughly they bore themselves, the more potent the medium of diversion they offer others, also when the boredom reaches its maximum, since they either die of boredom (the passive category) or shoot themselves out of curiosity (the active category).”

— Soren Kierkegaard

Real art and fame are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. 

“They got us hooked on data. Advertisers want more data. Direct marketers want more data. Who saw it? Who clicked? What percentage? What’s trending? What’s yielding?

But there’s one group that doesn’t need more data...

Anyone who’s making a long-term commitment. Anyone who seeks to make art, to make a difference, to challenge the status quo.

Because when you’re chasing that sort of change, data is the cudgel your enemies will use to push you to conform.

Data paves the road to the bottom. It is the lazy way to figure out what to do next. It’s obsessed with the short-term.

Data gets us the Kardashians.

The culture of compromise is often accepted as the price of mass. But in fact, this is the crowded road to popular acceptance, and it works far less often than the compromisers believe it will.”

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