Too much, too much

“I’m generally in favor of reading a bit less and knowing it deeply.” – James Wood (here)

My mania lately has been an ongoing project to clean up my clogged & cluttered hard drive by burning mp3s onto CDRs, labeling them, and sticking them into a vinyl binder. In far too many cases, I’m archiving entire albums that I’ve never listened to and possibly never will. It’s a sickness of the post-Napster age, I guess. I can barely remember the concept of scarcity (whether of music or information), and the online smorgasbord of sound has made me gluttonous, wasteful, compulsively acquisitive, forever neurotically convinced that there’s something life-changing out there still awaiting my discovery. I hear things I otherwise wouldn’t have heard, but I also accumulate things I will never hear.

For what it’s worth, I’m conflicted about P2P downloading in general. Certainly I have no sympathy for major labels, which keep the bulk of the money – and the copyright – while recouping every conceivable expense out of the artist’s meager royalties. (The system’s so morally bankrupt that it was hard not to see Napster as “a real rain to wash all these scum off the streets,” as good old Travis Bickle would say.) But I don’t think I’m entitled to free music, either; I don’t show up for work as a favour to anyone, and there ain’t nothing in this world that’s free except love. In fact, over the past few years I’ve probably been laying down more cold cash for records than I ever have. I download like a coke-stoked magpie – I just can’t help it – but if I really like something, I’ll usually buy it, too.

Still, I’ve got to lose this urge to acquire. File-sharing evangelists like to present P2P as the communist ideal at work, but in fact the glut of material only encourages the ultimate corporate-capitalist mindset: growth and expansion over stability and sustainability, more more more, and the costs are shifted elsewhere so who cares? And if you’re always amassing, what you already have is perpetually declining in value.

There were a couple years in the mid-late 1990s when I had very little money, no access to review copies of records, and of course no Internet stream from which to fish. Which meant that I bought records rarely and carefully – The Monks’ Black Monk Time reissue, the new Yo La Tengo, a Faust oddments comp – and listened to them intensely. And I learned to my pleasant surprise that I could live quite happily without, say, the new Pavement record. Nowadays, I don’t have to live without any piece of music once some throwaway two-line description somewhere piques my interest. Curiosity is natural & laudable & necessary, of course. But lately it seems I’m always half-listening, nervously eyeing the pile of still-undigested music that awaits.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’m doing this blog, and I’ve been posting less, despite the clamour of my readership – both of you – begging for more. I’d like to write only when I have something worth writing, whether that’s a quick little shot or something longer, and time to do it properly. I started doing this because (a) I missed writing about music, and (b) I missed my campus-radio DJ days, the chance to mix up different kinds of music and hopefully turn people onto things. But (b) doesn’t always translate well to this format without a high noise-to-signal ratio, and (a) is really what forces you to be a careful and thoughtful listener, so I reckon I’m going to focus on that one. (I’d still love to DJ again as well, but judging by my repeated unanswered e-mail inquiries, the community radio stations here in Toronto are moated & gated. Oh well.)

And even though 99.9% of the people who come here have been directed this way by Hype Machine and are just looking to scoop a specific mp3, I’ll still write the odd non-musical thing whenever something gets me exercised. And yes, by “something” I mean “usually some fluctuation in the contents of my navel.”