Don’t get me wrong, I still love music. I still get goosebumps to certain songs and ride the high of my favorite albums, but…I just don’t care about music as much as I used to. Back when I really got into music, everything was new and amazing. Underworld and Orbital were my favorite artists, and I obsessed over them, staying up late just to listen and relisten to their best songs even when my eyes could barely stay open. I found a bunch of great people online who loved them as much as me, and I discovered so many new artists from them. It was a golden era for me and music.
But, it did not last. Keeping up with new music each year to do a Best-Of list became a chore rather than a delight. I’ve always been stingy about downloading music, particularly crappy music, so I never downloaded a bunch of music to sort through. And when my interest waned from keeping up-to-date, I didn’t care about music quite as much. I haven’t done a Best-Of list in years. I’ve listened to maybe three albums all this year.
Seeing the Best-Of lists each year now just makes me sad and frustrated. Sad, because I feel like I’m missing out, not just on the music but on the communal experience that goes with listening and following music with friends. Frustrated, because there’s just too much out there to follow, that it’s too much work to follow music sometimes, that I’ve lost much of my interest in following new music. Yes, I know the internet is a great resource (how else would I be able to follow Underworld and Orbital in America without it?), but damn it, the internet is too big. There’s too much information for me to take in and process.
Also, other things have taken over my interests. Comics, of course, are my main focus now. Back when I was into music, I tried my hand at creating music on my computer, and I produced some decent songs. I even flirted with the idea of becoming a DJ by purchasing a pair of turntables and a mixer, but now they sit in the basement gathering dust. I thought I could be a musician, and maybe with enough determination that could’ve been a possibility, but my love for comics and my desire to make comics soon outweighed any musical ambitions I had.
So now I’m concentrating on my writing and comics. If you’ve been following my Twitter account, then you’ve probably heard I had some computer troubles recently. My biggest fear was that my computer would lose all my files, which I had stupidly not backed up. I wasn’t concerned so much about my music being lost as I was about my writings. I figured I could always replace my music collection, but my writings were impossible to replace. Thankfully, I didn’t lose my files. But you can rest assure, I will back up my writings on a more frequent basis.
My relationship to music has diminished that much in the past few years. It’s to the point where I could probably go a week or two without listening to music, and some days I actually don’t listen to music at all. A part of me wants to follow everything I can, to be up-to-date. Then again, a part of me wants to read the classics like War and Peace and Moby Dick, but those books have been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for years. So I’m starting to come to grips with my fading interest in music, or rather my pursuit of music, because I still do love music. I’ll read the Best-Of lists, get a little nostalgic, and who knows, maybe I’ll listen to them sometime.
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