Wednesday 23 March 2011

colour my life with the chaos of trouble

I had never thought about it fully before. Maybe I just had accepted it as fact and subconsciously ignored it due to foreseen obviousness.

Your music tastes change so dramatically throughout life.

SHOCK! I know. And sorry for such a boring post after being gone for so long, but working with people who are over ten years my junior on a daily basis has really opened my eyes to this. As much as it is common place that you journey through many ‘rites of passages’ throughout early life, a more haughty cliché is that music changes and is never as good as it once was (when you enjoyed it).

Admittedly, the former is a fact; music tastes change, people change. We have waves of style – these waves ultimately resurface. But as for the latter; I am losing patience with contemporary music, waiting for it to move me. The fashion seems to be to release a song which has the shortest of shelf lives, the proverbial ‘flash in the pan’ if you will, of little style and less substance. Yes, it makes money, and yes, we are all humming it for the afternoon after we hear it. It gets downloaded, stuck on an iPod and then lost into the ocean of mediocrity, only to resurface when boredom brings us to ‘shuffle’, but then ultimately skipped and then sunk again with its brothers.

I have started listening to Belle & Sebastian today. I had done so sporadically before this - I have heard their songs, but have never really listened. I have been missing out.

Such beautiful lyrics allow visualisation of real emotive moments. You feel the unsteady sentiment of being a teenage boy, lost in summer days of love and longing in many of their songs.

Final thought: isn’t it wonderful when you connect with someone from another world, another walk of life, through a corresponding taste in music. It doesn’t happen often, but when you are able to share an appreciation of a song and how it effects you it is often a high point of a day.

No comments:

Post a Comment