Incidental music, digital music obsession

What is our obsession with having a musical accompaniment to everything? You just cannot escape people with earphones on. A lover of the apple mac all my adult life, I blame apple to some extent, they have created the idea that you must carry your record collection around with you, when always before (or at least until the man at Sony invented the Walkman) it was good enough to listen to at home. Adorno (thats him form the Frankfurt Group) always claimed the only real music was live music, and this idea has something going for it…

But lets get back to this theme of portable music, that you listen to in every spare moment…why. As someone who works with computers and people, I find the constant noise of voices and fans and clciks of hard disks and tinny sound of other peoples music draining. I am glad of the silence, if and when it comes. My thought is what are all these people afraid of, are they afraid if it all goes quiet they will have to think and feel for themselves, they will be unable to escape the sense of self in their narrow existence.

What I wonder is has the socialism and its death been replaced by portable music. Not so long ago I asked what had happened to reading, and a few people responded and I reassessed my view when I saw a lot of people do read….however a lot do not…newspapers and magazines are not literature.

Any how in the past when people noticed their rather pale and nasty narrow existence as serfs or wage slaves, they banded together, unionised formed a cooperative or a communist party and fought back or protested or went on strike or argued it out. Now thye isolate themselves and escape into the manufactured rebellion of musicians and singers who live in the most part in a bubble of wealth and conspicuous consumption. stick in the earphones and turn on the iPod.

I have the answer to Iraq, Palestine, anywhere in fact where people have banded together to protest at their situation, a bit of market research to find out who the fave performers are, a few digitised recordings and then give everyone a free ipod m ini.
They will soon not be talking to each other or able to hear each other, and be working so hard to earn money to buy a computer/cable/adsl/software to download more tracks to listen to.

whilst you are reading this are you listening to music or talking to someone, perhaps the Internet in general is the home version of the personal music storage device…it certainly will be if apple have their way.

Related posts:

Related posts:

1. The Story of The Islanders
2. Think Globally Act Locally
3. Whats it all about
4. Surviving…you can create a new world with your thoughts and feelings!
5. The responsibility is ours.

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  Jonathan Spencer : Posted a new post on their blog
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