{"id":5738,"date":"2022-10-27T09:57:09","date_gmt":"2022-10-27T16:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5738"},"modified":"2022-10-27T09:58:40","modified_gmt":"2022-10-27T16:58:40","slug":"new-yorker-the-case-for-listening-to-complete-discographies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5738","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: The case for listening to complete discographies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Earlier this year, the critic and historian Ted Gioia published an essay called \u201cIs Old Music Killing New Music?<\/a>\u201d At first, this looks like a textbook case of Betteridge\u2019s law, which states that \u201cany headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word \u2018no.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Nevertheless, old music\u2019s encroachment on the cultural space once occupied by new music has become difficult to ignore. Gioia marshals compelling evidence: from a music-industry analytics\u00a0firm<\/a>\u00a0that found that old songs represented seventy per cent of the U.S. music market in 2021 to recent bidding wars over song catalogues by artists who are now septuagenarians, octogenarians, or dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of us will hear this trend reflected in our listening habits. My own musical life in this decade offers an extreme example, dominated by the likes of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. This resoundingly un-idiosyncratic list is the result not of an ossified musical incuriosity but of a deliberately undertaken project: whereas Gioia listens to two or three hours of new music every day, I\u2019ve made a daily habit of listening to \u201cold\u201d music\u2014music by artists who began their careers in the nineteen-sixties and have made the largest, most obvious marks on popular culture. Working my way through their entire studio discographies, I take one album per week and play it once every day, straight through. This method (which I used most recently to navigate the nearly half-century-long catalogue of David Bowie) requires both an obsessive streak and a certain degree of patience: the studio albums of Dylan alone, which number thirty-nine as of this writing, took up most of a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just by chance, Dylan\u2019s \u201cChristmas in the Heart\u201d happened to fall in mid-December, which enriched the experience of that spirited if bewildering holiday album. (For me, it will never again feel like Christmas without hearing Dylan croak \u201cAdeste Fideles\u201d in his surreal Latin.) Every discography adds another chronological-cultural layer atop the ordinary passage of time: the year 2020 yielded nobody\u2019s idea of an ideal summer, but for me it was at least enlivened by earlier Beach Boys releases, from the 1964 hit \u201cAll Summer Long\u201d and the 1966 critical-consensus masterpiece \u201cPet Sounds\u201d to the 1973 ambitious conclusion to the band\u2019s long heyday, \u201cHolland.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the New Yorker.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, the critic and historian Ted Gioia published an essay called \u201cIs Old Music Killing New Music?\u201d At first, this looks like a textbook case of Betteridge\u2019s law, which states that \u201cany headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word \u2018no.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Nevertheless, old music\u2019s encroachment on the cultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5738"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5741,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738\/revisions\/5741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}