mello on, music
blame ash for this.
(and subscribe to her amazing writing please)
…
when i think of music, i think of limewire. i look back fondly at my teenage years spent searching for every song i could find by a new artist i just discovered. a digital crate digger downloading anything i could get my hands on over a crawling internet connection.
now. if its not on spotify then it doesn’t exist. what appears at first glance as the entire history of human sound is only what can commercially be sold and distributed.
sampling and mixtapes are what defined my musical taste.
artists in conversation with each others work.
sound built on top of sound.
[and i know this still exists on soundcloud, youtube and other platforms. and that this whole rant is more of a commentary on my own habits. but thats the whole point of straw person arguments right?]
yes we can all draw influence from one another and seamlessly switch from Queen to Run the Jewels but we’ve lost the feeling of recognizing an already familiar beat. the joy of hearing your favorite artist’s voice turned into an instrument and reinterpreted. samples were my gateway. how i branched out not only to other genres, but other time periods.
platforms have gentrified music and now its just content engineered to juice engagement and appease computers. everything is familiar because everything adheres to what has already deemed profitable and favorable by the platform. look no further than the genre of music that critics call spotifycore. you know what im talking about.
idk. maybe the laws will change on sampling (not likely) or maybe what i really miss is AMVs lol. either way heres some music that reminds me of how much i love music. all hail youtube the home for music ignored and banned by the platforms.
p.s. - idk. i write all of this a day after a black child was lynched by the DC police. so im sure that has something to do with my mood
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