I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself yet again, but for some reason I decided it’;d be a good idea to set myself a limit and try to get this done. I’ve done this before and it doesn’t work out for me; or, it does, but it doesn’t feel like it works out and really, this is just an exercise in tedium… or exercise. An exercise in exercise. Yep. I truly an a literary giant.

So why am I doing this again, when I know that this is not a good idea? Well, I’m behind. I need to catch up. I don’t need to catch up, but I need to catch up. Does that make sense? I hope it does, because that’s what I’m going with. I’m going with some excise to stretch my fingers a bit and pretend that it’s just not an exercise.

Maybe it is an exercise in getting out all the thoughts cluttering my brain right now. Just trying to clear things and find a way forward. Maybe there is no clearing; maybe I’m stuck like this for the rest of the day. Maybe I’m not. I won’t know until I try, and really, this is about trying so try I’m gonna do.

Right now I’m listening to Cocteau Twins for the second time (might be the third), and it’s their album, Head Over Heels, and it’s all sorts of nice. I probably should’ve been listening to this around thirteen years ago. Somewhere around there, when I was listening to more music that was like this, but my head was elsewhere. My head was in far more abrasive music. Still is, really, but the older I get, the more I spread my wings. I was listening to a bunch of shoegaze at the time, or rather not much, but there was some. It was more prominent in my listening habits. Now shoegaze is more prominent everywhere and I don’t know what to do with myself. It almost feels like I was early, but I definitely wasn’t listening to it before everyone else. I would never claim that as that’d be an outright lie.

In a way it’s nice to see that music comes back and people find new ways to make use of things, but at the same time I find a lot of music to be pretty bland. Of course that’s the way it’s gonna be; there is always a lot of stuff that isn’t good. There’s always stuff that is good, too, and you go digging for it. You go digging and looking for it, and you experience it and work out why you like it and why it feels good, or if you don’t like it, then why you don’t. You work with it and you find something else… eventually. You connect the dots and you create a chain and you go back and forward and all of those things.

Digging for music has become more difficult these days, and I think that is solely to do with content generation programs. People refer to it as AI, but it’s really not. It’s just content generating programs generating content. Maybe that’s a really primitive way of looking at it, but that’s not the point of what I’m writing. What I’m writing is that it makes it more difficult for people to find stuff, unless they’re fine with that kind of cutting and repackaging, in which case, more power to them. I’m not, and I know there are others who aren’t because we don’t want to hear that kind of thing most of the time, if not all of the time. But now you need to train yourself to work out what is and isn’t, and even then it can be difficult.

You know, the attitude that everything’s been done really frustrates me, because it’s not true. New things are always happening, and it seems that the people who most often put forward this view are the ones with the most limited range of experience when it comes to music. A lot of things haven’t been done and we won’t know until we’ve heard them. It seems to be generational, too. You know, a lot of people who grew up being told Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, etc., are the best seem to not understand that this was probably something people before them were being told; that everything has been done. It’s just not true, and it’s especially not true when it comes to music. There is so much out there we don’t know and won’t know until we hear it, and when we hear it, maybe it’ll mean nothing. But maybe, just maybe, it will change things and reshape what we hear and how we hear it, and we’ll understand things that we didn’t before when it comes to sound.

Of course we could just be derisive and declare it to be wasteful and crap, but that’s the way these things go when we don’t explore enough and allow ourselves to be wrong, or to learn, or both.

But anyway, where was I? I wanted to say something and I’ve said it and now there’s nothing left to say. I guess I should wrap this up as this has mostly been about music, which is good, but I feel myself coming to an end of the ramble and so ending the ramble is what I should do. There’s no real point in continuing on if I’ve hit the point where I feel this should wrap, so this wrapping up is what will happen. No, there will be no rapping. There will only be wrapping, and it’ll be the wrapping of the up as this writing reaches the closing of the down.

So in conclusion, music rocks and there’s a lot out there to hear. We should always bear in mind the limitations of our experience, and we should try to grow and deepen it where we can.

The time it took to write one thousand words: 11:41:11

I was going to go for two thousand words and just write whatever. I ended up writing whatever, but it was more focused than I’d hoped.

Written at home.