Evil Streaming

I'm thinking about all the romantic crap I laid out the last time I posted something.  "Streaming?  I don't need no stinking streaming!"  Well, forget all that.  I am going to leave the spinning of vinyl to people like my son Nate.  He likes being elemental, going back to the classics.  That's one of my favorite things about him.  I even agree with all those purist vinyl spinners out there, that listening to, say, the Sergeant Pepper album the way it was originally created--vinyl--and on the equipment it was created for--cool stereo systems with belt driven turntables and 12 inch woofers--is a fundamentally different experience than listening to it on a CD, or through the air via Spotify.  Is it better?  I don't know.  I have tinnitus and can't really tell any more, but I do believe that in some sense vinyl spinning is closer to the artist's intent.

I'm forgetting all that romantic crap because we just purchased a Bose Sound Touch 30 wireless music system.  You don't call them stereos any more; they are music delivery systems.  The contraption is smaller than one of the speakers on my old stereo and produces twice the sound, or seems to.  Katherine hooked everything up because she has managed to stay current, technologically speaking.  It is sitting on the low brick ledge of the fireplace at one end of our main floor, the main floor with, in a late life stab at being avant garde, hickory floors and drape free windows.  The resulting echo effect amplifies the music machine's sound and absolutely fills the room.

But the best thing about our new music delivery system is Spotify.  In the last few days, I have listened to all the music from "Hamilton", an ancient jazz album with Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong, "The Well Tempered Clavier", "Julian Bream Plays Bach" and "Tapestry."  I have access to recordings I thought impossible to find.  I'm planning on listening to Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney duets the first chance I get.  Okay, okay.  A Crosby/Clooney duet might not be everyone's first choice.  It's just that at my age I tend to wallow in nostalgia a little more than I used to.

I do have a big problem with our new music delivery system.  I think it is kind of evil.  Evil in the same sense that sleep number beds, and dual controls on automobile heaters and air conditioners is evil.  Evil like gated communities, charter schools, and Facebook.  Evil the way headphones are evil.

I think everything works better if we make love to the idea that we are communal creatures.  We need things to bring us together, not further isolate us.  Back in the good old days where we only had three channels, news events, rather than being vehicles for division, brought us together:  Kennedy assasination,  political conventions, space walks, freedom walks, etc.  We could talk to each other about the news program we all saw, or the new episode of Hill Street Blues, or the white album around the coffee pot.

It's bad enough that the partisan nature of media news and talk radio and internet rumors manage to separate us, but we take all that manufactured isolation into the bedroom and set our own temperatures and firmness and end up sleeping differently.  The passenger side on my car has its own temperature controls, so Kathie and I end up riding differently.  I, as is my nature, get competitive.  "Christ.  She has her temp all the way up to seventy-five!  What's her problem?"

Now, my music delivery system has compounded the problem.  It'll be okay for me.  I'm old and set in my ways.  But what about my grandson Sage, or Brooklyn, Sammi, Willa, or Jaydee?  When I go on Spotify to get some music, I always choose to play an album.  I think that is the literaturist in me at work.  Albums are meant to hold together, like a novel, or a play.  So, even though the listening experience might be a little different, the whole structural approach stays in tact and by listening to the album as released, I am sharing in a communal experience.

Not so those people who make their own play lists.  These are the same people who cannot manage to get from their car to their destination without wearing headphones.  I'm afraid my children might do that already and I'm convinced that my grandchildren--all of our grandchildren--will most certainly be headphone dependent any day now.  The problem isn't just the headphones; it is that they are listening to something designed just for them.  They are immersed in a world of their own making that has precious little connection to the community.

So what do we have?  We have a "community" comprised of individuals who surround themselves with Facebook friends who feel and think the same way, with information feeds that only give them what they want to hear, with creature comforts that ignore others, and with a steady stream of music that cuts them sonically out of their surroundings, in their own ego driven gated communities.  I think that kind of separateness from the world is bad.

In "My Dinner With Andre", Andre tells Wally about the wealthy woman who dies of malnutrition because she will only eat what she wants to eat, in this case, chicken.

Spotify and the like make me worry about being that woman.  I wonder.  If I only choose to listen to Bing Crosby recordings from now on, will I die of some sort of spiritual malnutrition.  Maybe I should throw in some Beastie Boys for balance.