I'm not here to argue with you.
That new iPod you got for Christmas is stylish, slender and indispensable because it can hold 4,000 songs and all three seasons of "LOST."
Yeah, it'll blow your mind every time it plays JT's "My Love" after 'N Sync's "Bye Bye Bye" (how does it do that?), and it'll last like, a whole year, but it is changing the way people listen (or fail to listen) to music.
Not so long ago, listening to music involved getting fancied up and sitting (still) in a symphony hall, sometimes for hours.
With the advent of the car radio came the great driving songs of the '60s. Many a Motown producer engineered his songs to sound best when blasting out of car stereos on hot summer days.
When people wanted to listen to music at home that wasn't on the radio, they used vinyl, which needed to be tended to every three or four tracks.
Music used to have physical space, and listening to it took attentiveness, and sometimes patience (gasp!). Nowadays, music seems to be just periphery.
Don't get me wrong - I love having "running at dark" songs and "sitting by the beach" songs, but then again, some of us now have "grocery shopping" songs and "checking Facebook in the library" songs.
You wouldn't run through a museum and say you saw all the paintings. You would stop and look at each painting, evaluating each as an individual work of art. Perhaps always having our iPods on is ruining more than our hearing.
I don't think music is going to be beneficial if artists have to start considering what is going to sound best when strolling through the cereal aisle. Actually, I think that guy from Nickelback does consider that. Keep trying buddy!
Would we even tolerate the trite trash we bob our heads to while we fill up at the gas station if we had to be alone in a room with it? I doubt it.
When we put music in the background we lose emotion, intellect and sonic fidelity in exchange for songs such as "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt.
I think its time we paid more attention to our music. And who knows? Maybe with those ear buds out we will pay more attention to each other.
