"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."

It's not going to be generative music, though - sorry Brian!

See, one of the things people like about music (or art or anything) is the definitiveness - this is the way it is, this is the way it will be each time I look at it, hear it, watch it, read it....  

This is the way it is, and more than that (as with a novel's plot), this is the way it should be - this is the only way it could ever have been  - 

People like the idea, or sensation, that something has arrived at its ordained form, the best version of itself

Exactly this organized arrangement of colours and lines, or notes and timbres and beats, or storyline and characters. 

That's why there's only ever been a limited ultra-nerd consumer base for alternative takes and demos and prototype versions of e.g. "Strawberry Fields".... or for Director's Cut expansions (like the fairly poor and utterly extraneous additional material in the extended Apocalypse Now) and deleted scenes and so forth...  It's why only scholars of literature like to inspect the first drafts of novels and plays... 

What about remixes? 

Ah but you see - a great remix, a successful remix, achieves its own definitive form....  you want to hear that over and over again, exactly those same perfect decisions made by the remixer....

A remix that remixed itself each time you played it and was majorly or even slightly different - that would be exasperating!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ah but you say - 

What about jazz improvisation in the live situ? 

What about singers interpreting the great American Song Book? 

What about conductors and orchestras with their different versions of the classical repertoire? 

What about re-staging of plays (modern dress versions etc?)

What about what deejays do in the mix, taking two records and making a third one out of them? 

Hmmm.... well see I like listening to jazz records, born of improvisation though they may be, as if they were composed - it's just a different route to definitiveness as far as I'm concerned. I get as bored with the mega-expanded On the Corner / In A Silent Way etc boxes with multiple takes and prototypes as I do the expanded Beatles / etc 

The fact that you have to do research to find out which is the best version of the Pastoral Symphony or Carnival of Animals or "Trois Gymnopedies"  is annoying to me - the fact that there is a range of opinion on the subject and a bewildering number of options.... I always think, "why can't it be like pop, where's there's only one "Strawberry Fields" that really counts?"  

Different readings of "My Funny Valentine" or whatever is slightly more interesting / appealing to me for some reason...  it's like different actors playing the same classic part...   but I wouldn't want to listen to a whole range of different recordings of Sinatra doing "You Make Feel So Young". I'd want the definitive Sinatra version as captured on Songs for Swingin' Lovers...   A live version would only make me contemplate the ways it departs from that definitive and unimprovable rendering in the studio.

Plays - well yes, I suppose so ... but at the end of the day, the script, the dialogue, the characters, the plot, can only be faithfully rendered. The stuff that is at the discretion of the director, costumer, stage designer and the actors themselves is not the essential element....  although it's true that when misjudged and ill-conceived, or badly executed by the players, it can mar that essence, badly vandalize it. 

I think deejays and deejaying are overrated. There is a ratio between the magic that a deejay can do and the indistinctness of the records being mixed. The more unique and stand-alone brilliant a particular track is, the harder it is for deejays to do their work. 

That's why the really creative deejays like LTJ Bukem or Jeff Mills work with characterless materials, stuff that blends easily or that can be concatenated (DJ tools - unfinished tracks, effectively). 

Bukem created a whole label Good Looking / Looking Good and marshalled a stable of admirer-producers to generate Bukem-a-like tunes for him mix seamlessly. Which he did brilliantly - one of the most amazing dj sets I ever saw was Bukem making this amorphous blob-blur of dolphin jungle in a NYC club, where the whole set was like one shimmering track. 

The inverted ratio at work here: the creativity of the deejay must be correspondingly absent from the tunes they are working with. 

Q Among lesser known artists from less mainstream cultural traditions, which ones would be good for our hearts to listen to?

I would hesitate to claim anything is “good for the heart”. There are virtuous, emotionally-healthy people who listen to very boring, very obvious mainstream music, or to no music at all. And then are people into all kinds of experimental, adventurous, exploratory music who are not good citizens or nice people. I don’t think someone’s music taste or how wide open their listening is, is a reflection of that person’s moral or personal qualities. But perhaps I misunderstand the question and you are just hoping I will recommend something that most readers may not have heard?

I personally do feel I am elevated in some hard to explain way whenever I listen to roots reggae or dub reggae. It is spiritual music and even though I am not personally religious, let alone Rastafarian and indeed find many of the moral values of that belief-system to be the opposite of my own values, I find myself uplifted. The meditational serenity, the sense of belief and purpose that suffuses the sound and the singing, irradiates me. And then the grooves, the vocal melodies, the amazing production effects are just wonderful. So I would recommend the 1970s albums and productions of King Tubby, Lee Perry, Linval Thompson, Augustus Pablo, Keith Hudson, Creation Rebel, The Congos, Burning Spear and many more. And there are some beautiful examples of lover’s rock, a more romantic and secular form of reggae – artists like Janet Kay and Kofi.

 Better an honest curmudgeon than a career generalist with Botox prose, say I!

(A seasonally appropriate maxim)

in response to someone hailing jungle-in-1995 as the genre's mature peak, and using the phrase  "adulthood - a zenith of identity" - i.e. when the genre is most like itself, least like other genres, has sloughed off its formative influences...

I agree with this idea, but it raises a question or two

We tend to regard genres as organic or biological entities - as a person (growing through the ages of man: infancy, childhood, adolescence etc etc) or as an ecosystem (evolving, mutating, expanding, assimilating, withering)

Does this make sense - seeing social constructions and assemblages as living, quasi-natural systems? It seems irresistible to think of them in those terms but I wonder if there's any reality to it. 

But going with that conception of a sound or subculture as a living, growing thing - that leads to the melancholy thought: when a genre achieves adulthood (formative phase completed, influences shaken off) it enters its prime, but that can only ever be a brief moment before the next step, the onset of decline and senescence.

With genres, that doesn't take the form of the musical equivalent of arthritis or Alzheimer's, but genres as they age out do mimic one characteristic of the aging mind, which is inflexibility and an inability to generate fresh perceptions or thoughts. 

The character hardens and becomes a confinement.

It happens to genres and individual artists alike - they become predictable. You know what they are going to say before they open their mouths. They repeat the same anecdotes. They have their little catchphrases. 

It's that thin line between achieved style and self-parodic mannerism.

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Here's a playlist I made recently based on the Dissensus thread - it's enormous but still far from exhaustive of the year's mature brilliances. Frontloaded with the thread-starter's selections (sadly he never completed his own enormous run-down) and then into my own faves not as yet listed by him, and then some of the forum member's own choices...  What a year! 

(1994 is still my favorite jungle year, though - 1993/1994: something about sounds emerging, on the cusp. Jungle's early adulthood, maybe, as opposed to mature prime)

"music is the superb illusion"

 E.M. Cioran having a rare chat with Jason Weiss - in this excerpt talking about music, without which life would be a mistake

 “I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start.The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial.

“I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.”

- Theodor Adorno, 1968, televised interview, with imagery of Vietnam War and Joan Baez singing "Oh, Freedom".

 Sabbath = the great deaf-spot (auditory and ideological) of the Last Waltz/Stranded generation of rockwrite

Every generation of rockwrite has one, and has to have one. It's the essential by-product of having a value-system, a metrics of valorization.

So what was ours? (I'll leave the "us" of "ours" open-ended for now).

Thought: the vitiation of contemporary music-write = its attempt not to have any deaf-spots ... none at all, not one.