How do I feel about music right now? It's an odd question. Weirdly, given that I'm not posting very much, I actually feel pretty damn good about it, or at least I can find a lot of good/great stuff, which again is a bit odd because normally that'd be prompting me to write about it. But not so much. Still, there are a lot more albums I am currently or was recently totally nuts about than there were a few months ago: the Streets, the Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Annie (ANNIE ANNIE ANNIE!!!), Meow Meow, Ghostface (again), Phoenix, etc. And that's not even getting into the multitude of singles.

So what happened? A few things do stand out with the list above: 1) how many are also on the cover of Spin's recent "The Hip Issue" or some such bullshit, and 2) that some of them are kind of oldish, or at least old by the music blogosphere's album life-cycle. ("You're still listening to Franz Ferdinand?" Etc.) There are also a few that I feel have the possibility of breaking through--the Shocking Pinks, Madvillain, Soundmurderers, Dizzee Rascal (which I haven't really given a full audition to yet, but I'm going to review it next week, so it's on the top of the stack), etc. In other words, it's less that there's a feeling of some sort of coherent breakout as I remember happening in 2001 and 2003, for instance, with NYC indie-rock and dancepunk respectively--and I like those breakouts, mind you--just a sort of slow accumulation of stuff. Which is good, I guess.

Maybe the more interesting question--at least to me (this is a blog after all)--is, why aren't I that excited about it? Is it that lack of a breakout-feel? Or is it something else? In a way, I'm almost feeling poisoned by the music lately, like it's stalking me--I appreciate that Annie's "Heartbeat" is such a good song that I wake up with it in my head, or that I lie in bed for a half hour on a Saturday morning trying to get back to sleep but reciting Franz Ferdinand lines instead, but at the same time it's starting to feel a bit like a curse, especially when I'm struggling to create my own music. Being a relatively recently-created music nerd, at least of the critical variety, I find myself asking more and more lately how good it is to have this essentially useless knowledge permanently stuck in my brain. Is this what I really want? Why is music always around? Why do I feel bad if I don't listen to it?

Music is lovely--and of course I don't know what the alternative would be--and maybe this is all a load of self-indulgent crap anyway. (Well, moreso than usual.) But at the same time, I do wonder.

posted by Mike B. at 4:51 PM 0 comments