Remember the physical world? You know, before the iNTeRNeTz0rz? Back when you had to hunt for specific ink-stained pieces of ground-up trees to get little bits of misinformation regarding HUGELY IMPORTANT but obscure MUSICAL BANDS, and you had to buy stamps and lick them and get tongue-cuts and scribble on checks to order $16 pieces of plastic to put in physically imposing electronic devices that you would then sit in front of — having committed an uninterrupted block of time to this — while sound came out? And you tried to imagine what gods could walk among us and create such awesome sounds with their amazing brains, brains that could also convince powerful people to pay large sums of money to record said sounds and encode them to said bits of plastic. And you didn’t know much about the who or how or what of what you were experiencing, so it was exciting and mysterious and that was half the fun?
Me neither, I’m not really that old. But I’ve heard about it! Boy does that sound better than myspace, and the friendfaces and various whatnots, where you get up-to-the-minute reports on what your 1,872,388 favorite artists have typed into their cellphones today (it’s not very interesting), and every second of their last recording session has been captured on digital video so you can look at it on your own cellphone while simultaneously reading the Wikipedia article on how far the mic was placed from the kickdrum on Led Zeppelin IV while also downloading songs from the band you just heard about ten seconds ago on some blog (and will probably never play) along with the latest Beatles box set (why yes, it is re-re-re-mastered.. now you can really hear their money) and you’re on the bus and why are you able to do this on the bus?!!?
Bah! There’s just no mystery anymore. It’s like first setting eyes on that beautiful person across the room, and then humping them four seconds later. Which I guess is what those rock stars were doing back then. But see? On Behind the Music they appear totally regretful.
hahaha that image is the best