Nearly ten years had passed since KoRn. A preference had become a hobby, a hobby a fixation, a fixation a passion. The narrative reached a climax--its High Fidelity moment--with the indie music phase: visits to hip records stores in the city, the friends that only talked about music, the concerts on the weekends, deciding whether to date someone based on their taste in music, mix tapes. A feverish passion, that soon began its natural decline. A couple of years later, I had stopped searching for music, stopped browsing CDs, stopped going to shows. The only exposure to new music was through friends and whatever they played at their house, in their car, or at a party. I accompanied friends to shows, but never looked into whether any of the bands I liked (or had liked) were in town.
The death of music had two potential causes. First, the indie music scene had expanded the scope of “good” music to encompass almost anything, as long as you had discovered it on your own. In other words, it was a race to see who could find a strange, quirky band that nobody had heard of before. It didn’t matter if it was pop, hip hop, house, electronic, classical, jazz, old, new; anything, as long as you could defend it or as long as it was for the sake of irony. The internet and the proliferation of Do It Yourself recordings made the possibilities endless. There were the local dive bar bands, the international bands that sung in foreign languages (French, Spanish, or Portuguese), the forgotten bands that had broken up before finding an audience. These were all potential discoveries that one was on the hunt for. There was even a movement to rediscover old established bands that had been written off as dated, or had always been acknowledged but never truly appreciated.
Beyond one’s personal hunt, there was also the need to keep track of the already popular indie bands and their album releases, as well as new crop of chosen upstarts (those discoveries other people made that caught on). The amount of information one was forced to process in order to keep up with the scene was dizzying. I can count the number of nu-metal bands my friends and I listened to on one hand (the authoritative list of the entire movement on Wikipedia lists no more than 107 bands; to put that number in perspective, Pitchfork has a yearly top fifty albums list). During my punk phase, I mostly worried about two record labels: Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph Records. All I needed to do was check out the bands those labels signed (and I mostly stuck to the Fat Wreck Chords bands). It was a digestible amount of music. The indie scene was intentionally indigestible.
It was exhausting; not even exhausting, numbing. Like the feeling one gets when confronted with infinite possibilities: you simply become apathetic. (Think of the feeling you get when you are on the internet and you just sit, staring at the search bar; or when you enter an enormous grocery store; your brain’s first instinct is to shut down).
The second reason was that music no longer elicited the powerful emotional response of my early years. Instead, the intellectual response had begun to outweigh its emotional partner. The intellectual response had always played a role in my enjoyment of music. But the pattern had been one in which it slowly gained ground on the emotional side of listening to music. Hence, the transition from skate-punk to political punk, the arguments over “selling out,” the efforts to “appreciate” Radiohead, the search for “originality,” ect. The intellectual side demanded that the music get more and more complex and challenging as time passed. (The theory can even be taken a step further, to explain the transition from listening to music to reading books.) In the later years, the emotional response existed, but it could only be reached once it got passed the various check-points put up by the intellectual side. (Check Point 1: Is this a copy of other music? Check Point 2: What is different about this music? Check Point 3...)
I over thought it. And in over-thinking it came to the conclusion that it was all relative, and that no one music or band is better than another. That preferences were based either on immediate positive emotional feedback (the type one gets when listening to commercial jingles, or pop music on the radio), or on conditioning due to a person’s cultural surroundings and desired identity within a small society. This idea made me even more apathetic.
These two reasons played a role, but really, the hobby had run its course. After the pure emotion had faded, the brain kept things going, until even that turned stale. Other hobbies took over (literature, mainly, but also sports), and my passion for music became nothing more than a short (in the big picture), meaningful moment that helped create who I am.
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