Table of Contents
My Musical Evolution
For some reason, I woke up on January 1st, 2012 with the desire to do some kind of big project. Something that I would spend the entire year doing. After pondering for a while, I decided to try to document what I called My Musical Evolution“. This was supposed to be a timeline that documented the music that attached itself to me as the years rolled by.
I originally used WordPress to house this documentary. Eventually, it ended up containing over 400 entries. I used the Tag Cloud to tag the artists. It was an interesting exercise. The part that bothered me was that WordPress is designed to show the most recent posts on top. This made it difficult to consume the entire body of work chronologically. I know I made a point of disregarding timelines on here, but this is one of those instances where chronology builds on the evolutionary chapters that precede.
My Musical Evolution – Part 1 Introduction
I’ve got a pretty large media library. It holds just shy of 4,000 albums and 50,000 songs. It covers a wide variety of genres and artists. It has been called The Eclectic Collection for about two decades. So long that I’ve forgotten who originally came up with that. Here we are on the first day of 2012 and I thought it would be an interesting project to try to piece together my Musical Evolution and try to illustrate how I got from point A to point B. Along the way I’ll be sharing some of the tracks that support this illustration.
Have you seen the movie High Fidelity starring John Cusack and Jack Black? If you haven’t, do it. If you have, let me remind you of the scene after Rob and Laura break up and Rob decides to reorganize his vast music collection. His friend Dick observes the process but cannot comprehend the system. It’s not chronological, not alphabetical? Rob tells him that it is biographical. I personally store my CD’s alphabetically by artist then by album but in this project, I will attempt to reconstruct the entire thing autobiographically.
I hope to accomplish this in around 300 to 320 installments over the course of 2012. I’m going to try to be as thorough and honest about this as I can. Of course, I appreciate any help or advice you can offer.
I have to tell you, I’m kind of excited about the project. Our musical tastes are kind of like a stream flowing down the mountain. Any number of objects can influence the direction and speed. As I look back on my musical evolution, I can point out some definite moments of impact where directions changed. Actually now that I think about it, forget the stream thing. It is more like playing the original version of Zork on the Digital PDP 11/34. No DEC system should be without it. Here’s why. As you wander through the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, it is like listening to the music you’ve been listening to for years. Then something happens. A discovery is made. A riddle is solved. It doesn’t really matter if the discovery was made by you or shared with you by a friend, the result is a renewed interest and a whole new area to explore. Who knows where you will end up? Perhaps you won’t travel too far. Maybe you’ll find yourself getting back to where you were before. You might end up miles away from where you thought you’d end up. Enjoy the journey.
When my kids were very young, I told them to let music be personal to them. I encouraged them to like whatever music they liked regardless of what their friends thought. If your Metal friends don’t like Spandau Ballet, it doesn’t mean that you have to hate them too. When you think about it in purely non emotional, scientific terms, music is really just sound waves, and your thoughts are electric impulses. How do those waves affect those impulses to result in such a strong emotional manner. I think that answer to that might have to be explored in the 2013 project.
A quick scan of my media library tells me a few things, I’m a bit of a digital hoarder. Not all of the songs present are my favorites. For some I’m at a loss for explanation. How did I end up with J.J. Fad? There are quite a few tracks that are present for nostalgic purposes just so I could complete this project. Most of it can be categorized into about a dozen sections that begin with the “Scratchy 45’s Days” and at the moment end up at DeadMau5.
I hope I didn’t build this up too much. That is one of my personality disorders. I have a pretty rampant imagination. I can visualize in great detail, but my execution is no match for my imagination. Let me wrap up this part with an apology for the disappointment that you will eventually feel.