Too Much Music?

I'm slowly coming around to the view that having unlimited music does devalue it to some extent.  It just becomes background noise to the rest of our lives, particularly when there is so little marginal cost or effort to get the music (compared to the old days of having to go to the record store...).  I do try to avoid endlessly clicking around on Youtube or iTunes, skipping from one thing to another.  I also make a conscious effort to listen to albums straight through, particularly on iTunes, but the temptation is strong to go on to the next thing.

There are a few artists who have just so much stuff available that it becomes an embarrassment of riches,* as it were.  Jimi Hendrix didn't produce many studio albums, but there are so many live performances and bootlegs, sometimes legitimately licensed after the fact, that it is hard to keep up.  I think I stopped counting around 20.  (I draw the line at the Grateful Dead -- that way madness lies...)

Now I owned perhaps 1/3 of Felu Kuti's recordings on CD (back when they were putting two LPs onto each CD), but essentially all of his recordings are on iTunes, which is pretty incredible.

One thing that is interesting (to me) is that virtually all of Frank Zappa's recordings, even the posthumous ones, are on iTunes.  About the only thing that I couldn't find was 200 Motels, which seems to have some rights issues still hanging it up.  In contrast, quite a few Captain Beefheart albums are not on iTunes.  Now I never liked Captain Beefheart nearly as much as Zappa, perhaps because he was a bit more of a serious "beatnik," but I'm willing to give his music another whirl, so it is a little disappointing to find out that some of the core albums aren't on iTunes.  On the other hand, Trout Mask Replica just came out as a Record Store Day release, which often means that, after a week or so, the cleaned up music files make their way to iTunes and Spotify.  Here's hoping anyway, not that I don't have plenty to listen to in the meantime...

* At least for me, one of the most exciting things about the new approach to music delivery is that sometimes, though not always, the really obscure stuff (that never was in stock at the record store) is now available on tap.  In addition to the obscure stuff that the Numero label rescues (virtually all of which ends up on iTunes), you can find all 3 Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet albums (a bit of a cult band from my first sojourn in Toronto).  My new favorite listen is the box set of Nucleus records (a jazz-funk-rock hybrid in the same vein as Miles Runs the Voodoo Down).  While the box set itself isn't on iTunes, after the albums were remastered for the box, the individual albums went up on iTunes, which was great for me.  In this particular case, I really lucked out because there is one Nucleus CD on a different label not in the box (Out of the Long Dark) that I bought separately as a 2-fer (with Ian Carr's Old Heartland).  Neither of these albums is on iTunes, as of yet.