The Good Old Days

The last post neatly brings me to my next point, have you ever noticed the people who don't seem to glisten with sweat from an evening of dancing? There are people wearing woolly jumpers in overcrowded clubs who don't have a single hair out of place and are inexplicably not waving their hands about their person in a vain attempt to cool down. There are the boys who, in a packed venue, keep their jumpers and parkas on with no outward sign of being uncomfortable despite the temperature being about 30 degrees. And then there are always girls who look as pristine as they did 4 hours ago, no make-up smudges and perfect hair and no hint of them having exerted themselves on the dance-floor. I had a deep-set distrust of these people until last night.

It was at the point where I had to tie my hair up because it was actually sticking to me (mmm, lovely) that I noticed the types of people I mentioned above were on the dance floor but not actually dancing. Well, they were dancing but only in a very loose sense of the word. Their secret seems to be to move as little as possible, a gentle sway with a tiny shuffle of the feet and to sport a self-satisfied smile as they look at me bouncing around and sweating. I have tried this moving-as-little-as-possible-to-make-it-look-like-I'm-dancing-but-tricking-everyone-as-I'm-not-actually-dancing dancing but I'm no good at it, I need to move a lot!

I've been thinking that maybe I'm the odd one out a gigs these days, as I frequently seem to be the only person or one of a handful of people outwardly expressing my enjoyment of music during the songs. At the very least I nod along, at most jump up and down and sing and smile a lot. Clapping between songs is excluded as it is expected, people just don't appear to be so affected by live music these days.

What happened?!

As the way we consume music has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, the anything-you-want-whenever-you-want-it nature of internet and the sheer volume of music online may have damaged the good old fashioned excitement of seeing a band live or hearing the album for the first time or buying a music magazine only because there is a half-page article about your favourite band in it.

There is so much more music, more bands, more things associated and tied into music online that musical connections no longer rely on the weekly music papers like Melody Maker and NME (ahem), or your friends recommending some random find in a record shop, or saving your pocket money to buy the deluxe double edition of a long awaited album you've only heard rumours about or for tickets for your favourite band that have only played in Scotland once, 5 years ago to 6 people and a dog! Now you can just switch on your computer, type in the name of bands and hear other bands linked up to them as though you were listening to the radio, watch videos of them live, read news, gossip and tittle-tattle. Everyone makes music these days, at home, on their computers, churning it out faster than you can listen to it and it's all accessible from the comfort of your own home!

So with all of this wonderful stuff, available to me 24/7 at the click of a mouse, why am I complaining? Well, it's simple, I still love music the way I did when I was 15, with passion and exuberance and the desire to show that I love what I am listening to. I loved the mystery of it all, the way that the bands were just bands, not really connected to real life and they were not one of my 'friends' on Myspace or Facebook. I'm still deeply affected by music, live or recorded. I wish I could buy into what the music press say now, like I did when I first started to take music 'seriously' but there are certain music mags that are now shadows of their former selves and some of the others I relied on for my weekly dose of news, recommendations and reviews are long gone. I still love looking for music in independent record stores, the excitement of the unknown when I play a CD that I bought solely on the cover art work to discover that it's brilliant/nonsense.

Despite all of that, I guess you have to move with the times. I'm by no means stuck in the past, I just miss it a little.

Now, I'm off to download some songs onto my MP3 player/phone and add some more folks I don't know and will never meet as my friends on Facebook, bye-bye.