You know... this is still bugging me two days later. Like it personally insulted my daughter or something.

- I worked a closed-door "futurist" session for Warner Brothers some years ago, where the c-suite drones of every duchy of the far-flung Time Warner empire showed up to learn what the hell they were all supposed to do about this "internet" thing. The VP for programming of HBO was there, as well as the content directors for DC Comics and Youtube (he had just been hired away). And we had this one "futurist" who took to the stage to discuss torrenting. He turned to the audience and said "do you guys really believe that some kid with 80,000 MP3s on his hard drive was going to buy those tracks? Do you honestly think he'll even listen to them all? Of course not! HE'S CURATING!" and everyone nodded thoughtfully.

- Trent Reznor once called Oink.me.UK the best site on the internet. Sony was caught seeding their unreleased shit on there, while also demanding it be shut down. The guys into music enough to be on a private tracker, to pay for a seedbox? They're your influencers. The ones who decide "yes, I will listen to this once and seed it forever because this is how my tribe reaches each other" are the ones keeping the system running. When I need new music to play on the radio I pull down every torrent within a laundry list of micro-genres published since the last time I was dry. Anything good enough that someone else goes through the trouble to create a torrent of? It may not be to your taste but you know it reached someone.

- Jeron Lanier basically predicted NFTs in You Are Not A Gadget by pointing out that physical music sales will never come back, and if bands want to make money they need to focus on collectibles and the fan experience.

- I don't often purchase music off Bandcamp. I purchase shirts. Nearly everything is on Tidal and Tidal integrates with Rekordbox so it's easier just to stream it. But that doesn't make anyone any money except Tidal and AlphaTheta.

That's just fandom. The act of curation is the act of appreciation. Seeking out things you like and sharing them is the whole fucking point. The manifesto I wrote that saved my radio show relied on a "push/pull relationship" with music, stating that there were people who sought out new music and propagated it to their friends ("push") and there were people who were more comfortable listening to things that had already been vetted for social acceptance via MTV, Rolling Stone or television licensing ("pull"). I went further and pointed out that goth-industrial was entirely push because the path to mainstream acceptance had exactly one bridge on it - my show.

But I think the reason this bitch really bugs the shit out of me is because of a conversation I had 25 years ago. I dated this girl who was awful, who had a father who was awful, who had two kids with one of his students (she was not awful). 20 years his junior, she was within 10 years of me and the girlfriend, which means her siblings had young children. They tried to relate to us as peers rather than as youth, which was nice, but they were also young parents, which was interesting. I was talking to one of them about mixing in clubs and she said something that hit hard - "oh, sure, you listen to a lot of music now but trust me, once you have kids, you won't anymore. You'll just want the silence. I haven't listened to a band in five years."

Fuckin' haunting, yo. Also absolutely untrue, no basis in fact, etc etc etc but at the ripe old age of 22, here was a lady going "I have turned old and you shall as well, it is inevitable."

I think of the "pullers." The ones for whom Columbia House existed. The "album of the month" club for people who don't want to decide for themselves what they like, who want someone in authority to tell them that they won't be mocked at a cocktail party for liking the wrong things. The ones who had a subscription to Spin Magazine because their friends had subscriptions to Spin Magazine so they could all stick to what they read in Spin Magazine and rest assured that their lives were Spin Magazine approved. And those of us who considered it the anathema of music appreciation? Well, we just never crossed paths.

THAT is what this column is bitching about:

- There's no authority to assure people like this of what's cool

- If they wander out into the wild wooly world they might encounter people who didn't care for Spin Magazine

- They aren't sure what they should enjoy if there isn't someone to give them permission

IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER TO CONNECT WITH THE MUSIC YOU LOVE... BUT YOU HAVE TO LOVE MUSIC.

Spin Magazine, ironically enough, ran a feature entitled "Top Ten Albums Owned By People Who Hate Music." Their argument was that there were some albums that were so universal that people with absolutely no connection to music whatsoever ended up with a copy. I thought of that article when I saw Icona Pop for sale on vinyl at Whole Foods. The article, of course, predated Whole Foods and Icona Pop by decades; their list included Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours."

Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called Cornucopia. She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for the past two weeks. For a musician who normally goes into hiding and only emerges when it's time to promote something, it's been a pretty exciting time to be a fan. However, all the information being put out, promoted on social media and reposted on places like Reddit, have all been a little confusing.

This is a woman demanding that Bjork be less confusing for the ease of her musical fandom.

I ran lights for Gary Numan once. It was the Exile tour, well after Cars. And as I came out to the lighting console, all sixteen channels of it, and moved a pair of drinks out of my space, a couple yuppies grew outraged with me. "This is our spot!" they said. "This is the lighting guy's spot," I said. "Well we were here first!" they responded. "Well you aren't anymore," I said, and they wandered off to find a bouncer, then came back in a huff and glowered over my shoulder.

Until the first song, anyway.

The second song was Cars, but they didn't even stick around long enough to hear it. They came for that song they heard on the radio, won't it be fun to think back to that time when everyone took their musical instruction from Rick Dees or Casey Casem?

It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. I've been noticing this sentiment with society, this feeling of always being mentally exhausted. How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!" The reality is we're not going to watch it because we feel like we have no time to get through everything and we don't fully trust other people's recommendations.

This is a lady who wants Bjork to explain the riddles, who wants entertainment to be a puzzle she can solve, who doesn't "fully trust other people's recommendations" unless, apparently, those people work for Viacom. She doesn't want to order a Bedless Bones t-shirt off of Bandcamp because Kadri Sammel's cat might have left cat hair on it.

One of the things I found in the attic was a nasty-gram from Columbia House. Dude was delinquent on some 8-tracks; the one that really stuck with me was Burt Bacharach's Lost Horizon soundtrack. Now - there were a lot fewer ways to connect with music in 1972. It was a pretty forgettable year.

But still.