I had a ‘crash’ on Thursday &, finally, after months of running into the wind with lead weighted diving boots, I hit the wall. & thank fuck I did. I was 1000% exhausted (from proper job + USA trip just gone & USA trip to come + radio + pre-records + interweb updates & all that involves, etc.) & simply couldn’t do any more. I took a day off. A rarity. A faery at the bottom of the garden rarity. Hence no response to your responses in the previous post in this series.

Anyway, on the evening before my day off I attended a house party of a friend of mine, who I’ve played a handful of times on the show. I was kind of dreading it as she is, to all intent, & with love as I do value her, an idealistic old hippie. The prospect of being at a party with her friends, who I didn’t know from Adam but knew they’d be an assortment of 40/50-something dreadheads, crusties, pseudo travellers, raggamuffins & toking philosophers, wasn’t something I really wanted to be in proximity with (what with a mental state of bubbling iron ore). Also, I was attending with my friend Anthony Reynolds (he from Jack) who has a drinking capacity like I’ve never seen & a bottomless depository for pill & powder vices. In all, it looked likely to be a plane crash in search of a mountainside. The only thing that made me go was it was my friend’s birthday, hence the party.

Anyway, to the point which refers to your post here. The evening took a few surreal paths, as it would in such an environment (one of them being the next door neighbour & his son battering the fuck out of a punchbag they’d affixed to theside of their outside kitchen wall; every 15mins one of them would come out, knock seven shades out of the bag, then go back in. Until 3 in the morning. I & another guy were the only ones who found this a little, umm, odd). The party goers were exactly as I thought they’d be (there were little kids running about – all couples in attendance, with kids, with one boy called Nemo & one girl called Jazz… need I say more?) &, of course, most were musicians. At various points the thing descended into very drunken shout-singing (in the ‘look at me, I’m the best at shouting this’ vein) & arguments over who’s going to play next. Then a trumpet player turned up (which was interesting for me as I’ve been looking for a trumpeter for a while) & the place turned into a smokey New York afterhours bar. During all this the conversation inevitably went through the usual gambits until settling on the ‘what do you do, then?’ fall back. Which lead to the talk of music, the internet & blogging.

Now, I am not sure if I was surprised by the reaction I got from people when talking about this stuff, or surprised that I was surprised, but all of the people there, bar Anthony who is an attention slut & will do anything to self promote, either didn’t use the internet at all, didn’t know what blogging was, or didn’t understand the concept of music available as download, or music being played/radio stations on the internet. This struck me as very refreshing but also very confusing. The age ranges were between 26 to 55 & most were genuinely perplexed by TWR & the concept of, found the idea of a music blog strange & pointless (yes, pointless), & almost all saw musi sharing as a fad & therefore of no interest because they get their music from live gigs (i.e the sort of Celtic Folk fests this kind of circle run in & put on in order to guarantee gigs for their brand of carbon copy Celtic Folk). Music sharing as a fad? Coming from hippies? Bizarre.

It’s my niaivete I guess that has cushioned me in this somewhat arrogant belief that everyone knows what is happening in the world & therefore everyone must be au fait with the internet & its goings on. I thought iPods were, basically, even though not everyone owns them, the clarion call to music lovers because they are seemingly ubiquitous – even if only in people’s concsiousness – & therefore the gateway to knowing about things like MP3s, therefoe downloads, therefore the internet & so on. Clearly, on the evidence of this party, not.

Anyway, I came away from the thing, spending my day off in glorious fuck all to or want to do bliss, thinking about how is it, then, people pocket themselves into their likes & dislikes, into what they are willing to expose themselves to, what governs their boundaries as acceptable or obnoxious music, etc. I must say that answer is a long way off coming, but I do believe that music (types of/genres/styles – which all means the same thing, really) isn’t over saturated at all. Perhaps, most likely definitely, within the bubble we camp in we get to hear too much of the same thing/artist because we’re all pointing at roughly the same horizion, but not as a whole. I think, sometimes, cross-over artists (e.g. The Ting Tings, to be topical) get caught up in an unfair battle of criticisms as a result of either independently tapping into a zeitgeist or being forcibly jim-crowed into one by money, PR & circumstance. They, by proxy, are then on the end of an unfortunate campaign of ‘hit ‘em hard while it lasts’ constant rotation (cue iPod/Tunes, etc.) until people get sick of it/them. Even so, I’m not so sure that adequately describes over-saturation, especially after that group of 30 or so people I met who didn’t even really know who The Ting Tings were, nor did they care.

If you entered these guys’ world for a month or so, we might come to the concluision that the type of music (perhaps artists, too, if there are any contemporary recurring names/acts) they listen to has over saturated their market place because there does seem like an avalanche of stuff heading their way constantly. This doesn’t mean to say any of it is any good (or bad), but in a relatively large minority music taste group (in that nearly, if not all, major cities will have a bar or a venue that has this type of music every Tuesday or whatever) the target audience is very narrow minded (not in a conceited way – well, some are, I have to admit – but in a ‘know of what I like & nothing else & can’t be arsed looking’ way) & the music has a very shallow ‘marketing’ strategy with its appeal outside of those boundaries. Correct me, please, if I am wrong, but it’s really only ever been the likes of The Waterboys, Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians, All About Eve (to an extent), Hothouse Flowers, Del Amitri, The Pogues (but they’re more [Celtic] Punk Folk, but still made an indelible impact), The Corrs, The Levellers, that have crossed over & stayed in the conciousness of your average record buyer.

& it’s the same for the likes of you & I, Toad (&, yes, you can argue that the Celtic/Folk tinge is somewhat present in some of our likes) – we operate in a certain field of understanding & whatever crosses the radar is either dismissed or embraced because of its functionality in furthering our appreciation of an aesthetic we know works for us.

So, on reflection, I’d say, it’s all about perspective & the view from your own back garden. We just have to learn how to ignore or be less enthused as & when appropriate.

There’s probably a better argument against & me refrencing a gang of stoned paisley-wearing, face pierced, uber-tattooed idealists (they all have decent, good money ‘proper’ jobs, yet ‘the man’ is their enemy, man) probably undermines any of the above ramble as secondary smoke hippie analysis.

The other thing is that I think a lot of real music enthusiasts, who are used to having things vaguely under control, are starting to think that they have to listen to everything and it’s stressing them out. So what if there’s loads out there – who cares?

Like you say though, being told what is good is quite handy for people who are less bothered about it all – leads back to the fact that people use music they have in common in order to bond, and for most people they don’t care what it is as long as it’s vaguely pleasing – the important part is having it in common.

Its almost as if, instead of giving you a menu, a chef invited you into the restuarant kitchen and said, “well, theres the ingredients, what d’ya reckon i should make?”

So theres not too much music, theres are too few taste flags to run to. MySpace is big but lets face it, they couldn’t give a shit who listens to what as long as theres a chance that they will click on the BMW advert thats been put next to a song about cars.

The trouble is, theres not much money in arbiting taste unless you can get a paid writing gig or similar. And to do such, the old rules apply, you have to be able to “deliver” an audience. You blogging guys may not always do it for the love day in day out (though like unpaid runners in TV, you’ll give it a ruddy good go)

So there you go, the willing herds are looking for someone to tell them what they ought to like and the mavens are looking for an audience so that they can tell people what to like for a day job.

Eventually, you will all meet, get cosy and get a room. EMI et al can sit outside in the corridor and sulk.