CAPITAL LETTERS MAKE IT LOOK LIKE I'M YELLING

"My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever."

The world today is so ridiculously small. I have 190 albums by 117 different bands that play music that fits into 32 different genres all sitting on my iPod that I can stick in my pocket. That's almost 6 days of solid music. And I'll add more tomorrow. How do I know? Because it's there. Because I can. Because either the world is tiny or I'm a giant. Probably the tiny one.

I AM A GIANT.

Someone 50 years ago, even someone 20 years ago would probably be amazed by something like that. If someone walked into a house in 1985 and saw 8 B.B. King albums, the entire collections of Steve Miller, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elton John, and Billy Joel, plus a hundred albums from that decade alone, they'd probably think it was pretty cool. If not pretty amazing. 

But 6 people on my hall have more music than I do. Rough guess. I really have no idea.

We're all overexposed though. Me, the people on my hall, the entire world. Well, everyone who can access the Internet at least. So a lot of people. We're overexposed. When I got my first CD in middle school, and I mean my first CD that wasn't really awful, I worshiped every second of that album. It was Blink-182's The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show, and I knew every lyric, every note on guitar and bass, and every drum beat through 20 tracks of solid entertainment. I know all the jokes they tell after the songs. Blink was pretty hit and miss live, but that album's the best thing they ever did. Just a side note.

I think I still have pretty good appreciation for my music. Didn't mean to say that I don't care about it by anything in that last paragraph. I love it all. I've listened to everything in my collection, all 3000 songs or whatever, I know the sound of every band, the chorus to almost every song, and every word and note of a good many. But to be honest, I don't love any of my music the way I loved the Mark, Tom, and Travis Show. I don't think I ever will, and I doubt that most people I know can. There's just too much available, whether it's jazz recordings from the 1920's or every song that's being made this year or that came out this decade. We have so much music around us (and so much of everything else, but that's too epic and understated to talk about right now) that we don't hear the subtleties anymore. We don't hear the bass notes, we don't love the off-beats and improvisations. Too much, too much.