Other people’s music

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With all of the craziness of the past couple of months I failed to note Björk getting into the press on a couple of occasions. First she went after another photographer (and this time couldn’t claim she was trying to protect her son like she did the first time this happened), and then there was the incident of her chanting “Tibet” over and over at the end of her song “Declare Independence” while performing in China. I’m still not really bothering to keep close tabs on Björk or Tori Amos these days, though; in addition to just not appreciating their more recent works like I do the stuff they were making a decade ago, and just generally not having time or money to follow them like I used to, I’ve definitely been on a big new age kick for a few years now, probably because I’m finding it much better music to do work to. I’ll still pick up the new CDs that they release, but I’m not going nuts trying to get every single released in every country like I used to do (not having Media Play to go to any longer contributes to that as well), and I’ve got far more in my own life to be concerned with to spend that much time following their lives.

That being said, I did pick up a couple of non-new age CDs for myself for my birthday; Low’s Secret Name and Under Byen’s Samme Stof Som Stof, the latter of which I’m listening to as I type this blog up. These are a couple of artists whose work I’ve come to enjoy through Urge Radio’s Blue Room channel, which I would love a lot more than I do if they didn’t seem to keep playing the same eight-hour rotation over and over again. (I hear that’s a general concern with Urge Radio as a whole, though.) I’m definitely hearing a very strong Björk influence in Under Byen, and as much as I love to know that there are other big artists out there who are being influenced by Björk, it’s disconcerting to know that Björk has been around long enough to start having a new generation of artists influenced by her work. Not that I mind that Björk is getting older, but that means that I’m getting older as well, and that’s kind of worrisome.

On that same topic, I was looking through my Amazon.com wishlist before my birthday trying to decide on what CDs to buy for myself, and I have a number of 90s CDs up there just because I’m a fan of the decade in general when it comes to music. (Although I fell in love with Björk and Tori I still enjoy most of the stuff that came out then), and at first I was kind of happy to see that a lot of the iconic CDs I want to pick up from then were selling for ten dollars. At first I attributed this to the effects of the digital music revolution causing CD prices to be lower in general, but then I realized that the true cause of this phenomenon is simply that the CDs are so old that they’re considered to be “oldies” in terms of CD pricing schemes. That really made me feel old, and the fact that I haven’t really found any recent artists to get into (not counting new age artists) makes me wonder if I’m getting crotchety in my old age.

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