you pull me out of the dark and now it's light

I've been forcefully reminded lately how listening to music keeps fundamentally changing. Prior to ~120 years ago, you had to listen to live music if you listened to it at all. Then came phonographs and radio and *waves at evolution of recorded music*.

I mention this because I dabble in listening to music reviewers on YouTube. I tried keeping up with a few for a bit, but Todd in the Shadows is basically my speed when it comes to engaging with modern music. However, micthesnare on YT is someone who does what he calls a 'deep discog dive', which basically means he sits and listens to an artist or band's extant discography and talks about it. He also does the occasional experiment where he doesn't listen to anything via streaming and checks out a different/older way of engaging with music. He's done cd's only and radio only, so far, and it's pushed me to engage with the remains of my once-insane CD collection. (Luckily, I still have a CD player in my car.)

But! His most recent discography review was for Madonna. Which, full disclosure, I was a huge Madonna fan as a kid? Legitimately, I think her True Blue and Like a Prayer albums are ones that I owned on tape and played on repeat for several years.

And this is kind of what I mean about how listening to music - for me - has evolved? Because I was so limited in what I had access to - I saved my birthday and Xmas $$ to buy tapes, then CD's at the mall - I ended up spending a whole lot of time with the albums I ended up buying. I know that's similar to how my parents engaged with music too, although for them it was predominantly on vinyl.

Streaming/online music spaces really were a huge game changer for how people listen to/engage with music and I'm not going to finger wag about that. I know that there are some artists that I would never have even heard of if it hadn't been for how digital music opened things up. Artists with work that have helped me emotionally in ways that I can't really parse because their work is so fundamental to my emotional development.

That said, I'm enjoying forcing myself to slow down and engage in another way with music.

Por ejemplo, back at the end of 2014 I had the large and mildly upsetting realization that I couldn't remember the last time I'd read a published book. I'd been pretty exclusively reading fanfic at that point and I made an active choice to force myself to read published books along side my lovely fanfic. This was also when I started tracking my reading (as a tool!) to keep myself accountable. And I am very, very glad I pushed myself to prioritize reading published books. (Reading is a skill and I got a lot better at it by pushing myself out of my comfort zone.)

So, yeah! I love dumping stuff on the busted iPod (TM) and hitting shuffle, but I think it will be good for me to slow down and engage with specific albums too.