Quick Shots 06/Jul/2026
More About Cultural Obsolescence
And What Happened Next?
I got some pushback from saying music has lost its social meaning a couple of weeks ago. That led to some interesting conversations so thank you! A lot of people have argued a subjective perspective whereby music has not lost music for them or the people immediately around them, ergo music has not lost its social meaning. Another pushback I got is the fundamental importance of music to our lives is infra-psychic and therefore cannot be less important now than it ever was in time. None of these people can tell me the name of a song in the top 40 right now, let alone hum the chorus of one. The original point is that the centrality of music to our social discourse has been dislodged, not that the personal significance of music to individuals has lost importance.
Not that that little test proves anything but just about everybody who was invested in music I know, is now lukewarm in their involvement. Maybe I’m the idiot in continuing to go out there and continuing to listen to ever more stuff and keep playing and recording and making and buying musical stuff? If we’re talking the subjective space, I can assure you mine hasn’t changed. I can also report everybody else - in general - is a lot less intense about music than they used to be. As for the younger generations, they’ve had computer games and social media and then Tik-Tok around which their subcultural consciousness is/was built. God knows where Gen-A are, but however they are building their identities, they’re not doing it around music. Music is Grandpa’s story.
There’s a scene in ‘Mad Men’ where Don Draper asks “when did music become so important?” What I was asking was “when did music become so un-important?” The landscape has changed. It is best we acknowledge it.
High Fidelity And All That
I never really wanted to be the kind of guy who scours the internet for information about Hi-Fi components, but if you listen to music, a part of you ends up wanting to hear it better. That has led to owning two systems as opposed to one and I can’t quite explain how that happened except to say the need for two is a reflection of a bifurcated listening profile. If I include the computer, it is more like three.
I draw the line at getting special cables and connectors, and I don’t put a whole lot of stock into brands. I’m also not spending thousands on the components. I leave that sort of expenditure to people whose primary hobby is their Hi-Fi setup. They have an interesting and lively on-line presence. They’re knowledgable and obsessive, and probably a little far-gone in their investments into better audio - much like musicians and our gear, - but they do have a lot to say about the act of listening to music.
What I am hearing from these Hi-Fi aficionados is that this hobby is on the wane. This is because the market consisted of rich old guys who are all dying, and their kids and grandkids are not going to replace them because music is just not that important to them (their words) compared to the rich grandad who dropped tens of thousands on their Hi-Fi set up.
So the lament about the decline in value of music in the social discourse isn’t just around me observing it around CDs and LP records. The playback business is witnessing a significant decline. Even if the grandkids listen to music, they stream it off Spotify straight into their skulls through earbuds. The kids can’t afford the space; they can’t properly set up a dedicated acoustic listening space in their homes; The kids are listening through headphones now - and while headphones are a big chunk of the Hi-Fi business still, general interest in having the kinds of Hi-Fi systems of yore, is passing.
It’s like a palimpsest of a decline of the American middle class. At best the observation I would make is that the Hi-Fi business is the canary in the coal mine.
What‘s Spinning This Week (in no particular order):
The Essential Kris Kristoffersen - Kris Kristoffersen
The Essential Johnny Cash - Johnny Cash
At The Rainbow - Focus
Nursery Cryme - Genesis
Physical Graffiti - Led Zeppelin
This is exactly the kind of Country Music I dislike. There’s not a whole lot to say. This Kris Kristofferson one and the Johnny Cash one from the ‘Essential’ series have been interest-challenged affairs. The narratives of the lyrics are strong at times but the relentless adherence to oompah bass lines and the I-IV-V thing just drives me nuts. Maybe I’m not good with music where the lyrics are more important than the melody or arrangement. And the lyrics are about shooting a man just to watch him die or being lonesome and drunk and so is the next man in sitting next to you in the bar. I don’t relate to it and I wonder if there really are a lot of people who relate to sociopathic or alcoholic lyrics. I didn’t decide to do the Country Music delve to bag it out. I’m looking for something I can get with but there wasn’t much I could go on with these guys.
‘At the Rainbow’ shows Focus in their heyday doing a live show that is mostly built around their instrumentals. Pretty bitchin’ playing all round, but you expect that from a Prog Rock outfit. Drummer Pierre van der Linden is the standout for me in this outfit. Jan Akkerman is pretty showy as well. I find he gets a bit same-y in his playing across the gig.
It’s my pet theory that outside of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ and ‘Selling England By The Pound’, the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis is a bit overrated. I love Peter Gabriel’s post-Genesis albums 1 through 4, but I think the early going of Genesis was very haphazard and messy. With ‘Nursery Cryme’, I find I only like half the material, and the other half is a bit naff. As a result I did not get the CD for 40 years and I have to say I didn’t miss it a whole lot. The naff bits did not improve with time. This album is contemporaneous with ‘Fragile’ by Yes; ‘Islands’ by King Crimson; and ‘Tarkus’ by Emerson Lake and Palmer. So at this point in time, Genesis really were firmly behind the curve as one of the Prog Rock bands.
This week’s nostalgia listen is ‘Physical Graffiti’. Sometimes, when you’re going on a long drive, you just want to listen to something you know you’re going to like. You don’t want to be stuck in traffic on the way to some place and find yourself listening to… I don’t know - probably ‘Triple J’s Hottest 100 Vol. 20’ - which is an album I detested from start to finish with genuine moments of alienation, loathing and boredom shoved in between. I don’t want to be like some angry boomer and bang on about the superiority of the music from the 1970s but ‘Physical Graffiti’ is better than just about anything being released this year of our lord 2026. And it’s not even remotely close.
Hi Art! Keith here from the iComposition days. My apologies if I'm explaining what you already know. Re the Don Draper quote: WW2 created an unusually level economy where the working class had loads of money to spare. Partly due to the enormous number of deaths of working class males, giving them unprecedented bargaining power in the employment market. As a consequence, new markets emerged, fed by new techniques in mass production, suddenly there were luxuries (like hifi) for the masses who for the first time had leisure time (cultural pursuits, like music) and money.
Now everything is drifting back to historical norms. Neo feudalism is on the way, people can't afford a roof over their heads, much less hifi and only a severe drop in working class population numbers will reverse this. The drop would need to be more severe than WW2 to have the same effect, since modern automation (including AI) would act as a buffer to population drop.