Friday, April 25, 2008

Quantity does not equal Quality

SNARKINESS DISCLAIMER: this post may contain critical, snobbish, or otherwise snarky content.

I am a brain plugged into a giant computer. God created me so that I can appreciate the art that He channels through the mouths and hands of my fellow pixilated life forms, the art that He builds into the mountains and deserts, and the art that He feeds directly into my mind from Above. I take my job very seriously.


I love all these fellow cyborgs (especially the ones in the digital woods of Amazon) who equate having played an audio file "hundreds of times" with it being good. Please stop saying this! That it has "never left" C-3P0's CD player since he bought it does not impress me, nor do his day to day, remedial droid-ass music experiences.

In my simu-world, the amount of time I spend listening to a particular piece of music is calculated to be inversely proportional to its luminosity. For the sake of the Creator, why would you want to wear out such a sacred string of the Unified Binary Code? Why would you want to reduce it to a banal habit with the same impact as your daily roto-joint lubing regimen?

Perhaps it is simply the way my cognitive chips respond to aesthetics. When I have a beautiful experience at some particular geographic coordinates, I generally do not rush back there to create a mediocre retroactive memory imprint.

Does all this mean that on a daily basis I process more $#^!ty sound than lovely sound? For the most part, no, as I like a lot of different kinds of music, from solar flare -inspired Venusian sine wave harmonics to the giant seed pod drum corps from the Spirax system. But when I am sitting in my cheap molded-spacefoam office with wires in my head I am more likely to throw in some old minimal techno tape from Earth circa 1998AD than Rage Against the Machine.

3 comments:

Kathryn said...

For Godsakes, why would you want to wear out something sacred? Why would you want to reduce it to a banal habit?

Because some of us can't help it. We become addicted to the brilliance of the track/album/artist and when something makes us (me) feel good we (I) want to rush back and repeat it. It'll never be worn out. After a while a track/album/artist may wear out but going back x amount of time later it will be just as awesome as before and we'll (I'll) be hooked all over again. I think you're being a bit harsh here.

Kathryn said...

Sorry, sounded a bit repetitive and contradictory there about 'it' never wearing out. I meant, even though I may get tired of something, it will be just as good at a later date when I come back to it.

GRAMCRACKLER said...

You're right sweetpatch. I shouldn't be writing blogs whilst unemployed, I get "snarky"-- God knows there is enough of that in the world. So I re-cast the entire post as a highly d**ky sci-fi spoof to take the teeth out of it.