Ever wonder what Lester Bangs would be into right now? I’m trying to listen exclusively to music from 2008 in an attempt to recapture some of the ol’ manic pop thrill of discovering a new album and not immediately discarding it for something else without getting to know the songs, and I’m thinking about Lester Bangs. I haven’t thought about that guy in years, and I never really gave him much consideration ever, when you think about it- though when I lived with my friend Fernie, we would talk about him a lot, because Fernie is obsessive in ways that lead to long conversations about dead rock critics…

I always felt kind of sad, thinking about Lester Bangs, because he really was a brilliant writer, one of the best in America during his height. Really, if you look at who was doing the best work in the 70’s, you can pretty much leave the list at Bangs, Joan Didion, Phillip Roth, Hunter S Thompson, and Saul Bellow. Cormac McCarthy and DeLillo had yet to their stride, Mailer was busy embarrassing himself with stuff about negritude, Joyce Carol Oates was insisting that she was kind of a boxer because she wrote… I’m sure I’m leaving people off, but those are the ones who were using the English language as a musical instrument and, occasionally, a weapon. When you consider Bangs in that company, and then realize that he never wrote anything that was really original, that he spent all that talent talking about the doing that others did- it used to make me sad. Typing that sentence, though, I realize I’m over that now- because he used music writing as a lens by which to examine life, and his conclusions were valuable on their own. Nonetheless, I wonder what he’d be into right now, if anything.

I’m listening to the new REM right now, and there’s no way in hell. I suspect he might have time for dig lazarus dig! by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, alopecia by Why?, and maybe the new Black Keys. Not sure what else, really. And it’s not important, of course, but I’m just wondering tonight.

There was a time when a new CD was a thing that brought great excitement into my life. I had a platinum card that I should have never been given when I was 18 and I spent about $10,000 on CDs and, like, meals at IHOP and was hopelessly in debt by the time I was twenty. I loved buying CDs, had nearly a thousand of them. I catalogued them and organized them and loved the physical objects, the artwork and smell of the liner notes. It was kind of weird, maybe, but it was a healthy obsession, except for the five-figure debt and fact that I kinda expected that if the right girl saw how many great CDs I had, I’d totally have gotten laid or something.

I sold them off over time, once the Internet happened to music, and stopped buying them for the most part around 2002 or so. The last CD I bought in a store was the saul williams album by Saul Williams, because it came out when I was on tour and my CD burner had broken on my laptop so if I wanted to hear it in the car, I had to buy a copy. I don’t think much of music piracy, but if such things offend you, fear not- I am not writing about it, really. Just about the way it’s changed the way I listen to music, and maybe how I’ve come to enjoy it a little less through it.

Which, hell, wasn’t a point that I thought I’d be writing about, but I’m loose. We’re floating downstream here, who knows where we’ll end up! This could end up a column about Obama if we’re not careful, speculating on who he’d invite to play his inaugration… Stevie Wonder is a natural, and I’m gonna guess Prince, too, just because that would be incredible. I don’t even know if he likes Prince-

Whoops! I almost fell down one of those black holes that happen when I’m online- I just spent five minutes googling to find out if Obama likes Prince. No official word, but his Facebook profile lists his favorite music as Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Miles, Coltrane, Bach, and the Fugees. I bet with a resume like that he’s got at least a beaten up LP of purple rain tucked into a room in his house somewhere, and probably sign o the times too… So maybe Stevie Wonder and a Fugees reunion show in Washington on January 20th? If they’d get back together for Chappelle, surely they’d do the same for Obama…

God damn, there I go again. What was I talking about? Music?

Right, music. The way I listen to it. I know this is true of other people, too- that since music has, for many of us, stopped being a physical object, it’s not consumed the way a physical object that I’ve paid fifteen dollars for was consumed, and it’s hard sometimes to know if it’s because everything’s wild and free and it’s given me a short attention span or if that thing’s finally happened to me that happens to most people as they get older, where they stop really getting new music, and instead just listen to the same bands they liked when they were young and hip for the rest of their lives. The way you end up with forty-five year olds who go out to increasingly tiny rock clubs to see Great White and getting burned to death in a hail of pyrotechnics.

So I’m focusing entirely on new music, albums in their entirety, giving them time to be heard as though I respect the artistry of the people who made them instead of mining them for the immediate thrills and then discarding them callously to the dustbin of iTunes’ rarely played Smart Playlist.

It’s not the delivery medium that’s changed the way I value music- even only a few weeks into this project, I can tell that much. Because if I listen to it as an album, if I have the artwork on the computer and don’t just think about it as a thing to have on while I’m doing something else- then I get it. It’s been a long time since I made time for a band like the Black Keys, for example, and I have my doubts that their new album is any better than the previous ones, but I’m liking this now because I’ve bothered to. This is useful, because it suggests the big difference between music as a CD that you purchase and music as a thing you download for free off of exclusive and frankly a little bit overserious bittorrent trackers- that with one, the music is the point, and listening to it requires you to find it, remove it from its case, place it in the CD player, and then listen to it, while having it on the computer tends to make it simple background noise while you’re typing and doing whatever you do on the computer.

I’m sure this isn’t groundbreaking or anything, but it is interesting. Because I bet I’m not the only person who came of age, musically, during the waning days of the compact disc, and who has found the experience of listening to music now drastically different from what he was used to- and it’s important to question if it’s the fact that I’m getting Old and Lame, or if it’s something else. I’m happy (and very quick) to report that I’m totally clear of Oldness and Lameness, thankfully, and capable of leaving the computer on, but utterly ignored, while I sit in the armchair in the corner of the room and really focus on what Adam Duritz is singing about on track three of saturday nights and sunday mornings. Because nothing rejects the concept of being old and lame more than listening intently to the Counting Crows in 2008.