On buying into things
I read an interview with Yorkshire guitar genius Bill Nelson in which he stated that he has nine albums of recorded music ready to release, hot on the heels of recently releasing two albums. The headline of the article read something like: "In the 1970s I wanted to release an album a month like a magazine. People said I was mad!"
I loved Bill's work with BeBop Deluxe and the handful of solo disks he put out in the early to mid 1980s, but kind of drifted away after his "Getting The Holy Ghost Across" (aka "On A Blue Wing" over in America) when he seemed to drift into atmospheric synth noodling. I was aware that he continued to work from his home studio, regularly releasing albums for purchase on his website. A trawl through Bandcamp revealed a massive collection of albums so, out of love for his old stuff, I decided to listen to the tracks available to stream.
Nothing really grabbed me. His guitar playing was as sublime and beautiful as ever, but the songs were pretty uneventful and, sad to say, dull.
And it got me to wondering. Has Bill gone crap, or have my tastes changed so drastically that I find the stuff I heard boring? Is his output still at the level of his earlier 1980s stuff and I've just gone off him? What makes his 80s music brilliant but his 21st century stuff dull to me? Did I just buy into Bill Nelson in my youth and view anything he did as genius when some of that stuff was actually bang average?
Recently I've got into Louis Cole and the band Knower - of which he's a member. The first time I heard his stuff (a video of Knower's "Butts and Tits and Money" on YouTube) I thought it was unlistenable dubstep style crap. Then the algorithm coughed up his "Blimp" video - a mosaic of him performing all the parts to a short song. I thought that was okay. Then the algorithm gave me "Hanging On" by Knower and when I was watching it something just clicked. I found myself going through his, Knower's and his musical partner Genevieve Artadi's whole back catalogues and I loved nearly all of it.
But a month earlier his music was dubstep crap.
What suddenly turned me around? Why did I buy into the Louis Cole Extended Universe when it initially repulsed me? Why have I no longer bought into the colossal Bill Nelson Musical Archive?
I know tastes change, but it's fascinating to me that I can just suddenly "get" but also "lose" the taste for an artist's output and it's making me wonder whether stuff I invested so much time in (the back catalogues of Genesis, REM, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Mogwai amongst others) was just because I had bought into them and persevered in a 'sunk cost fallacy' kind of way.
I honestly think that if someone had played me Radiohead's Kid A when The Bends had just come out (and was never out of my CD player) and not told me it was by those Oxford miserablists, I'd have hated it. But, viewed through the prism of my Radiohead love, I bought into its glitchy sequencers and ProTooled cut up groaning.
I wish I knew the answer to this. But, basically put, Music's Weird.