The Antigenesis of Taste

March, 1998 - I downloaded my first mp3 off the net, entitled "Hohoemi no Bakudan". That was a time when most of the general population didn't even know what dialup meant (not that I'm implying a lot more people do now) and the term "mp3" was just two letters and a number that resembled a really shitty answer to an elementary spelling quiz. It took me 20 minutes to download the song using the 28kbps modem of my pentium 133mhz box while connecting to Infocom prepaid internet.

Before that, I would patiently wait for the song I wanted on the radio, hit the record button when I hear my favorite track playing, with my blank cassette at the ready in the tape feed and slowly built up my album that I could listen to in my second-hand walkman. The only cassette that I was using roughly had 12 tracks in it but I could listen to it all day.

But with the power of MP3 and dialup internet, I began changing tracks of that tape from the best the radio had to offer to the tracks I really wanted to hear. I saw that it was good, and I rested.

December, 1999 - My sister bought a CD Burner for her college projects. Not a lot of people had something like that at that time. Woot for me, I could now burn my mp3s into music cds. That meant I could make clearer copies of the cassette taped tracks without having to rig the component system to the audio out of my pc - one part of the plan I hadn't anticipated though was that I didn't have a CD player. I just love the irony of that, like having all the porno in the internet loaded into your pc but without the eyesight to relish the moment.

April, 2001 - I finally got a CD Player from the States - and it wasn't just a CD player. It was a rocking CD Player that could read mp3s at the same time - state of the art! Now I had 650MB of music in just one cd - thats 650 minutes or 11 hours of music! Unfortunately, the player I bought had a battery life of 2 hours so everywhere I went, I carried my large adapter with me. So much for Compact Disk being compact.

After my first mp3 player came the advent of the mass mp3 sharing. First it was on a hundred megabyte basis - cds and cds of music filling up 8 gigabyte hard drives. It was cool to be able to grab hold of that much music in just your pc and you could carry it around too - you're like your own DJ, minus the funky hairdo, minus the chicks that follow you around.

Then, it came to some point a few years after that music was being shared by the harddisk - hard disks were literally being passed around, filled with nothing but music in pure gigabyte goodness. Albums became passe - if you wanted some artist's music so badly, the entire discography was just one hard disk away.

At about the same time, gigabyte-sized mp3 players that could last for hours flooded the market in the form of iPods - the hard disks became players. And all the music in the world was no in the palm of your hand. And all you had to do was "turn the wheel".

July, 2005 - I now have a 30 gigabyte mp3 player that's thankfully _not_ from the anus of Steve Jobs, just half of its capacity contains all the music I've ever listened to since that fateful day I downloaded Hohoemi no Bakudan. This pc I'm using right now contains 10GB worth of MP3s while my office pc contains another 10 more.

Packed in a ratio with 1 megabyte per minute (128kbps), that amounts to 50,000 minutes worth of music - enough music to play for an entire month without a common file track repeating. No radio station can beat that.

All's right with the world? Not really.

It got me thinking. If I have all the variety in the world that I've always wanted - why am I more than ever getting sick and tired of the music I'm listening to? It's like the rush of hearing your favorite tracks is no longer as exciting as when I used to hear it on radio, or even first listen to it fresh from my 28kbps modem. Not even the newer songs stick around in my hotlist for long.

Nakakasawa na.

Not the songs, just listening to the songs in its entirety.

So here's what I think. It's like a degenesis in diversity. The more you know you can choose from, the more finicky your taste becomes - and the harder it becomes to satisfy. I guess the same can be applied to the thought that 60+ channels of cable cant seem to give me any interesting programs.

The thinking always becomes "been there, done that". The bar of taste just keeps getting higher and higher while my attention span keeps getting shorter and shorter.

I find my taste drowning in a sea of flavour that I should never have started tasting all at once. So where's the fun in that?

Tonight I'm typing this entry with only the sound from the whirringblades of the electric fan beside me. No background singing. No instruments playing.

And you know what?

For some reason, what I'm hearing still feels like music to my wearied ears.

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A serious post for somebody who specifically asked for it. I hope this one's serious enough for you.

So we dont end on a serious note, I have a little song for you music lovers (sung to the melody of Popeye, The Sailor Man:

I'm Pedro Basura Man
I listen to gwapo bands
I go to Makati
To the Cueshe party
I'm Pedro Basura Man!