"Rooted by instinct in the Dark Ages, squintingly at odds with progress, metal nonetheless strode forward hand in hand with technology: distortion, amplification, sustain; speaker stacks rising higher and higher. One well-struck chord, and the concertgoer was twisting in a vibrational abyss."

James Parker wrote a fantastic essay for The Atlantic, of all places, on How Heavy Metal is Keeping Us Sane. Even if you’re not a metal fan, it’s worth the read.

Listen: carefully? →

Jeph Jacques on listening to music casually versus concertedly:

Music affects us on three levels- conscious, subconscious, and emotional. You don’t necessarily have to be consciously concentrating on a song to appreciate it or learn from it or have it affect you. […] A good song should appeal no matter HOW casually you’re listening to it- the details are the icing on the cake, the stuff that separates a GOOD song from a GREAT one. And those details frequently take time to tease out. Even music that on the surface seems to require close scrutiny to appreciate should appeal on a base level.

Click the link at the top of the post to read the whole essay.

"[N]either is the song the natural unit of music experience. We very rarely sit and listen to a single song, unless it’s that first moment of fan devotion. We experience music as playlists, mixes, concerts, streams, shows, compilations and — yes — albums. We value the people who can do these things well — recombining the atoms of music into molecules of experience."

Russell M. Davies, “On Words”

Essay on the how digital creation and distribution is disrupting the natural ‘units’ of publishing, in music, magazines and more.

"Having vaulted from the fringes of pop culture into the mainstream after a newly atomic America became obsessed with films about mutants and aliens, SF literature matured and flowered throughout the ’60s and beyond, just as rock ‘n’ roll did the same. It was inevitable that the two would mix."

Moonage Daydream: The Rock Album as Science Fiction