On a Music Rabbithole and the Longevity of Streamed Content

"Nauraushaun" (nauraushaun12) 07/14/2020 at 18:02 • Filed to: None

4

0

I fell down a rabbithole. I like to keep to car stuff on Oppo, but fair warning, this isn’t that.

About a year ago I was in Iceland driving around in a lovely rented X-Trail, and my friend put on an album that had been recommended to him: And The Glass Handed Kites by Mew . We played it a few times, it was pretty good. The seed was sown. At some point after getting back to Australia it grew on me. That was 10 months ago and since then I’ve been sinking ever deeper into Mew.

!!! UNKNOWN HEADER TYPE (MULTI-LINE BREAK?) !!!

First it was Kites , a weird and wonderful guitar driven Danish dream-pop-prog-rock masterpiece. I remember earlier on describing it to someone as sounding like “the vocals don’t sync up with the melodies at all - he just sings what he wants”. Some versions of the album have 2 versions of the same song, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! with the lyrics sung in Japanese. Odd for a Danish band, and a sign of what was to come both in terms of general quirks and a tendency toward re-versioning a song over and over again.

Like a good fan I worked further back and forward through the band’s discography ( Kites is sort of in the middle, 2005). I found a song that is intended to be played !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! or !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , and to have lyrics and melody either way. I found lyrics that make only the barest bit of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The band have self-described as “a mix between thinking and feeling” - comprehension is not required.

No More Stories Are Told Today I’m Sorry They Washed Away // No More Stories the World Is Grey I’m Tired Let’s Wash Away. Oft abbreviated

I found a song with !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! timing. I found a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! that if I try to sing, falsettos and all, it makes my lips reverberate and feel itchy.
I found a compilation album, Eggs are Funny , with ever-so-slightly different variations of existing songs. I found a song that’s about !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and another that appears to be about a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

The more you explore, the worse the album art gets.

I found the earlier albums that pre-date a major label signing. These are a combination of different arrangements of songs that would appear on later releases, and other weird stuff that didn’t make the cut. They weren’t on Spotify, but then just a few days ago, suddenly they were. Just that led me deeper still.

I’m yet to find the bottom.

I found a contribution to an !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! of songs inspired by the Transformers franchise . I’ve found !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! Mew songs that are entirely different to !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ones but share the same chords, or have taken two or three lines from a newer !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and made a whole !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! out of them. Weird B-sides from single releases, vinyl releases, not-quite-releases. I started through weird old Youtube playlists of unreleased material trying to come to terms with the madness. I made my own !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , some 80 songs trying to contain it all. I found a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! - 50 hours of fans chatting about MEW.

City Voices

One song had me stumped - “ City Voices” . This is a song that barely exists in album form - it was only released on some versions of a single disc from 2003. There are 2 !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! versions on Youtube, a handful of comments from a decade ago from people who used to have it and Mew !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! that mention it as the only thing missing. There’s a megaupload link that no longer exists, a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! page that’s not available unless you search for it on Google, where the track is present but unplayable yet with 18,273 plays if you manage to open it in the Desktop app.

I found !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! for City Voices, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . I found endless sites claiming to have it, but not letting me play it. From Spotify to Google Music to !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! to !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! I don’t have access to, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! sites. The hunt for this song that’s less than 3 minutes long took on new meaning, embodying the relationships I’ve lost, the cars I’ve !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! or !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , the missed opportunities in life. It’s become clear that while this song isn’t available to me in the now, it was available in the past, if only I’d done things differently. If only I’d been into the band a decade ago.

And here’s the kicker - I almost was. I heard one of their !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! around 2006, but it eventually faded from the TV and faded from my life. I never pursued it. I could’ve had Mew back then, I might have had City Voices, I might have seen them live. Certainly they’ve played in Australia, but they might never do it again. If there’s one skill I have, it’s falling into bands that peaked in the early 2000s (see Brand New, Los Campesinos!, Circa Survive, The Weakerthans, Radiohead).

Transience

City Voices is a harbinger of a future where content disappears on us. The content - music, movies, video games - that we own in physical format will be with us in 20 or 50 years, but this is not true of content that we only consume via the Internet. Songs get taken off Spotify when a label doesn’t care to keep them there or when rights change hands, YouTube uploads get taken down when accounts are deleted, servers are turned off and games are shut down. Bands break up, game studios close, on a long enough timeline people die and their content may die with them. These things do get sustained indefinitely by passionate fans, but only some things - for every Halo 1 that can still be played online, there are 50 games that can’t. City Voices echoes the story of thousands of other songs that aren’t popular enough to be hosted by someone 15 years down the line, and are only available to those who have them on a disc that they own the access to.

Do I want to become a sort of digital hoarder, downloading and squirreling away content that others blissfully stream online? Not really. Do I want to listen to Mew in 3 decades? I don’t know. But I do want to have the choice , and I can’t stand the thought of these songs disappearing. It’s true that most of the books written 100 years ago are now gone, as with the people who cared about them - that’s the way of things. But it’s also true that, for as long as my relatively insignificant lifetime lasts, the onus is on me to preserve whatever garbage matters to me, for my own sake at least.

!!! UNKNOWN HEADER TYPE (MULTI-LINE BREAK?) !!!

I downloaded the MP3s of my Mew playlist. They’re not big, I’ll keep them safe somewhere. And I found City Voices too - I ended up ordering an old CD off eBay, but I woke up the next morning and a mate sent me a link. Despite all my searching, he’d found it. It’s not a long song or ambitious, maybe it wasn’t worth the time I invested in it. But it’s nice to have it.