Where’s the slow motion button?

I noticed that I’ve been “acquiring” more music that I can actually ingest. I’ve now had to create a special playlist in iTunes just to dump all the albums I haven’t gotten the chance to go through. I haven’t sorted everything yet, but as of now there are like 3000+ worth of songs in that playlist alone.

You see, my “method,” when it comes to iTunes and my iPod, is that I only leave the “nice” songs (according to my taste of course). This is so I can conserve space since my collection is merrily on its way approaching the 60GB mark (and my iPod is 60GB, so you see my dilemma). Of course I want to use the iPod for something other than music since it’s a very handy mass-data-storage device.

To do this, of course, I have to know which songs are worth leaving in the iPod. What I do is listen to songs by albums. Yes, I purposely go through entire albums even if the first impressions suck.

I think this is a very healthy thing musically. As human beings, we all have opinions and preferences. I’ve always wanted to do away with my “musical preference” and just enjoy music as such… any kind of music. This means taking a particular piece in its context, understand it, and appreciate it.

Listening to whole albums (especially of artists that I’ve never heard of) benefits me in the sense that it broadens my musical horizons (which is very useful for singing, composing, and arranging) plus it lets the music “grow on me” (wether forcibly or not) despite my biases against/towards it. So I end up appreciating the artists’ intentions – and ultimately the songs they make. I could still not like them at the end of the album, but at least I could understand where they’re coming from and assess how good (or bad) they are at their particular genre.

Of course, everything will boil down to opinion wether we like it or not. The trick is to try to give objective criticism with the least bias(es) – and your “assements” [at the very least] will be respected if you actually know what you’re talking about, and are not just letting prejudice get the better of you.

I don’t know how this has affected me, but I’d like to think that though I still have my biases, I can give a pretty accurate opinion on the subject matter.

But going back… the time! I wish I had the time to absorb all these songs. I did quite a lot that during our pilgrimage, but ended up coming home with another 20GB of unrated tracks hahaha. I need another long trip. Maybe I’ll decide to go with Mom on that Mediterranean cruise after all.