Meryl Streep goes deep
I’ve been thinking a lot about Meryl Streep lately, which has never happened before. She was one of the people featured in Rolling Stone’s latest 40th Anniversary Issue, and she just put our current interaction with art in a way that perfectly crystallized it to a point where I want to take as many steps possible to not continue down this path. When asked about the fact that we’re living in a time of big technological change, she said:
“It goes horizontal, it doesn’t go deep. When you have 10,000 songs on your iPod, do you have one that really sticks in your head for longer than two weeks? How about two years? I can remember the sequence of cuts on Rubber Soul. My kids don’t have that same sense of a whole, an album, so they don’t follow an artist’s career from the beginning and go back to the basement tapes. In fact the younger ones not only don’t listen to a whole album, they don’t listen to a whole song. They get to the riff. It’s like skipping to the sex scenes in a movie. It’s really weird.”
When asked if it’s wrong or destructive, she continues:
“It is what it is, and it’s going to make a different art, a different culture, a different society — just the fact that nobody sings the same songs. You get in a car and nobody knows the same songs.”
For about two weeks now, I often think about the fact that ‘it goes horizontal, it doesn’t go deep.’ And she totally nailed it.
If anyone asked me the most interesting album I got recently, I would probably say Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” for which I think I paid one pound. If you then asked what’s my favorite song on it, favorite lyric… I’d be at a loss. I’ve played it through maybe twice.
Anytime I find things that make me part of ADD culture, I rebel, so Meryl has changed the way I’m going to interact with music again. I need to open myself up to the deeper layers of things, of letting less things in but letting them take root.
Otherwise, it’s just more distraction.
December 11th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Interesting. I still listen to whole albums. I think the best album this year for me was the Klaxons “Myths of a Future Generation”. I’m sitting here making out my best of 2007 list and here are the albums I listened to most this year. Some amazing stuff this year.
Klaxons “Myths of the Near Future”
Hilary Duff “Dignity”
Tracey Thorn “Out of the Woods”
Mandy Moore “Wild Hope”
Tori Amos “American Doll Posse”
Angels & Airwaves “I-Empire”
Gwen Stefani “The Sweet Escape”
Suzanne Vega “Beauty & Crime”
Amy Winehouse “Back to Black”
Lindsey Buckingham “Under the Skin”
Interpol “Our Love to Admire”