Nov 2, 2011
“Flowers” on MOG
I am listening to Flowers by the Rolling Stones on MOG.
I have never owned this album and, although I have yet to hear a song I haven’t heard before (I’m on “Let’s Spend the Night Together“), I feel like I’m hearing it for the first time. It’s pretty amazing.
The first thing that hits you is the bass. It’s way up front and in the stereo mix a galloping, insistent presence.
There’s also a dark noisiness—the blunt organ, the shattered drums, the jumpy, rawly harmonized vocals—that makes this thing seem both straightforward and experimental.
More interesting to me than the music—”Lady Jane” is a weird anticipation of the Grateful Dead (“Rosemary,” “Mountains of the Moon” on AOXOMOXOA) and Depeche Mode (“One Caress” on Songs of Faith and Devotion))—is the fact that I’m listening to music on MOG.
I’m sure others have written this elsewhere (if there were only a way of searching the Web to find out if anyone else has posted anything about MOG), but there is a “dream come true” quality to MOG that I can’t get over: almost any music I think of, I can listen to at will.
After a lifetime of listening to music as chosen by others, in the case of radio, or to the extent that I could access its recorded form (I include mp3 or other rips of albums to be essentially the same thing in a different recording medium or, more accurately, encoding), I am now plugged in to a vast, explorable library of music.
I must say it means that I haven’t used iTunes in going on two weeks.
And that my burgeoned cd collection seems even more archaic than ever.
As long as we have electricity and connectivity and a robust information infrastructure—and are not being attacked by government forces or rebel militia—this is how recorded music (and all recorded media?) will be consumed henceforth.
Not yet available outside the US. I’ve got Simfy here, though. Still, I end up not using it that often, because I’ve got so much stuff to listen to anyway!
It’s not like I don’t have a ton of music, as you can imagine.
It’s just that MOG has so much that I don’t have, including things like the Stones entire catalog – I own one Rolling Stones CD.
And it makes it possible to explore new music instantaneously. That’s what has made it so addictive to me: Hmmmm, I wonder what THAT sounds like!
I went through all of David Byrne’s solo stuff on Simfy a few months ago, and decided that it is a) excellent and b) still nowhere near as good as Talking Heads. It’s all like late Talking Heads, in fact: so good, but there’s something missing, and what’s missing is precisely what made the best T. Heads some of the best music ever recorded. A psychotic, psychedelic, psychic energy or something.
I have never listened to his solo stuff (unless you count The Catharine Wheel and that other one with a lot of horns on it) and I think you just explained why.
Remain in Light changed the way I thought about music. Nothing he’s done since has had a similar effect or lasting impact (on me).