The biggest torture
At I Love Music a thread titled Used to love it, had to kill it gets going. It is about a theme I already touched before when writing about best of lists and the last REM. It concerns the problem that certain albums one used to love in the past can become unlistenable one day.
It happened to me with many albums e.g. Out of Time by REM, Grace by Jeff Buckley, most albums by King Crimson, Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, Freedom by Neil Young etc. I think the problem is quite easy. If you love a record in the beginning you listen to it as many times as possibles. One day the record is exhausted. Your feeling towards the music changes from love and veneration to hate and contempt. So it is much better not to love a record too much in the beginning and let it grow slowly. But this is a kind of paradoxon. Who would buy a record he does not like from the start? So actually you should try to find records you think you might love in the future. That is a little bit like buying shares on the stock market. You have to forecast the future. But instead of prophesying what other people will do as on the stock market you have to forecast your own future taste which seems to be much more difficult I guess.
When thinking about this from another angle I can think of an almost devilish idea how to torment people. You ask them what their all-time favourite piece of music is (some answers are here) and then you play it to them 24 hours a day. After a short while they will suffer as you will have destroyed their favourite music and they will become crazy listening to it again and again. This works not only with music but with everything people love. If you force them to do what they like, be it eating sweets, having sex, drinking cocktails or/and lying in the sun they will quickly start to hate what they considered a pleasure before and will feel oppressed. So I finish this with a nice ending. The most valuable good for a man is his liberty to do what he wants without others dictating him what to do. But it is also his fate when it comes to buying records...