Sometimes, I have no choice but to ponder the wonders of the modern world and wonder what is being lost.

See, it's all about activity. What's happening now.

We live in a world where we expect instant connection, instant results, and being asked to wait is almost an offense. I have seen this first hand while working for a computer retailer the last few months. People hate waiting in line. They loathe you if you say you're out of stock. Customization should simply happen, and anything else is disgusting. As a retailer, you do what you can, but you know that sometimes, that's not enough. Especially when a new product has hit the market.

The demand for what is new drowns out the requests for something that simply works, or something that has had time to be perfected. This is true across the spectrum. In technology, Apple, who has always prided itself on offering beautiful products that "just work" has recently come under fire for errors with both the iPhone 4 and iPad. While I can attest that the iPad shutting off in the sun is mostly an exception and not a rule, the iPhone had very basic errors that simply weren't anticipated. But the public was hungry. The public demanded. Then the public was disappointed.

As a member of posterous, you've no doubt received the email about the system crash. I only got through the first few paragraphs and felt like the company was anticipating a public beating for being off the air for a few collective hours. In the grand scheme of things, the functionality and ease of the site should far outweigh a bit of a stall, but in many cases, it can be a make or break moment for companies today.

Yes, it is even possible that by know, readers of this very blog are asking "Isn't this a music blog? What's this got to do with anything?" I'm getting to it.

Many years ago, one of the most powerful bands in rock and roll broke up. The lead singer and the remainder of the band had too many issues to sort, and they called an end to the group. While Slash, Duff and the others went on to help form Velvet Revolver, Axl Rose could not give up the ghost. He retained the name of the band Guns n Roses, and he set off to create a new super album.

This, of course, became the laughing stock of the music industry. It took nearly a decade for "Chinese Democracy" to be released, and even the name of the album was a rip on the liklihood of it being made at all. By no stretch was the music groundbreaking or revolutionary (another suggestion of the name), but it also wasn't bad. Sadly, it was judged on one factor... was it worth the wait? The answer in that context was decidedly "no".

Right now, reader, you may be thinking "but that was ages ago". Fraid not. Nov 11, 2008 was the full release date of "Chinese Democracy". But the effects go much deeper.

The first victim, of course, was the attack on the album. Due to the instant consumption of individual tracks, most albums are canabalized by modern listeners. The handful of "hits" an album may provide are the only things that are downloaded, leaving the entire album laid to waste. Larger concepts (like the Decemberists' "Hazards of Love", which I've written about previously) struggle, despite their brilliance. Artist go to extreme lengths to stay on the radar. A more classy example of this is another artist I've written about previously, Amanda Palmer. Her constant effort to release new projects cannot be unintentional. Since the release of her solo album "Who killed Amanda Palmer?" in June of 2008 (yes, BEFORE Chinese Democracy, and yet it feels a bit more recent, doesn't it?) she has invaded the world via twitter, online auctions, blogs, a b-side album, a super-artistic project called Evelyn Evelyn, a well-documented production of a high school musical based on Neutral Milk Hotel's album "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" and an album of Radiohead songs covered with ukulele. While I admire her greatly, one also has to wonder, what does this day and age expect of our artists?

Here's why I'm worried...

Imagine that society is a car... it's engine has been constantly upgraded. It runs more effeciently, with more power and producing more speed than anything ever before. You step on the gas, and you're flying. You think of a location and you're already almost there. Any other car, by comparison, is outdated, sad, and not worth the effort. The engine is great. The problem is that not all of the car (soceity) is built to keep up. Pieces start flying off after a while and it's dangerous (fragmentation). Perhaps worst of all you're missing the scenery as it blows by. There is no time to appreciate anything but the speed of the car. Artists like Paramore and Ke$ha become popular. You're heading for a total collapse.

In the end, I suppose my only thought is that music is meant to be enjoyed, not simply consumed. It's why it's called art, and art should take time. Let's hope the modern day man can stand it.

To anyone who grew up playing music or in a musical family, there is one thing that can come to your attention very quickly. Lots of songs sound very much alike. Whether we're talking a specific beat, a chord progression, a vocal refrain... if you boil a song down to its basic parts, you're going to find it has SOMETHING in common with another song.

There is an arguement that there is nothing new anymore, and I'm sure that's kind of true. Lets face it, music and rhythm have been a part of humanity for... well, pretty close to forever. Their are 12 different notes in the modern note listing (granted, an infinite amount of tone between, but seriously, who uses those?) which can only be combined to a finite amount of major, minor, diminished, suspended, (etc) chords. And you go from one of those chords to another in hopes you're not ripping someone off.

Even the greats fall victim to this. The Verve recieved acclaim for their song "bittersweet symphony"... except they stole chords from the Stones. Oasis is roughly built upon every major Beatles song there is... but even the Beatles ripped off the Beatles (Ringo was infamous for bringing in "new" songs to show the boys... songs that the band had already written). So is there anything new?

Of course. New instruments, new sounds, new lyrics, new sentiments... they are out there. When one thinks about songs describing a persons beauty, they can go back in time as far as history allows and find evidence... but if James Blunt wrote "You're beautiful" 300 years ago, chances are good he'd be killed for being a witch.

The point, I guess, is that there are new discoveries to be made, but as a musician, don't be TOO hard on yourself if your newest melody "kinda" sounds like something else. After all, it's just music. Its the song that really matters.

I don't really have a lot of hard and fast rules about music. There are songs I like, artists I admire, and things I generally won't listen to. In that manner, I'm like almost everyone. I do however have some rules about music listeners, and whether I can respect them or not.

They are as follows:

1. If you complain about music more than you compliment it, I don't respect your opinion. Yes, I understand there is a lot of stuff that can suck, but music is a shared social experience and personal art form. Many people labeled as musically knowledgable are actually only good at bitching about music, because if you're an exclusionist, you're obviously cooler than what others enjoy. But most of the time this is just a front to get away with the fact that you don't know anything about the artistic process, you just like complaining. Even pop crap that's churned like butter had someone at some point pouring their heart into it, and in that, there should be some respect.

2. No one song should ever define your life unless you wrote it or are profiting off of it. Songs are great background for our lives, but songs are very limited and almost always under 10 minutes long. If you're restraining yourself to one song for your whole experience, it means it is tragically one-sided and not worth writing a song over or the song is so generallized it's about nothing at all, like later Zappa records. Either way, it doesn't speak well of you.

3. The sentiment "I love every type of music but country", or "I love every type of music but hip hop" makes you sound ignorant. These genres are much to large to be excluded entirely, and the pool you're claiming to "love" has a lot of crap in it too.

4. I just can't relate with people who really really like Nickleback. I just don't get it.

5. I don't believe anyone who says they "outgrew" any certain type of music. Chances are, the music just outgrew them.